Psychologist Charles Fernyhough is director of the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University. His book The Voices Within describes the pervasive and multiple ways and reasons that people talk to themselves: to motivate, self-focus, regulate mood, direct attention, change behavior. In essence, to become conscious. As we’ll see, even highly verbal thinkers do visualize, but information comes to them mostly in the form of language. Yet Fernyhough, like many, falls prey to a certain bias in reporting on his research. He contends that thinking is primarily linguistic, more closely “tied up
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