The Voices Within Quotes

“This is part of what makes us distinctively human: the fact that, without any external stimulation, a man in an empty room can make himself laugh or cry.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves

“She has described the hearing of a voice as being like receiving ‘a telephone call from your unconscious’. It’s a message that, however horrible and disruptive, you feel compelled to listen to.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within

“If psychotic experiences have a hereditary component (as they have been amply shown to have), they must bring some selective advantage, something that balances or protects against their negative implications for fitness and survival. Otherwise, the genes that make someone prone to paranoia, hallucinations or mood swings would have been eradicated from the gene pool long ago. Perhaps those unusual patterns of thought confer benefits in making the individual more creative: more able to make unusual connections, or to think outside established strictures.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within

“You can’t tickle yourself, because you know (probably through the same kind of efference-copy transmission that usually ensures that you know that your inner speech is your own) that it is you who is performing the action. If you already know the joke, you shouldn’t laugh at it – unless perhaps it’s a reliable classic that has made you chuckle before. If I’m making myself laugh, there must be some element of surprise – but how, if I myself have generated the idea? Surely I know what I’m going to think. I’m choosing these words, aren’t I?”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within

“The Vygotskian model of inner speech proposes that it develops from conversations with other people, and thus retains that quality of switching between different points of view. In her private speech, Athena asked herself a question (‘What am I doing?’) and then answered it by treating it as if it had come from another person (‘I’m going to make a train track’).”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within

“Lexical errors involve making mistakes such as mixing up complete words (think of a classic Spoonerism such as ‘The Lord is a shoving leopard’). In contrast, phonemic errors involve mixing up individual speech sounds (such as mistaking reef for leaf). The Illinois researchers tested this by giving participants four-word tongue-twisters (such as lean reed reef leech) to recite either aloud or in inner speech, stopping to report any errors they made (for example, saying leaf instead of reef). The tongue-twisters had been carefully generated to allow the researchers to manipulate lexical (word) and phonemic (sound) similarity. The data showed that both kinds of error occurred in overt speech, but only lexical errors happened in inner speech.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within

“Even if we could somehow make our thoughts heard, it is likely that other people would struggle to make sense of them. One reason for this is that thinking makes use of words in a very particular way. When you are thinking, there are things you don’t need to communicate to yourself, because you already know them. Thinking often does not have an obvious starting point, and it also often requires us to arrive at its goal before we really understand what that is.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within

“For the rest of us, self-directed speech can allow us to obtain different perspectives on ourselves and some critical distance from what we are doing.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within

“Thoughts can make history, but they usually don’t.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within