Study sheds light on the voices in our head

New research showing that talking to ourselves in our heads may be the same as speaking our thoughts out loud could help explain why people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia hear voices.

As far our brains are concerned, talking to ourselves in our heads may be fundamentally the same as speaking our thoughts out loud, new research shows.

The findings may have important implications for understanding why people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia hear voices.

UNSW Sydney scientist and study first author Associate Professor Thomas Whitford says it has long been thought that these auditory-verbal hallucinations arise from abnormalities in inner speech – our silent internal dialogue.

“We all hear voices in our heads. Perhaps the problem arises when our brain is unable to tell that we are the ones producing them.”

Full story here:

Full Research Paper:

More information: Thomas J Whitford et al. Neurophysiological evidence of efference copies to inner speech, eLife (2017). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.28197

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A thought i had on the dampening of the common inner speech would be that i believe for me these are the distracting “half thoughts” that grab more attention than they deserve. I often find them to be intrusive but this new to me idea that we ignore these predictable phrases shines a light on how i will interpret these moments.

That seems like it must be true because our minds do/must create the voices. But I don’t even hear human voices, except the people in the next room. My voices are an angel and demons who are primarily cruel to me. Why would my own mind abuse itself? And the crowd I can here in the next room makes even less sense to me. Hence the propensity to believe they’re real…They don’t sound like me at all. I have internal dialogue that is nothing like the voices I hear.
It’s just very confusing.

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The crowd I hear in the next room doesn’t sound like me either. I think this study is rubbish.

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Rumor has it that our internal thoughts are actually composed of a type of sound wave, but this may be false. I heard it from a friend.

Things the mind thinks should be said for some reason? A sign of great conflict when intrusive…

efferent is a new word to me… thank you science

Yes.

Before I was scz I recall that when I’d be in the mix with friends, and we’d be rattle our mouths about everything and then some, I would often take my verbal cues two ways: visually seeing words that I was trying to source from my memory before I got to the place I needed it in my sentences, and audio voices.

So this would happen quicker than you think. Remember that brain works happen as quick as light because its on an EMF circuit, and the space that these things need to travel is a few inches at most.

So what seems to be ample time between the words I would see or hear in my head that I would then decide to use or discard, and then actually speak without missing a beat (no umms, and, uhhhhh).

My problem later on when I was trying to make those become “radio transpondances” that would be the answers to my life’s problems. I was using those like a kind of crutch in a way which it was not capable of.

I was even using my ordinary imagination, problem solving well of photographic memory and creativity like these were “radio transpondences” from whatever. You know us scz’s. It’s always “radio transpondences” from something. :confused:

So of course the pressures and stressors of life, all of the hormonal impacts, and so many years of the fallacious descriptions of these subjects such as how reality works, how brains work etc…all have this total lala land “radio head” permanently wired in.

While I believe I am such a failure for this, I know that I would have never achieved what I’ve achieved if not for this. It only has the feeling of a bone crushing defeat, but the feeling is not the same as the truth about what I’ve done. It is ironic that in order to do so much I would have to become so lame.