If we want to understand whats happening in the brain when people hear voices, we first need to understand what happens during ordinary inner speech
Hearing voices: whats your experience when reading? Survey
Most of us will be familiar with the experience of silently talking to ourselves in our head. Perhaps youre at the supermarket and realise that youve forgotten to pick up something you needed. Milk! you might say to yourself. Or maybe youve got an important meeting with your boss later in the day, and youre simulating silently in your head how you think the conversation might go, possibly hearing both your own voice and your bosss voice responding.
This is the phenomenon that psychologists call inner speech, and theyve been trying to study it pretty much since the dawn of psychology as a scientific discipline. In the 1930s, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that inner speech developed through the internalisation of external, out-loud speech. If this is true, does inner speech use the same mechanisms in the brain as when we speak out loud?
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