I once took an extensive course in Vietnamese language. The sounds of the vowels, diphthongs, tripthongs, some of the consonants, and tones were so different from what we were used to in English that the first 2 weeks of class consisted of nothing more than listening to, and to some extent reproducing, those sounds. No actual words were taught; just the sounds. I began having dreams where 2 Asian men, dressed in black suits and bowler hats, were engaged in a dialogue, conversing at length in Vietnamese, although I still had not learned 1 word of Vietnamese. Their speech was very clear, but I understood very little of it. I mentioned this to a classmate and found out that most members of the class were experiencing the same thing, although the men might be dressed differently. I don't know if that relates to this subject in any way, but I was vividly reminded of it.

I met a person who spoke 6 different languages. At one point I asked them which language their internal thoughts were in. Oddly enough, their answer was NOT their native language. I think they were as surprised as I was by that idea. Apparently, they had never really considered that before. They just heard the inner speech and processed like anyone would.

The thing that happens to me is that I hear music in my head ALL DAY long. And I don't choose what it is. I *can* choose it, but it can spontaneously change. I wake up with a song in my head every morning. It might be something I'm listening to lately, but it doesn't have to be. I recall trying to do this when I was in 3rd grade. I couldn't afford the music I wanted and I trained myself to play it back for myself. It's gotten stronger and stronger as I've gotten older, to the point now that the music is nearly as audible as though I were hearing it for real. I don't know how common this is. Sometimes the song that manifests is some kind of clue to things that I ought to be paying attention to. And it'll stay in my head for days until I realize what it's telling me. Kinda creepy to be honest!

I speak three languages and get inner speech randomly in all three.

I can only recall hearing a voice once and it was just one word. It was my own voice shouting "Here!" from the bathroom 15 meters away from me after I had talked aloud to myself saying "where are my keys?" I didn't know I knew where I had left them. They were in the bathroom

The voices in my head didn't start until I was told to stop reading out loud and to read to myself.

If my inner speech developed from the way adults spoke to me when I was a toddler, that explains quite a bit.

I am a meditator. A part of my practice is to notice my inner conversation. This inner conversation gets in the way of directly experiencing life, in that it is a facsimile of life and not the actual natural experience. It is a left brain activity that pulls me out of "Reality". Of course, inner dialogue is useful at times, but it shouldn't become the dominant experience, if one wants to live a peaceful and natural life.

That beeper study sounds like a great way to improve self-awareness.

I believe this is why multi lingual is so important! ... It opens our minds and our lives to think in other languages too

_The way we speak to our children become their inner voice._

This interests me because my son is autistic. It seems that he has trouble accessing and expressing language, but his vocalizations are like a “stream of consciousness.” He can understand language perfectly well. In fact, he knows multiple languages. Very interesting indeed.

After having a MELAS syndrome stroke like episode in 2013. My inner voice ceased. It was the loniiest feeling.

when having to solve a problem or make a decision about something quite often if you put your own self-talk to one side then your own mind will suggest a solution to you, it can be amazing as you were never even thinking along those lines originally!

THANK YOU ALL OF THIS INFORMATION IS WONDERFUL FOR HIGHLY INTELLIGENT HUMAN'S..I HAVE HAD BRAIN SURGERY IN SANTA BARBARA CALIFORNIA ..😊🇺🇸

Thank you for your work! I have tremendous admiration and gratitude for you and your colleagues!

I often feel like much of the voices in my head.. well the ones that aren't heard by my inner ear as being in my own voice.. are just memories. Seems like echos of conversations I overheard, partially/vaguely overheard, or thought I overheard at some point in the past of my daily life. Sometimes when I'm feeling really anxious, fearful, and/or ashamed, I feel like I'm hearing the thoughts of other people thinking badly about me. Those times are rough because even though I tell myself it's really just _me_ thinking badly about me, I can't stop reacting to it as if it is someone else's thoughts. I've almost never heard an auditory hallucination that sounded clearly from outside of my physical body. I'm glad that is extremely rare. When that happens it goes beyond being an interesting or annoying oddity and becomes outright scary and disturbing!

The inner voice that says negative (or overly positive) things is the destructive force throughout humanity's history.

I see this as breakthrough material! Bravo!

At last a theory of mind that we all should be aware of all the time. Thank you

Happy 😊 valentines 💝 day let compassion be your compus blessings to all ! !

Excellent, so insightful and encouraging, giving hope and understanding where not existed...

This was simply wonderful ❤️

very interesting talk... I'm deeply introverted... I spend more time in my life talking in my head than to other people.

Thankyou Charles.listening to this again after being through a fairly severe PTSD experienced has helped to put the inner dialogues into.perspwctive.i had forgotten about the hearing voices association,will look for the app if it is still available.

Years ago I was lying on my bed inhaling nitrous oxide and in the quiet I heard a conversation. I realized the conversation was in my head and started listening. Then one voice said, “Shhh he heard us,” and they stopped talking.

Taking resting state data in the experiment with the beeps is really clever. It actually made me think of the practice of recording audio "silence" for a few seconds to get the background noise profile of the recording space for later procedural removal in the audio post-production environment. How neat! 🤓

I think you should check whether there's a connection between the inner voice experiment, and Libet experiments, because the way I experience it, there's a spontaneous usually mischievous and psychopathic voice and a system to negate that voice, the voiced literally debated

Fascinating! I self-talk frequently. I self-yell, aloud, at myself, usually when I do something that is not going the way I want. I even tell the items I touch in my tasks to help me to refocus, and get the job finished correctly. I do not self-condemn.

What about the concept of a ‘higher’ self? It seems from my perspective that I often have a thought and then there is usually a secondary, contradictory thought or addition to that thought which then spurs on other thoughts that kinda go back and forth to the original thought to try to work out if said original thought is valid or worth further entertaining/storing. I also wonder if people who have done various psychedelics might have more consciousness surrounding meta-cognition. Personally, after my experience with psychedelics I’ve found that I am much more aware of this internal dialogue/ various layers of thoughts/ the river of thoughts that are continuously happening.

Absolutely fascinating and helpful 👍🏼🙏

Voices? those guys are my friends!

How can I tone down my inner speech ? I find myself engaged in conversation all the time, and it has several bad effects. 1. I miss what people around me say when I am not focusing specifically on them. 2. I can't fall asleep for most the time, as my inner voice will run off, most the time going on about things I done wrong in the past. So I have to fall asleep watching something etc... like this video.

I find that deliberate auditory thoughts, whether being internal dialogue or being some other sound, can be anywhere on the scale from planned/controlled, to with a bit more effort being improvised with minimal input, in other words being surprising.

I found myself pausing the video so I could say out loud to Mr. Fernyhough how much I could relate to what he was saying. I've had the creepy experience of hearing my name called in a loud whisper just as I was dozing off to sleep. I've wondered if auditory hallucinations were caused by bodily processes bubbling up through the brain into consciousness - like Scrooge's bit of undigested beef.

This was such a great lecture! Okay, so in January (2023), I was independently thinking about the inner dialogue. Obviously you know about the "voice" inside your head that you "hear" when you are just thinking but not speaking (inner dialogue) (I put voice and hear in quotations because I understand that it is not technically auditory since it does not pass through the ears which is the source for interpreting sounds). I did ask myself, "Where does that 'voice' originate in the brain?" After watching your lecture on your studies and findings, I began to also think the inner dialogue may not originate from one specific area of the brain, per se (as you pointed out so lovely), but rather a systematic function between the different structures of the brain. However, I then wanted to expand on my thoughts by asking could the inner dialogue originate in other areas of the brain (outside of what your studies have found) depending on the situation that is present for the individual (emotional thoughts (limbic system), stress thoughts (HPA Axis), high functioning thoughts (frontal lobe), etc.)? Do you think there may be some truth to the inner dialogue not originating from just one area (a systematic function) especially since our brain has almost 100 billion neurons and close to 10,000 connections each? And lastly, is there a link between the inner dialogue and consciousness? I am interested in your thoughts? Thank you!

Interesting, then, that I seem to have two streams of consciousness. When they are both going, one of them is specifically using speech, the other is a more abstract process that acts as a guide, dialogue partner, or is specifically aware of how the speech side is thinking. For example, if I'm thinking about something, sometimes I become aware of the string of thoughts I'm having, separately, while having them. It's hard to be accurate when describing this, as that second stream of consciousness is very abstract, never using words, only thinking raw thought. The speech side will shut down any time I'm listening to speech, and if I start to use the speech side, I can no longer pay attention to whomever is talking. When I'm playing videogames, I'll often be using only the abstract side during the more intense moments, and the speech side will come back when I have to specifically work something out. It's also why I have a hard time doing something that requires logical thought if there is any speech going on outside of my head. It's also why I have a hard time speaking over someone in a conversation, as I can't speak if I'm using that part of the brain to listen (that's my understanding anyway).

Very interesting seminar by Dr. Fornyhoigh...

Here now because I don’t have an inner monologue...and I just found out last weekend that most people do and I am 1000% baffled by all this

The most interesting question about thought is, "How is it generated?" Does it arise from a non-verbal (pre-verbal?) intuition that becomes "dressed up" in language by some process in the brain before you become aware of it? Or does it arise already dressed up in language? In any case, you do not know what your next thought will be until it pops into your head. The idea of "agency" in this process is highly questionable in my opinion.

My dad still does it and he's 72. He's always done, and funny enough he doesn't KNOW he's doing it. We used to tell him he did it, and he didn't believe us, until we set up a tape deck (this was a LONG time ago) and recorded him working. It's funny he doesn't think he does it.

This was a very interesting lecture.

Very interesting structure of Speech.

I'm thinking religion, as a setting of behavior and world view, plays a huge part in it. If someone has a strong religious background, maybe the voices and visions will be very influenced by their values, manifesting in the shape of what they believe, in the codes they understand and value.

At 20:23, you did avatar dialogue where your voice speaks through you. It is a common experience. What to look for when you see others do it is, spontaneous, third person language, different voice tones, different mannerisms, and the human has no clue it happened. As for your daughter's invisible friend, that is her voice speaking through to her human explaining how the human world works. If you have question on how the voices, a.k.a. avatars, work, see my blog. Thanks for the talk.

One thing that fascinates me is when my voices would say stop talking when I was just thinking. I would tell them that I was not talking, but thinking. That it was not the same as speaking. They would completely ignore me when I said that, but later continued to judge me for thinking. I would give them examples of what is was like thinking and speaking. They would stay quiet, but then they would continue to press me to stop thinking. With time, what I learn is that the part of my brain that was in destructive mode, wanted to create stress and anxiety so it would record it in my nervous system, so when this force in my brain wanted to induce anxiety and stress in me, it already have as part of memory.

From about 12:00 to 12:50 he displays a revised diagram showing transition from social speech to private speech to internal speech and arrows back from inner to private speech. I would have added addition arrows from private speech back to social. If a person is engaging in private speech and they are interrupted by someone entering the room or moving closer or responding to the private speech there are two possible reactions. They may apologize for being too loud and then retreat back to inner speech, or they may apologize for not including the other person and convert to social speech. (or they might not apologize but an apology is a common method of alleviating the embarrassment caused by having been discovered talking to oneself in a society where that is thought of as a bit crazy.)

Fascinating and truly ambitious to take on Man, Woman, God + the Universe. I do hope it all works out well.

Imagine deaf people could never hear their mother’s or fathers voice. That is really sad, I suddenly feel very blessed and very fortunate.

Thanks

There's a whole spectrum from just being aware and present with no thoughts or impressions or images to outward social speech with all the variants mentioned in the presentation more. I wish he would have included pure awareness. All thought and speech arises from it.

Dear slide presenters and web designers, please stop using blinding white backgrounds. Screens are not print. If you must print your slide deck, use your print options. ;)

One way to simplify the answer you are looking for is to call the voices : tones in charge of certain behaviors and /or actions. Kind of a file for relatable thoughts to intentions.

i imagine athena maybe got that question from her father "what are you doing?" what sort of conversations could you influence in a child by starting it off in life of with different questions? what spectrums could we see?

I used to hear voices in my head, one specific one was that of a woman I met while working at a sandwitch shop. The voice would sound like her voice. I would hear her at random times for more than a decade. After a while I started believing that they were talking to someone else and for some reason I was overhearing, but it was never a conversation, just a word or a sentence. I don't believe that my mind was making it up. I've had so many unusual experiences that I can't be so dismissive about this. I'll go even further and suggest that there are a type of people that can communicate with others without the person being aware that they are having a conversation with someone else.

the voice in my mind has a voice in its mind, all rather confusing

25:40 When we read something to ourselves on demand, was any region implicated in “hearing” it?

I have studied this with myself and for me, it seems that I get the thought then say it to myself in my head but it doesn't have to be said. I have been working on just settling for the first impulse thought before I put it into words to myself. I find myself doing it but soon I am talking my thoughts in my head again but it isn't really needed.

Finally, It's nice to know that we are all the same. However some of us are more Tuned-In than others. I truly believe that we all have precognition (knowing what's going to happen before it does.)

I speak 5 languages and speak to myself constantly, as well as translate everything in any given language , I do it as an intellectual exercise as well as self entertainment... speaking to mysel has always been my thing ,,,after all I love myself...most natural awareness

Most of inner speech is tied to a brain network called the Default Mode Network, which is commonly referred to as the "ego" of even "superego" ...here inner speech is often tied to thinking about other people; we carry representations of other people who in a sense become the "superego" by which our "ego" is concerned about = inner speech, or even a dialogue between these superegoic representations as others.

What a great & eye opening well produced take on a very 21st century kind of pathology manifesting through someone & through family members in this day and age it is very common for people to disappear inside their own head and then begin to become emotional and energetic food for what appears to be some form of ancestral trauma based demon. these demons are on the rise and hugely key into humans through Shame. it's heartbreaking, but if one looks into the Concepts of Wetiko A lot of things could be healed for the human race, since that is a energy force which feeds off Shame. and through social media and self image. Brilliant video.

U are curious about it too? *You're all my best friends* 😊

I spend alot of time alone after work and i constantly talk to myself in my head and never physically say a single word and it weirds me out but think its interesting

Sometimes, after I have seizures, for up to a couple days when I'm talking to whoever is with Me, My speech is more like the thoughts or internal dialog out loud. As I consider an answer, I'll talk thru it to Myself outloud. I find this video interesting since I'd like to find some neurological study groups to volunteer for. ... I'm not Sarah, I am on her phone tho and She is the one usually with Me while I'm " thinking out loud while trying to converse. She's quite a patient and nice person.

I hear my inner self from the first moment I wake up till they time I go into deep sleep.

Hindu logic states that "all thought is preceded by motive". I would love to hear your opinion as to what initiates and influences these voices in your head. DNA, Socialisation, hormones, culture, dysfunctional childhood, trauma, vagus nerve, gut bacteria, soul. What is the motive behind the voices. I would love to see an experiment where sensors are placed to measure hormonal activity and vagus nerve activity to see if there is a correlation between these activities and the voices. Voices are where we verify reality - where we do a double take - did I just see a cop in a bikini? I have suffered depression and ptsd occasionally and I welcome this kind of science as a potential solution in the long term. This is a fascinating lecture but he lacks energy as a storyteller. I would love if an internal voice told him to be a bit more concise and look a bit more happy due to his excellent achievements.

It is my experience that one can actually create auditory hallucinations through the protocols found in 'Tulpamancy.' When I say my experience, I mean I personally engaged the protocols to determine if I could have experiences similar to other people who have also pursued creating a 'tulpa.' I was successful. The protocols, in essence, was repetitiously rehearsing a dialogue between self and 'other' until it became automatic. It is more than that, one also assigned a concept of mind, and list attributes that this other has, and in effect, after a certain threshold of engagement, 'other' comes online- for lack of a better term.

We think, therefor I am.

If someone who was born deaf has auditory hallucinations, I wonder how they register and interpret that speech as language, having never heard the association b/t sound and words. Any thoughts/explanations on this?

If one grew up without learning written or verbal or sign languages, what would the nature of their inner speech then be? Would internal dialogue be interpreted as however the individual has labeled his/her experiences? Would the thinking be in the form of grunts, simple gestures or what?

💚❤ Quantum Mechanics plays a role in the process of speech. As far as "hearing voices" I think Understanding Auditory Verbal illucinations on a deeper level would go far. Progress has been made but more could be done. More depth breadth and understanding needs to be applied to these topics. ❤💚

Costumo aquietar minhas vozes internas com música clássica ou jogos para concomitantemente realizar ou desenvolver algum outro trabalho. Considero o assunto delicado e polêmico, margeia ciência e metafísica, contudo o psicólogo soube abordar o tema com cuidado evitando as assertivas, preenchendo-o com seus próprios questionamentos. Tal zelo é necessário, pois há, por convenção, uma tendência em desqualificar esse tipo de pesquisa. Parabéns a RI e a todos que participam das apresentações.

Ri,, always has something interesting on its networks...

The voices in my head speak Spanish. I have no idea what the hell they are saying.

I cannot say I've experienced expanded inner speech beyond thinking of how to communicate what I want to say/type. When looking up the term "expanded inner speech", several places said this was mostly used when thinking intently about a problem. When I think intently, I do not think in words, I think in images. The longer and more intently that I think on the same problem, the more detailed the images become. At some point I'm working with a many dimensional image that has no analog in the real world. I can get some pretty bizarre images. They're always static, in that they don't visually move, but they can still have "movement" in that I can see interactions without having to animate the interactions. The interactions are implicit from the many-dimensionality of the image I am perceiving. It gets stranger yet. As I manipulate the image, it's like I can simultaneously see all of the interactions changing at the same time, new interactions being created and prior interactions going away. This allows me to make logical changes without having to step through everything. Once I am happy with the solution I have created with the image, I then have to set down the arduous path of converting that image into language in order to explain Converting the image in my head to something concrete can take awhile, but I can generally solve complex novel issues very quickly with this method. There is a few downsides. I've used this method all of the time since as far back as I can remember. It has a lot of overhead. It takes a long while to initially create these images in my head, making me slower for simple issues. The benefit doesn't really show until the problem to be solved is beyond a certain complexity. Another is that it can burn me out very quickly. In a one hour stretch of intense thinking, I can be spent for the rest of the day, barely capable of forming coherent sentences without a few mistakes or having a "brain fart", difficultly walking and pretty much anything spatially involved.

I usually think visually, and only resort to speech to allocate memory when time constraints force me to lose the critical focus required to think visually. Sound takes on the format of melodic music without words. My inner speech is loudest when I am anxious or in need of approval. When I came to terms with what I know and what I don't, and literally embraced the idea that seeing is believing, my inner voice almost completely became irrelevant. It becomes a very extroverted form of expression when people, ideas, or philosophy puts constraints on my perspective.

Advised to watch this as a family member hears voices from Ghosts but she also sees them and feels them, not only an inner voice. Interesting though!

I have so many questions! I visualize way way more than I ever speak or hear. I’m also fluent in American sign language and all words have a picture in my head.

I speak 2 languages fluently. I suppose I could improvise a dialogue in those 2 languages, or I could improvise an inner dialogue in 1 of those languages, yet I do not do that. I do not have an inner dialogue. I have an inner monologue. I am not thinking in sentences in the brain to anyone. I am, simply, thinking in sentences, thinking a story, thinking of a problem, thinking up replies to people I've been communicating with. Yet, I am never thinking those conversations as talking to another person. I am, simply thinking in sentences. And I do not hear any voices either. I am not hearing myself. I am, simply, generating thoughts put into words and sentences.

I think of it as a radio wave signal but its like super weak..but its when it does the future projection stuff...like an old tv guide...thats the part that freaks me out..

PRESENT...

I remember the very first thought that came to my mind. I was held by someone in a hall was and suddenly I felt a claud cleared from my head and I discovered “Me” and I thought “This is me!” And felt so so happy, and after that referred to that moment as: “..since I know my self”. I believe I was about 8 or 9 months old. And yes I do remember some things from that time.

Mind bending! :P

Anyone ever have a dream where your talking to someone and the other person says a hilarious joke that you never heard before? That's the moment I was both impressed by the dream world and also incredibly frightened

It would be very interesting if you did the same studies for your theories in the east or other places on the planet where there are war zones and individuals had not been subjected to ad - mass materialistic values, just a inner thought. Big things have very small beginnings.

As a youngster I realized that the words in my head were preceded by images. Those images were again preceded by a feeling. Not an emotion, but a feeling. So the feeling comes first and eventually ends up as an internal dialogue. I also observe in myself an internal dialogue that is not outspoken to myself, and another one that is outspoken to myself. At some point, I can decide to "outspeak" it to myself when it is not yet outspoken. This is all still all internal. When I have to perform a difficult task, I have to coach myself and only then I give voice to the dialogue and other people can hear me. Dear Charles Fernyhough, I miss some depth in the sense that it all boils down to neurology in your approach. What warrants that that is the only way to look at it? I see a bias there. What is thought? What is awareness? An interesting angle here would be to go back to the story of the tower of Babylon, and that that was the time when people could no longer understand each other. According to Emmanuel Velikovsky that had to do with the influence of Mercury, the god - or the principle - that has to do with communication. Interesting to ponder about that and see where that may lead. To come back to my first statement: Some years ago, I read somewhere: "Images come before words, and feelings come before images". (Exactly as I had concluded myself as a youngster) "If we forget about the feelings that precede the images and if we forget the images that precede the words, communication becomes very difficult". Mr. Charles, try to see what I wrote as a whole. perhaps it gives you some food for thought, or better, some food for imaging, or better still, some food for feeling. I believe Descartes blinded us when he said: "I think, therefore I am". It is very one-sided. He could also have said: "I perceive, therefore I am" or: "I feel, therefore I am". Oh, and there is this too: I read somewhere that the American indians said: "White man is crazy - he thinks thoughts come from the head. Everyone knows that they come from the heart". Please chew on all this a bit and look inside yourself first.

My very pedestrian way of looking at this goes as follows: Everything that is going on in our consciousness is a creation of the massive virtual machine that has is sections to visual, auditory, tactile, and sensory productions. What we call 'perceiving' is actually just giving material to the virtual machine so that the images created correspond to the reality of the outside world so that it serves our existence. Pictures are created feature by feature as the neural flow goes from visual cortex to visual cortex (and back again). We can see very real things with our eyes closed. The machine is good at what it does. Equally, the auditory material is processed so that a simulation of it is created in the auditory area. Did you know that you actually have to LEARN to hear sounds? In the Japanese language, there is no 'r'. Late learners mix it with 'l' so that 'next slide please' becomes 'next ride reese'. The machine's syntax cannot handle the 'l'. So if we hear our inner talk, there is a malfunction somewhere probably in the dopaminergic system that helps us to understand the difference from 'calibrated' information with relevance to the outside world versus the content that it creates independently. Like what happens in delusions and hallucinations related to disease states and intoxications. The only world we have access to is an image created by our brain. We mistake it for reality. That's the problem.

I have the longer internal dialogue and argue with myself alot and sometimes when I'm on my own I have heard some one call my name or say something that I didn't quite catch also if I think of a sentence or phrase someone says I can hear it in their voice the brain is amazing I also have a gender issue and when I'm feeling feminine my internal voice turns feminine too and the interesting bit is I very Rarely talk to myself out loud but when I was riding my motorbike everyday with the helmet on being closed in and sound dampened I found myself talking out loud to myself quite often I also have full conversation with the cat internal and out loud just thought I'd share in case you find it interesting

Does anyone has several levels of inner speech? I have a main one, but in the background I am thinking other stuff. If I concentrate I can access at least three levels. But mostly I just use one and a second one to think about things I have to do or want to do, while the primary is concentrated in the task, For example right now I am thinking in what I am answering here and in the background I am thinking what I am going to do after I finish writing this.

Children are programmed by evolution to learn at a phenomenal speed so they try things out repeatedly that an adult would find boring because the child is building up its database of actions and responses so it can improve its ability to predict and control ie it is calibrating its actions. So when a child talks to itself, that talking is exercising the system, giving the opportunity to further refine the utterances and the ability to produce sentences to utter. The fact that there may be no one there to listen is irrelevant, the system needs exercise in order to develop and refine it. Later those refinements will be tested in actual communication with another person, leading to adjustments where the refinements are wide of the mark. Try to take a child away from the frantic learning experience and you will provoke a hostile reaction because they are programmed to learn rapidly. I think this is why they wake up early full of excitement, and resist going to bed.

I don’t hear voices outside my head, I hear the voice inside my head and I’m aware that it’s my own voice , it thinks randomly for me, it chooses what to throw at me randomly too

"Fernyhough? Funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you?"

Soviet psycholinguists' (Vygotsky's, Luria's and Kolcova's) ideas about evolution of consciousness in humans and development of consciousness in toddlers are both profound and under-appreciated in the Western world. I honestly wish that some of Vygotsky's methodology was used in the more mainstream study of human consciousness. Unfortunately in the philosophy of contemporary Cognitive Science there appear to be 2 extremes: One where the term "consciousness" is used as a collective term for everything that happens in the human brain (such as Glasgow's Consciousness Scale), and another, - where consciousness is defined as an extremely narrow process, such as for example Julian Jaynes's "knowing that I know" or "awareness of awareness". In my opinion, it would be more objective to study social, developmental and linguistics aspects of consciousness during the cortical pruning stage through direct observation, with a heavy emphasis on social aspect, which is precisely the route early Soviet psycholinguists have taken. Vygotsky's main achievement was demonstration of just how indispensable early linguistic instructions are to the normal development of consciousness in infants, and the role of internalised language in our ability to form "complex concepts" or words without referents like "mass", "volume", "velocity" and so on.

Working as an academic, writer and storyteller, my life is very much about words, yet I find that when it comes to the “stream of consciousness” aspect of thinking, or just everyday life thoughts, I do not generally feel like I am thinking in words or sentences. Words are what I am using to attempt capture something which exists more as existing or emerging patterns and intutions about connections between these patterns. They’re mental images in the neurological sense, not necessarily visual images although it can be - it includes any aspect of sense memory, but also has emotional value and at times a conceptual or structural component, which tends to be more felt than explicit. Writing I often know something is coming - into consciousness first and then in translation words - I know the direction of it, I intuit it’s bearing, tone and direction and perhaps what it is a response or reaction to, but words are generally downstream. I said translation but it’s partly inaccurate. Translation is deliberate and consciously selective, which is a process of word usage that’s pretty far downstream from the initial coming into words. There is a preconscious selectivity that I rely on. Going by the stream of consciousness thing, I can go down that stream with words as they happen and pursuing or not pursuing associations as they speed by. I consider that raw material, and the most important part of it. It has inherent selectivity. It is a voice from a perspective BUT it exists before the words and my thinking is THAT not the words. As I sit here, years of experience guides and shapes language on the page, but I am pretty far gone in a world of concepts and in trying to recall the feeling of semi-oblivious creationg. My thoughts are generally not words, except if I am thinking about what to say or write and thus working with a word component. ANd the things that I feel like I have to capture in creative or generative writing is essentially NOT about words because there is too much there to narrate. Clearly what is said about anything represents a selection driven by some impulse, intuition, urge or even a desire to manipulate something. If I enter a mental marketplace as ME different things will stand out in experience than if I am there as say a child character. The selection is character. The selection is theme. The selection comes from the need or motivation that drives the plot or that life situation. Long story short I find that while language may come easily when I am in the middle of the mainly sensory, emotional, divergent stream, and there is great pleasure in squeezing it out with a feeling of precision or strong evocation of that which is important to experience BUT generally “wording”l, when it comes from there (and not functional, technical, codified, functionalistic language of which there appear to be as endless of a boring supply as there are boring people in administration and souldestroying amounts of boring written files about stuff) is work. IT is heavy lifting. It is something that risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the very act of naming it. It is a secondary aspect of initial thought and feeling. I always felt like I sensed or intuitively knew more about people and situations than could be easily put into words or even more into acceptable words. I think we all remember being a child and knowing that there was stuff you’d be unable to explain to adults, so you just gave up trying and took the rap or whatever. It’s kind of a lonely place to be. I sometimes speculate that a large portion of my life has been devoted to putting things into words that I felt lonely about seeing or understanding. In making THAT relatable, maybe I feel like I am making myself understood, where I would sometimes feel alienated or lost in the rush of everyday experience. Writing for me is an act of remembering and asserting that which would be otherwise invisible and consequently - forgotten. But it is not words first. Whenever it is, real writing dries up fast, reproducing itself with no connection to deeper drives or emerging truths. It’s just formal coding at that point. Staring at a page as if it holds the answer. Toying with words rather than foundational, experiential premises. An analytic rational exercise hoping to eke out relevance, but never transcending itself. I do not hear voices either btw. If anything I feel characters as some kind of vibe or attitude with a certain feel. I taught myself to draw at a young age, and when shaping characters I would always somehow feel them them first. See them in my minds eye. Their attitude, their expressions their behaviour and body style and how this was evidence of or an extension of their personalities and motivations and assumptions about the world. This might dictate how they spoke, if they did, but also, I think, downstream from what they just WERE. As I write this, I am realising that maybe I partly did in answer to a perceived challenge for me in feeling as natural with written characters as I would with drawn ones. Ironic how one can spend an entire life on words mainly because of all the things that are NOT words.

I can never listen to the voice in my head because that song I can't get out of my head keeps drowning it out.

Really interesting speech, with a really god-awful powerpoint.

Interesting when you talk about this idea, you end up at the Royal Institute. When I had this idea as a kid, and started talking about it, I wound up in therapy.

Christine de Pizan preceded these writers. She self names her protagonist, Christine. Her book The Book of the City of Ladies could be interesting in light of the topic though.

It's curious when I pay attention to my thoughts that they are very inconsistent. Only a surface layer. Something like the way light reflects patterns on the outside of a soap bubble.