Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, where the inner voice is in your head, it turns out. Good job, Chuck. You got this. So what you're engaged in, Chuck, is called private speech. Oh, Chuck, you're so stupid. That's still private speech. No way you're going to do a good job. Oh.

As long as we can hear you and you're talking to yourself, that's great. Oh, yeah. I get it now. Sure. Saying it out loud, which means it's not inner monologue or dialogue. No. I've always heard it called the inner monologue, too, or internal monologue. But Anna helped us out with this, right? Yeah. Anna G. She points out that inner monologue is a pretty limiting term because that voice in your head, the way that you talk to yourself –

it can take all sorts of different shapes rather than you having a conversation, beating yourself up quietly. Those are kind of the keys to what we would call inner speech or the people who research it would call it inner speech. Yeah. Or inner voice. And it turns out this is kind of a tough one in some ways because it's like, I imagine Anna was up against it because there are many, many, many, many facets to this.

And it can serve a lot of different purposes. It's very common, but also some people don't have it. Yeah. We can look at brain scans and say like, hey, this is lighting up.

But it's like it's also really hard to study and get a consensus on because a lot of it is self-reported as far as when people do it and why people do it and what function it could serve or doesn't serve. And if you if you don't have one, what does that mean? So there's just a lot of different avenues and it's tough to kind of make this a real tidy package.

And it's really impressive that people are figuring out how to research this at all. It's a definitely developing field. It's not established quite yet. So it's kind of the Wild West in a lot of ways as far as, you know.

psychology goes. But one of the reasons why it's fairly new is because people forever just thought like there are such things as inner voices. We'll never be able to study them because they are the definition of subjective. And like you said, self-reported tests are how they had studied them before. And that's just not super reliable. William James, the father of American psychology, had a quote that

I'll paraphrase him. He basically said like trying to study something like inner speech is like turning up the lights to get a good look at what the dark looks like. You can't do it was the end of his speech. Yeah. Oh, boy. That makes a lot of sense. It does. I've heard another one, too, that I love. Studying consciousness is like trying to use a flashlight to find the shadows.

Oh, I got one too. Okay. Youth is wasted on the young. Ooh, that's a good one. That's a good one too. What was Spud's McKenzie party animal? Two words. That's all you need to know. Yeah. This is just a tough one because there are so many little nuggets to uncover. Like after I had done all the research and I was kind of like, all right, let's go do this. I was like, wait, wait a minute though. Like when my grandfather had a stroke when I was a kid, he had aphasia, which is

is some stroke patients, you know, can't, you know, they're talking, but they're not saying the words that you understand. Right. I was like, I wonder what's going on in their head and what that has to do with your inner voice. And I saw some things that said like, nope, you're it, or it completely disturbs your inner voice as well. And then another other studies that said, um, no, your inner speech can be preserved, uh, relative to the spoken language if you have aphasia. So it's just,

It can be frustrating, but it's also I shouldn't look at it that way and just think of it as like just super fascinating. And maybe, you know, we don't always have all the answers. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I think another way to say it is we don't understand it. So those listening to this episode aren't going to understand it by the end of it either. Well, yeah. And just in the case of the stroke thing with my grandfather, I remember very specifically being a kid and seeing the frustration and thinking as a 10 year old, like,

He in his head, he's saying what he's trying to say. Right. Like I can tell because he's getting really frustrated that it's coming out as something that is unintelligible to us. But, you know, all these years later, I got two answers. Yeah, there you go.

Full circle, I guess, in that sense. Yeah, it's not a very satisfying one, but yeah. So like we said, inner monologue is a little too limiting. We don't want to use that. Inner speech is way better. And inner speech is actually a little limiting, as we'll see, too. But it turns out there's a lot of things that our inner speech does besides, like you demonstrated, beating yourself up. It can be used to motivate. That's a good one. You kind of did that at first, right?

Yeah, I think that was good, Chuck. Right. We use it for memorizing things, problem solving. We use it to regulate ourselves. Like, okay, Chuck, don't be mean to yourself. Calm down. Yeah. That kind of stuff. But again, not out loud. And then even more, not me saying it. Because, dude, if your voice in your head was my voice, I would be so sorry for you.

I dream as you. Is that weird? A little weird. I'd like to hear more about that later on. No, I'm just joking. There have been plenty of people that have studied this, though. And, you know, we're going to talk about some of these people here and there. There was a pair of researchers in 2011, Simon McCarthy Jones and Charles Fernihow, maybe? Fernihow is what I saw or what I heard. Yeah. Like Tallyho? Exactly. But Ferni. Right. Right.

They developed a survey and where they kind of categorize different varieties of inner speech. And their survey was called the VISC, the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire, BISQ. And they also, along with others, have other categories. And we're kind of just going to go through these now. But one can be dialogic, which means you're like you're having a back and forth with yourself.

or others. I asked Emily if I could talk about this because she talks out loud, which I guess isn't quite the same thing, but I'll see her talking to herself sometimes, having a conversation with someone. Much more common when she was having frustrations with her business, talking like out loud to people, but it would be in her head, but then I would also see her talking out loud and I'll walk into her room and say, who are you talking to? And she'd tell me and

But that's dialogic because there's someone else involved, even if that someone else is another you. Right. What you can't see is the giant furry purple monster with googly eyes and a tiki drink. Oh, man, that'd be great. So, yeah, dialogic seems to be fairly common, too. There's also condensed inner speech. That's kind of like a different form of dialogue.

So this, okay, here's one of the things that I had trouble with, Chuck. Let me just be forthright here. There's not any neat package of there's this kind, this kind, and this kind, and then there's this subkind of this kind and this kind and this kind. No one's put it together like that, so it's a little confusing. So, for example, dialogic inner speech. You'd think that the next thing would be monologic or something like that. That's not here. Instead, we're talking about condensed inner speech,

which is using like abbreviations or like just words rather than full sentences. And that this is a way that you speak to yourself in a very private manner that you would probably never use to speak out loud. It's just the kind of shorthand that you use for yourself. Doesn't fit this list at all. And yet here we are. Yeah. Anna's example for that is, you know, you're leaving the house and, you know, phone, keys, wallet in your head, that kind of thing.

Right. But at the same time, you could be having a conversation with somebody about your wallet. So it would be dialogic condensed inner speech. Drives me nuts. Yeah, I see your point. Other people is another one. That's when your voice not when you're speaking to someone else, but when it takes on the voice of someone else. It could be Abraham Lincoln. It could be Josh Clark. And that's when you're imagining a conversation with someone else.

Where your own inner voice sounds like someone else's different than like Emily having a conversation with another person. Right. For sure. Like you're the bystander. Basically, there's two people talking. There's a did you see that Guardian article about the that included the woman whose inner voice was like a stereotypical Italian couple fighting, arguing?

It's so interesting. And that's how she works stuff out. Like the wife would be like, no, she needs to quit her job and follow her dreams. And the husband would be like, no, she's got a good job. She needs to keep her feet on the ground. And like eventually one would win the argument and then that's what she would do. That's what that lady's inner voice is like. Yeah, it's very fascinating. One can be motivational or evaluative. Either, you know, am I doing a good job here or do a good job?

They found that, you know, with like sports performance and any kind of like public speaking or any kind of performative thing, you know, that inner voice pumping you up can lead to real results, usually good. Yeah. And I saw that that was kind of expanded or changed or kind of cut into subcategories later on or at some point.

there's evaluative critical, which is basically like, you know, did I do a good job or why didn't you get 100%? That kind of thing. Yeah. There's also positive regulatory, which kind of ties into what you were just saying. Like, if you imagine yourself...

You know, doing really well, practicing shooting baskets. There's some part of you that could be like, keep up the hard work and you'll be in the NBA in no time. Or you did a great job. Like those would fall under positive regulatory. When I play basketball, all I hear in my head is what I hear on the court, which is swish.

Nice. I was going to say, I was waiting for you to say brick because that's what I hear. Ruby expressed interest in playing basketball the other day and I had a hard time containing myself. I was like, you know, that's the only sport I was actually pretty good at. Like I can actually teach you something here. That's awesome, man. But I didn't want to say it too positively because then she'd be like, nah, maybe not. Very smart. Boy, you know what you're doing, don't you? I'm working on it. Another is prompted.

No, no, no. I'm sorry. Expanded speech, which is like if you if you have to have a tough conversation with someone and you're literally kind of just rehearsing that in your head as one or both. That is like when you're speaking, not in any kind of abbreviated way. Yeah, it's the opposite of condensed speech. Like you're thinking in or hearing in your inner voice the exact words with the phonetics and the grammar and everything that you would say out loud.

Right. Which that got me on a sidetrack of like, oh, that's like, why do people when you hear your voice played on a recording, why does that sound different? Is this has anything to do with that? And I just had to park that because that gets into a whole other thing, which is should probably be a shorty. The efforts copy. No, no, no. Like when I listen to a podcast of us.

Like, why does your voice never match when you hear it out loud as it does in your own brain? I think your efference copy, probably. No, it has to do with like the way your skull reverberates. Oh, really? Actual physical stuff. But I think that could be a shorty. Reverberating Skull is a great album name. It is. And we'll get to efference copy later on. I clearly can't wait.

Yeah, it's good stuff. There's now we reach a point of the list where coherence starts to emerge. We've got like basically like a one and then the opposite. I don't know why I just put it so confusingly. So let's just start.

There's elicited or prompted, which is inner speech that's basically triggered by some external factor. Someone comes along and says, here's some pictures of different stuff. Pick out the ones whose names rhyme. So you've got a boot and then a, I don't know, a foot or something like that. Like you would pick out the boot and the foot. And depending on...

how liberal they were with their judgments, they would say, yes, that rhymes. Yeah, but it's a prompt from an outside source. Right. Whereas the next one, which logically follows, thankfully, pristine or spontaneous, that was Russell Hurlburt, kind of a mouthful, a researcher that coined this one, that is, that's just unprompted, spontaneous, and it's a part of like what makes us us. Yeah.

Yes. Like that is your genuine, true inner voice. Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere. Sometimes when you just are talking to yourself and don't even realize you're talking to yourself in your head, like that's what Herbert Herlberg calls pristine. And there's this really great Aeon article about your inner voice that was written by Phil Jekyll.

J-A-E-K-L. And Phil points out, I'm hoping I can, we're on first name basis, me and Phil. But he points out that this is leading psychologists to be like, oh my God, oh my God, if we can study pristine inner voices, like that's essentially like,

The external, the exterior of the unconscious. And we would be tapping into people's unconscious. And other people are like, I think Fernie Ho is like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Let's just kind of take this one step at a time. Old Fernie Ho, that's what he's known as. They call him the breaks. That's right. And well, except when he gets excited about something, then he yells out, Fernie Ho! That's right.

Maybe before we break, we should talk about these other four. Yeah. Because that visc is still, they've been revising it over the years and it's still in use for some researchers. But in 2015, there was another researcher named, what a great name, Mal Gorzada, Polchaska Wasil? Waisel? Waisel, maybe? That's a good one. They were like, all right, let's categorize it by emotional types. And

And these are the faithful friend, which has a nice ring to it. That's like your personal strength, positive feelings about yourself. You're an enabler. Yeah. The ambivalent parent, which is awful, otherwise known as Gen X parent, associated with strength and love and caring criticism.

So wait a minute. Is it the parent of a Gen Xer or a Gen Xer as a parent? I'm confused. I would say the parent. I mean, weren't most of our parents fairly ambivalent about us? Yeah, I would think so. Sure. It's like, oh, you're here? This is weird because associated with strength, love and care and criticism. Right. That's not ambivalent. So here is another problem with this field. People are naming stuff just way off.

Yeah. Way off. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And it's hard to remember and understand this stuff if the pieces don't fit together because they're dripping. You know what I mean? That's gross. Yeah. But it's true. I know. What about the others emotionally ticking? Proud rival. Okay. Yeah.

And then there's one that was initially called Calm Optimist, but Polchaska Wazel did a follow-up study testing to see if her initial results were confirmed. And Faithful Friend, Ambivalent Parent, and Proud Rival were all there again in the second one, but Calm Optimist didn't show up. So she ended up replacing that with something called Helpless Child, which apparently is probably the worst of the worst. All right. That's a lot. It is. It was a lot. Do you understand this anymore? No.

sort of okay good well we're making headway chuck all right well we'll take a break and see if we can uh rein this puppy in right after this you're a details person checking reviews reading nutritional info even terms and conditions so when donating check out give well an independent resource offering rigorous transparent research on top of giving opportunities their recent analysis of cash transfers in africa includes over 300 footnotes perfect for meticulous readers for

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Ready to celebrate the magic of live music?

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Okay, Chuck. So one of the things we're talking about with inner speech is it's easy to kind of confuse it with like, say, private speech where you're actually talking out loud to yourself. Somebody could hear it. But one of the big differences with inner speech and verbal speech is that it's just faster. I guess allegedly for some people. It's not for me. Mine goes very slow and actually slows me down. It's like it goes slow. Yeah, my...

The part of me that has to process the words slows down the speed that I could conceivably go at. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's like old Fernie Ho. It just kind of puts the brakes on everything. But normally, if you compare the two, it should be much faster just because a lot of times you're using condensed speech, which, you know, again, is you're just using shorthand that you can understand. I think that's where I get tripped up. I don't really do that.

And then like physically, physiologically, it's just you can think a lot faster than you can speak because you're not moving your mouth. You're not like taking a breath or anything like that. It's just supposedly faster. Is yours faster? Yeah, for sure. There was one person, a researcher, who actually endeavored to find out how fast that can get. This is in 1990. And they found that some participants in the study could think more than 4000 words a minute.

And, you know, just for context, the world record for fastest out loud talker is a Canadian guy who went to 655 words per minute. So this is basically you can think.

Up to six times faster than the fastest talker on the planet. Yeah, that's at least twice as much Yeah, he did the math it's roughly six was that the guy from the Dunkin Donuts commercials or the FedEx commercials and they know it's unfortunately just some I mean, hey, I love this guy. It's gonna knock him down. His name is Sean Shannon He's a Canadian guy who who did the to be or not to be soliloquy in 23.8 seconds Wow

Way to go, Sean. You can't understand anything he's saying, but I think they have judges, you know, that are like, yeah, he's still saying those words. So I guess then we reach another question. How does inner speech develop? Which apparently when they started figuring this out, thanks to a guy named Lev Vygotsky, who we'll meet in a second, it completely changed our understanding of

Because up to this point, it was like, do kids learn first? And then, or does their brain develop and then they learn first? Or do they learn first by, or do they develop their brain by learning? Clearly, I did neither at some point. Right.

You can kind of get the gist of what I was saying. Yeah, I thought this was super interesting. Child development is just fascinating to me, like going through it now, like more than ever, obviously. But for most kids, and by the way, this Lev Vitgotsky, who you said we would meet. You know what? Let's just bring him in. Come on in, Lev. Hey, I'm dead. Yeah, exactly. This is in the 1930s. So he has left us earthwise.

But a lot of this has been borne out in modern research. But in the 30s, he was looking at, like, basically it starts out as private speech, like kids saying things out loud to themselves. And, you know, first they start talking just to communicate, like, I'm hungry. I need to whatever, go to sleep. Actually, kids never say that. I want to stay up. And, you know, that's just social communication. But then as they get older, they start communicating.

sort of privately talking to themselves as an internal motivator. And then eventually that, I think around, that's between like three and four and then around six or seven is when kids take that private voice inside their head and that's when the inner monologue kicks off more or less. Right. And then they start to, after that, they continue to develop and get good at things like condensed speech and creating their own self shorthand and stuff like that.

Yeah. It's pretty cool. So, again, I said that this kind of turned things on our head as far as understanding. Piaget, who was a very famous French psychologist, he said kids are dumb and then they learn or their brain grows and then they learn.

And this showed the exact opposite, that they developed their brain and their understanding of the world through learning, through this inner dialogue. And it was Vygotsky, believe it or not, was a Soviet researcher. So the West wasn't exposed to his ideas until like the 50s. And when they finally came out, were translated, it was like –

Great. Okay. Now we finally understand. Right. He's the one that coined the term inner voice, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure what that is in Russian, but yes, apparently it translates to inner voice. I think it's a property of the Soviet Union. I don't know why I said that as a German. It sounded Russian to me in my head.

You know, we mentioned that not everyone has inner speech or develops that. It exists like a lot of things do on a spectrum. Some people, Emily is a very, very, she's like, I'm constantly talking to people in my head. Really? I know. I see it happening. You know, the other interesting thing she does, I don't think I've ever mentioned on the show. And she was like, you can say all this. I don't really care. She spells out when she's stressed, she'll spell out things with her thumb.

In cursive, like on a table, like just no, just like sitting there, like we'll be watching a TV show and I'll know she's stressed and her thumb will be going. And now I'll not only know what she's doing for years now, I'll be like, what are you writing? And if it's a scene about like a tent standoff in an office or something, she might.

spelled typewriter or office or something just that she sees. It's not always like I'm nervous, never like I'm stressed or anything like that. So it's a way to alleviate her anxiety? I guess. How interesting. That's cool. I've never heard of that. Yeah. Hey, man.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Emily is one of a kind. When you couple up with people and you really dig in, you don't have any of those barriers up. It turns out that we're all just a little strange. Well, how is her air penmanship?

She's great. I can read it all. I can look at her thumb and just I can spell it right out in my head. Very neat. Wow. Can you really or are you just joking? No, no, no. Okay. Wow. It looks like thumb's gone wild. All right. Nice. Too hot for a TV thumb wipe.

Anyway, but that's kind of her inner voice, too, you know, in a way just manifesting itself physically. But it's still, you know, not out loud. But some people constantly are doing this kind of thing, talking to themselves. Others sometimes, some never. These two researchers, Johan Nedergaard and Gary Lupien, if you have zero inner speech, they have termed that an endophagia.

And they say, and this is another kind of frustration, like between 5 to 10 percent of people don't have inner speech. Whereas Russell Hurlburt, who we've met, said, no, it's more like 50 to 70 percent have inner speech.

Or no, don't have inner speech, right? Yeah. So that's just, that's wildly different. It is wild. That's a great term for it again, wild. So now Fernie Ho comes in and says, whoa, everybody. I'm not really excited about this having its own term, an endophagia. And an means lack, endo means inner phagia speech. Because, and I think he makes a reasonable argument here, when you...

come up with a term, especially a Latin term, for something, a way people behave or think or whatever, it seems to suggest that this is a condition, maybe even a disorder. And he's like, that's not necessarily true, especially if the majority of people don't have this inner voice. So do we really need a name for it? And I think Nettergaard and Lupien were like, it's a pretty cool name, though. Can we please keep it? And Fernie Ho is thinking about it right now.

Right. Well, that got me thinking, like, if you have no inner dialogue, does that mean like the sociopaths have that? But I found no correlation there. It seems like sociopaths quite often have an inner dialogue saying, like, do this awful thing. Right. Yeah. Should we? Who are you? They have other things, though. Like, it's not like if you don't have an inner voice that there's no thought involved.

It can also come in different forms, I think, is what they're finding.

Yeah. And they've also found this is Nettergaard and Lepien in a study just last year in 2024 where they tested they want to know how it related to memory and apparently verbal memory of groups with very they tested people with very high and very low rates of inner speech and found that a very low rate of inner speech. You're not going to be as good at just remembering stuff like your lines in a play or a grocery list or anything. Poor bastards.

The thing is, though, is that seems to be, at least as far as they've discovered, really the only big drawbacks is you don't do well necessarily in memory tests or something like that. But even for somebody who isn't thinking in, like, inner speech where they're talking to themselves, there's a voice in their head talking, there's other ways that you can think using what is basically some sort of inner voice.

Well, inner speech is the best way to put it, but imagine that without speech, without language or words. There's inner seeing. Some people think in images. Right. Feelings, like just your emotions, which I'm kind of like, okay, does that get you in trouble if that's how you respond and move and behave from the world? Because that's one of the big things from...

inner speech is when what we do is we prepare ourselves and come up with a plan of action. What are we going to do next? How are we going to respond to this? So if you're not thinking it over in your head and it's your emotions that drive you, like that just seems like it could get scary. Yeah. Fraught. Huh? Like it's fraught. Fraught. Exactly. Yeah. There's un-symbolized thinking. So you've got like, you're just not

You're not thinking like, OK, I need to get in that car. You just I don't know. I don't know. I can't even give you an example here. And then the last one that they've mentioned is sensory awareness, which is just sensing things. And then I guess responding essentially like an amoeba.

Like, oh, this stove is hot, so I'm going to move my hand. But imagine nothing in between the heat, the sensation of heat entering your hand and removing your hand. No thought whatsoever between that. That's apparently what sensory awareness is like. Huh. All right. That study from last year where they were talking about verbal memory made me wonder about dyslexia.

Uh, because you know, my daughter has dyslexia and, and I was like, I bet you there's a tie there. And I was actually right on the money with this one. Um, supposedly, uh, if you have dyslexia, you have very little to no inner voice. Really? So that was fascinating. Yeah. Because a lot of times they think in images and they think in, they call it kind of like 3d thinking. Gotcha. So it's less word based. Gotcha. That's pretty cool.

I tested myself on this a little bit to find out what I do. Like, I typically just think in words, I guess. Yeah. A lot of times I talk to myself, but I think, I don't know. I think there's a lot going on in there that I'm not cognizant of. I'm really bad at like how I feel and like just understanding things.

you know, what's going on in my head at any given time. Like really just introspecting. Like I do it a lot, but I'm not necessarily good at it is what I guess what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I can be like that too. See, I don't believe that one bit. I think you're a champion at that kind of thing. Well, maybe certain kinds. You know how it gets so complicated.

I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, but you're wrong about you not being good at it. So I tested myself to see if I could think in just images without words because I've never really thought about that. So some part of me told myself to think of a watering can. Okay. And I didn't hear it. It was just...

Like it wasn't in words. I didn't hear it. No one spoke it. I didn't see it spelled out. It was just there was some command all of a sudden to think of a watering can. And all of a sudden a watering can came up. And the proof that I was not thinking in words is that I couldn't think of the word for what I was seeing. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then some other part of me came in and was like, you know, I think you were actually supposed to produce an image of a flower pot. And then I got worried about cognitive decline.

And that's no joke. Like that was the whole process right there. Wow. That is fascinating. And I would imagine hard to do kind of like a Ghostbusters, you know, don't clear your mind. Right. And then you get the safe up marshmallow man like that.

If anything is suggested, I will immediately see the word. If it says, like, don't think of the word, I'll think of that word. Yeah, I guess I didn't. It was more like not. It wasn't like I was saying, like, don't do this. It was more do this or try this. So because there wasn't like that blanket prohibition on not thinking about the word, it was easier to do. But just back to Ruby. So did you ask her if she has an inner voice or if she thinks in symbols or whatever? Yeah.

No, she was she's at school, so it didn't come to me. But I'll ask her later and let you know. OK, do let me know. Text me. Yeah, this is Ruby says that her inner voice just says, find Josh, kill Josh. Burn Josh. No, she loves you. I know. I love her, too. I think she's sweet. I love her, too, I think. That's what I thought you were saying. Hey, did she know? Did she like Magdalena Bay?

She did. Did she really? I just figured that she hadn't and you were just not mentioning it. No, I thought I texted you back. Yeah, Josh, it was very sweet. Got a text and he said, hey, I got this new artist that I've been listening to. I think Ruby might like it. Well, I'm glad I was right. For some reason, every time I heard it, I would just be like, Ruby would really like this. That does not happen every time I listen to something. So I thought I should just say something. Oh, I could have sworn I texted you. But yeah, we listened to it together and she dug it. Cool.

Cool. So, hey, big plug for Magdalena Bay. Also a nice place to visit from what I hear. She's great. Is that a place too or are you joking? No, I'm just kidding. Man, you're getting me all over the place today. Back to Russell Hurlburt. That's just so hard. It doesn't roll off the tongue. Sorry. Even in your head it doesn't. Yeah. Oh, yeah. In my inner voice it's hard to say too. Yeah.

So he developed a tool called the Descriptive Experience Sampling. I would call it the sampler, but D-E-S. That is when he sits you down and puts, I guess, a device in the room and just like, hey, just sit there and chill out and do whatever and think about whatever. And anytime you hear a beep, though, you got to write down whatever is in your brain at that exact moment.

I guess in the idea of just sorting to try and hit on the randomness of like what you might be thinking at any given time and just log those thoughts right then. And then they would talk about those. And he said, maybe this could give me a good framework.

And when he got the results back, he was like, wow, this is fascinating how just all over the place it was. It's so multilayered. It's so varied. People can be thinking of a watering can and be saying the words flower pot at the same time with no explanation at all. Right. Sometimes you have multiple voices all talking over each other. And he was just like.

This is, he just put the device away and walked slowly out of the room, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a really big deal that he was able to come up with this because this is one of the reasons why people were so, I guess, wary of trying to study inner voices because they're so subjective. Herbert figured out a way to like,

take as much subjectivity out of it as possible. Yeah. You know, and I think in the... So simply too. Exactly. And I think in the more, like the bigger studies that he came up with, like you would get a beeper and like turned out in the world for like a week or two weeks or something. So that you would eventually get used to the beeper being there. It wouldn't just be like waiting, like I'm going to have this awesome thought.

like ready for when the beeper goes off. That's a good way to do it. Yeah, so that you would, like he was genuinely tapping into whatever random thoughts are in your head. So he also, the process also includes extensive interviews. I saw a

like multiple, like six, seven minutes on one word, one thought from one entry. And then they're really careful not to lead the person and have them, you know, start to implant memories accidentally, that kind of stuff, or revise what they're actually thinking, but instead kind of dig deeper and deeper and deeper into what else was there at the time. And I think the people who are participants in studies like this are actually surprised by

From these interviews, because they didn't realize, like, you know, in addition to thinking this word, wait, there was this image over here, too. And, you know, it just goes on from there. Yeah. And he's like, Rosebud's got to be more than a wagon. It was a sled. I thought it was a wagon. Was it a sled? Yeah.

Oh, good Lord. You're the movie guy too, aren't you? I know. Man, Burl Ives is rolled over in his grave. Why did I think it was a wagon? It's a sled, which is really just a wagon with rails. Yeah, I guess it is. I think Radio Fire makes both. So who's going to discriminate? Not me. Shall we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll take another break and we'll talk a little bit about brain areas lighting up right after this.

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Okay, buddy, I'm supposed to lead off this segment, but I'm going to hand it right back to you because I know when I say the word efference.

You get excited. We're going to talk about efference copies at long last. Take it away. Oh, okay. I had never heard about this before. Had you? Same. Okay. So apparently when we think, when we're about to speak right now, without me being cognizant of it, there's a part of my brain that is prearranging and planning what I'm about to say.

Right. I have no idea that this is going on. I think I'm just talking at this point. But there's a part of my brain that knows exactly what's going to happen. And they set out they send out what's called the sorry, my brain apologizes for that. What's called an efference copy, which is basically a blueprint.

of what I'm about to say to the rest of my brain. That includes what movements I'm gonna make with my jaw and tongue, and a prediction of what it's going to sound like coming out

And then also basically a blanket statement like what you're about to hear is coming from you. So it keeps us from being startled. It allows us to recognize that what we're saying is coming from us. And the most amazing part about this is that when we think to ourselves using our inner voice or inner symbols or whatever, but definitely inner voice. I'm not sure about symbols now that I mention it.

We do the same thing. We get basically a cruder version of the efference copy, but it also includes orders to not move your mouth, to not move your tongue, that there's not going to be a touch sensation, but that everything else is like the efference copy contains all the other stuff.

Yeah. Fascinating. And Efren's copy is not a bad band name. No. A little brainy. It is, but yeah, I could see. I'm going to go to the old standby math rock. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay.

So as far as the old wonder machine goes, there obviously have done plenty of studies where they always like to see what's lighting up, you know. But these are often disappointing to me when it comes to stuff like this because it's like I feel like at this point in our show, after so many years, even listeners will say,

Oh, I bet the temporal cortex lights up where that's associated with memory and hearing and language. And then Broca's area, which we've talked about countless times, is it's associated with speech. And yes, those areas light up.

Yeah. Ta-da. Yes, but at the same time, there's also different regions that light up as well that wouldn't light up when we speak out loud. So it's clear that there are – it has its own thing, that inner voice is different as far as the brain is concerned from speech.

speech as well, that they bear a strong resemblance to one another. And then also they found the brain patterns for when we are spontaneously speaking to ourselves, that pristine inner talk that Herbert mentioned, that uses or different regions of the brain light up for elicited types where we're like using, we're rehearsing what we're saying or something like that. My inference copy is...

Is it working slow or fast? It's a little rough around the edges today. Okay. You might be wondering about schizophrenia. This is something that we've talked about on the show before because, very sadly, many times you will see someone suffering from schizophrenia having a conversation out loud seemingly with someone. So it's very natural to probably wonder like, oh, what's going on there? You know, they can call those verbal hallucinations

is that someone's inner voice. And they have done studies and they found that there can be an impairment of the process that creates efference copies in those cases. I think it's another term is corollary discharge. And if you have schizophrenia, it can make it hard for you to identify that voice as their own. So kind of what

It seems like it's happening, seems like that's exactly what's happening. Yeah, that message is not included in the efference copy. Then also, I failed to mention before, one of the things that the efference copy does is say you don't need to pay attention to what is about to come out of your head as much like the sound of it.

It's not coming from you. You don't have to respond to it as you would if somebody was talking to you. And that's another thing that gets lost in the Ephraim's copy as well. They respond to the sound of the voices in their head in a way that makes them feel or they respond to a voice as if somebody walked up and was talking to them. The problem is there's no one there.

And they are misattributing their own inner thoughts. That's kind of one of the big postulations for schizophrenia, or at least audio-verbal hallucinations associated with schizophrenia. Which is, that's a great example right there of why studying inner speech is such a big thing.

Like, if we can figure this out, you could conceivably help treat people that much better. You know, I mean, like being plagued with inner voices that you think are coming from somewhere else, especially if they're like commanding you to do things. That's a great thing to learn how to treat. You know, that's debilitating. And then also kind of related to that is a.

The idea that as we start to learn more about inner speech and where it comes from and what it does and all that, that we could conceivably get better at treating things like anxiety or OCD because those things have clearly shown to be associated with negative self-talk, that you can increase your own anxiety and stress by basically being mean to yourself or being –

just having a negative outlook on life. And it's, I mean, just from my own experience, it's nuts how illuminating it can be when you have somebody point out, like, do you hear like how you're viewing the world, like in your own head? Like, do you hear the things you're saying to yourself? And when you become aware of it, you can change it. And when you change it, it can have sweeping effects on your entire life. One of which is treating anxiety and even depression, I think.

Yeah. I mean, man, it seems like so much stuff with the human condition can come down to being in touch with yourself and really self-aware. But, you know, that can being too self-aware can also be a problem. So it's just it's like living life is tough. Yeah. Well put, man.

With the OCD, you know, I'm a little bit on the OCD spectrum. Mine doesn't manifest, though, in negative self-talk, but I was thinking about my inner voice. And I do a lot of, with my OCD, it's like efficiencies I'll talk about in my head. Like when I'm doing something like cooking, in my head, I'm literally saying, all right, you're going to grab the spoon and you're going to take it over here and you're going to grab the salt and then you're going to cut that thing. And I'm kind of planning out

stuff that I'm about to do, but it's in my brain, it's all in the, in the, and like kind of wrapped up as an efficiency. Like if I do it in exactly just this right way in this order, it's, it's the best way to do that. I do that too. I associate that with perfectionism. Interesting. For me, it is at least like I have to do it as efficiently as possible. And efficiency is a form of perfectionism. And that if you do it all in order, it's loosey goosey. And why even bother to get out of bed?

Right. But I'll even do that when it's not like a specific thing, like, all right, if you're cooking something, I sort of get that. But if I'm at my desk sometimes and it comes and goes, I'll be like, all right, you're going to grab the mouse and click on that thing. And you're going to answer that email and then you're going to grab your pen. Same here, man. Like, how interesting. All right. I had no idea that we had that in common. Hey, look at us. Wow. See what happens when you talk about your inner voice, Chuck. We're meant to be. I've been asking you to do this for decades now. I know.

I was like, I don't want to look at myself. Well, that kind of leads us to the purposes of inner speech a little bit, right? I mean, talking about it clearly helps connect people, but there's things that we gain from talking to ourselves or just being able to do that.

Sure. And we've kind of touched on them here and there. You know, when kids are developing it, they believe that it's a way to sort of grow and mature into being responsible. Like you start out hearing your parents say to go do something, go clean up your room. And eventually, the more you hear that, you'll start thinking, I should really go clean up my room. Or I'm not sure when that's supposed to start, but...

Yeah. At some point, eventually that will lead to you saying those things to yourself like you would as a responsible adult. Like, I got to clean this mess up. Right. Yeah. And also, I mean, executive functioning, like making decisions, figuring out the best solution to a problem by simulating them, like thinking through your actions before acting, which also oftentimes ties into emotional regulation. Right.

All of this uses some sort of like inner voice, inner speech, inner hearing is another way that you can experience it. That's an enormous role because that's essentially how we navigate life as adults. Right.

Yeah. And, you know, I already mentioned sort of the performance aspect. Like if you're if you're about to play a game or run a race or something like talking to yourself, you got this. You're the best. You can do this. You're going to run fast. You might have a routine that you run over in your head. That's all your voice. Exactly. And that can be that can really pay off. Yeah.

obviously much more than negative self-talk and motivation. You know, it's not exactly tied to what you're saying, but what you were mentioning before, like how you were planning out which action to do next for cooking and then the one beyond that. I realized that's why I had to stop playing video games because I would walk around thinking about how to do it better next time. Oh, interesting. Even when I wasn't playing the video game and realized like this is not, no way to spend my mental energy. Yeah.

Like it's one thing to just sit down and relax and play a video game. And if that was it for me and I could leave it there, I would totally play video games still, but I just couldn't leave it there. Yeah, mine comes and goes too. And I haven't thought too much about when or why. So I think that's interesting. Do they still call them video games? It feels really 80s or 90s. I don't know. I think it's more used as like...

Like a verb. Like when I game. Gaming. Right. Yeah. I've heard that. I heard that in a magazine. Yeah. But I think if you said, hey, do you play video games? It'd be a very Gen X way to say that. Okay. I'll watch my steps then. Nothing wrong with that.

Um, if you're wondering about, you know, cause we've talked about whether you dream in other languages, if you learn a second language, uh, is that a mark of fluency? Uh, it kind of ties into inner voice. Um, generally speaking, you, you think in your, or you talk to yourself in your first language. Um, but if you are fluent in, you know, let's say I was fluent in German. Oh,

Oh, if only. And I moved to Germany at times there, or eventually I could have an inner voice. Is that this talking in a different way? Yeah. Not with a German accent, an American, but yeah. So also deaf people, apparently, and I would guess, especially if you were deaf from birth, right.

They see or think in sign language. So they visualize the word but through signs. Yeah, so cool. That is super cool. And then other people can actually, they might envision someone like their face. So they're reading their lips.

Yeah. But they're not hearing anything. I just think that's just fascinating. They also don't speak it themselves. Yeah, yeah. I think that's totally fascinating. There was also in that same Guardian article with the woman who was featured with the Italian couple bickering in her head, there was a dude, and man, I can't find his name anywhere, but he, I think, is the hero of this entire story, Chuck. Oh, yeah.

We don't know his name? His name is Justin Hopkins. I found it. Oh, okay. He has this, what he basically calls an island in a sea of void. And the island is his mind. And his mind turns on when it needs to. So an example, because I don't fully understand how this guy, how his mind works. But the best I can say is he realizes that he's out of milk. So he needs to go buy milk. So he buys milk.

Right. But imagine that being the extent of it. So he needs to buy milk and he goes and buys milk and he puts the milk back in his refrigerator and then he doesn't have another thought until the next thing that comes along. He said that he can go hours without a thought.

And so he can just sit in front of a sunset and enjoy the sunset in the most basic way that you can enjoy a sunset and just not be thinking about all the problems he has or what he has to do next or how to most efficiently watch the sunset. And this guy is like, I

I wouldn't want to necessarily live like that all the time because I do enjoy having like an inner life. But to just be able to modulate it and do that once in a while, I think that guy's amazing. And apparently in the Guardian article, they said that he says he sleeps like a baby, which I could totally imagine. Well, interestingly, I know that I'm drifting towards sleep when my inner voice gets really weird. Yeah.

Like I'll be thinking of things and when I start thinking about things and I can tell that are just absolute weird nonsense. It's almost like pre-dreaming. But the problem is now I know that that sleep is coming and I know that's what that signals. So in my brain, I will start inner talking going, all right, baby, I'm about to fall asleep. And that takes me out of it. So, OK, OK, I'm I'm fascinated by this. Like, give us an example.

of how your brain starts just becoming nonsensical or speaking gibberish or whatever that you can recognize you're starting to drift off. I'll be drifting and all of a sudden, like, I mean, I'm just making this up because I can't, I don't get up and write it down. What I should do is write it down, but then I've ruined my nap or whatever. That would definitely wake you up, yeah.

Uh, but it's, you know, all of a sudden if, if I'm just hear words or I'm saying, hear my voice saying words like, you know, uh, you know, the chicken put on a Cape and, uh, and played a little basketball and jumped in a pot of chili, like complete nonsense. And I will recognize it's happening and go, all right, that means I'm, I'm about there. And then that takes me out of it. And then I'm like, yeah, but a lot of times you can just experience it and not note it and just fall asleep.

Or note it and then just not let it rouse me too much and it'll lead to sleep. Gotcha. Man, that's amazing. I've never heard of that. It's very hot. That's pretty cool. Oh, boy. But every time I've said something weird about myself like that on the air, like stepping on cracks with the same place of my foot every time with OCD, I've had people write in and say, I do the same thing. Right. So.

Yeah, I think that's, I was going to say, like, I know we've been talking about ourselves a lot, but part of it for me is like, you know, I want to hear from people saying like, I do that too. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, oh, one other thing before we go. There was a tweet, it's become kind of a famous tweet from a few years back, I think in 2020, where somebody just basically said some people have an inner voice and some people don't.

And it revealed this commonality among people. If you don't really have an inner dialogue, monologue, inner speech, whatever, you just assume no one else does either. And if you do have it, you just assume everybody has it. And it was really kind of eye-opening to people to find, like, that's not the case at all. It's basically a spectrum. Yeah. And, I mean, maybe new research was spawned because everyone was like, oh, wait a minute. People are interested in this? Yeah. Yeah.

Fernie Ho said, "Fernie Ho!" That's right. Well, you got anything else? I mean, there's a bazillion other things, but we'll just park it right here. Okay. It is parked. And since we just parked it, as everyone who has been listening to the show from the outset knows, we've just unlocked Listener Mail. That's right. I'm going to call this Toledo, and this is from Alexander Nozar, or Alex.

Alex says, you know, every time Josh talks about having come from Toledo, I was thinking about Tony Paco's, which he mentioned in the fan theory episode. What wasn't mentioned, however, was, and Tony Paco's is what? It was a restaurant, right? It's like a hot dog place. Very famous in Toledo. And then Jamie Farr made it famous on MASH. That's right.

What wasn't mentioned, however, was what makes Tony Paco's awesome. First and foremost, it was founded by a Hungarian immigrant, making it a significant place for Hungarian Americans, especially here in Ohio, which has a pretty large Hungarian population in Dayton, Columbus, Toledo, and I believe Cleveland. My family is Hungarian on both sides, with great-grandfathers coming over here in the 1900s, early 1900s. Tony Paco serves not just Hungarian food like spetzl,

But they're well known for their homemade pickles and most importantly, their hot dogs. But what makes it truly unique as a fun place to visit is that anytime a celebrity visits, they're asked to sign a hot dog bun, which is then encased in plastic and hung on the wall. It's been a while since I've been there, but I remember Leslie Odom Jr.'s name and of course, Jamie Farr.

So I think you two should go up there on some sort of tour, and you can experience our awesome food, but also sign a hot dog bun. I don't think they've let us sign the hot dog bun, but I appreciate the thought, Alex. Are you kidding me? Didn't you get a key to the city or something? No, there was a listener years back who was trying to get us, actually, the key to the city, and I don't think it went anywhere. Well, you should get a key to Toledo. I should get a key to Stone Mountain, Georgia. You should sign a hot dog bun, and I should sign...

like a stone mountain. Plus also we should have the hot dogs while they're there because Alex ain't lying. They're really good. And I have to say, if you're ever in Toledo or apparently Dayton, Columbus, Cleveland, and you aren't in the mood for a hot dog, but there's a Tony Paco's nearby, go get the stuffed cabbage. Cause it is top notch. Like you wouldn't think this hot dog place, why does it have stuffed cabbage?

Well, because it's a Hungarian place and it is really good. Like, really good. Okay, I'm just going to say it again. It's really good stuffed cabbage. What's it stuffed with? Love, magic, I'm guessing three kinds of meat probably. Ha ha ha!

Awesome. It is. It is very good. Well, thanks a lot, Alex. It's always nice to hear from a fellow Ohioan, I'm guessing. Yeah. Yeah. And if you want to be like Alex and write in and tell us about something we love, like Tony Paco's or whatever, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Ready to celebrate the magic of live music? South by Southwest Music Festival returns to Austin, Texas this March 10th through the 15th with a fresh lineup of legendary and rising talent. Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.

With hundreds of showcasing artists performing across six days in over 50 venues, Discovery is right around the corner at South by Southwest. Explore the lineup at SXSW.com. Hey, everybody. It's your favorite plate cousin, Junior, from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. You know, the Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. So get in the Tundra with available i-Force Max Hybrid engine, delivering exceptional torque and towing capacity. Or check out a Tacoma.

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