NewHUmanistInnerVoices

I’ve spent a week learning to listen to myself and discovered I’m not very nice. The scene is a workshop in south-west London, the cast a French instructor and a group of PhD students. The task is simple: to remember a moment from our morning journey. And yet, as I’m soon to discover, such a straightforward task is anything but. Because between instruction and completion, an inner voice is getting in the way. And it’s telling me I’m useless.

Inner voices shape our lives every day. They tell us what we should think, and how we should behave. They impact how we plan a task and organise our time. They cajole us for failures and encourage us in times of need. Yet for much of the recent past, they have been neglected by scientific enquiry. Basic, but profound questions – where do inner voices come from? What purpose do they serve? How do we experience them differently? – have gone unanswered. Something we live with every day, influencing our decisions and imaginations, remains in the shadow of our perception.

In 2014, the Polish scholar Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl conducted a statistical analysis of common inner voices. Depending on need, context or personality, she discovered, participants might experience – or even strategically deploy – different styles of voice: from the “faithful friend” to the “ambivalent parent”, “proud rival” or “helpless child”. The personae of the voices can vary as much as their character: arriving in versions of our own voice or adopting the voice of another. They can be strict or gentle, punishing or kind. Yet for the most part, we are oblivious to their presence.

For most of my life, I took my inner voice for granted, becoming aware of its presence only in times of high intensity. As a cross-country runner I discovered that the exhortations of an inner voice could summon hidden reserves of energy during the final sprint. Later, as a rock climber, I learned that the ability to silence the inner voice was just as significant to success; removing alarm signals of fear and doubt so that flow and intuition could take over. But mostly, the voice was dim background noise, part of what I came to discover was “pre-conscious experience”: images, thoughts and feelings which occur so rapidly, with such innate familiarity, that they fail to consciously register.

It is to access this pre-conscious experience that I’ve come to the workshop. By developing techniques to enter the hinterland of our conscious processes, we can discover exactly how we set about doing what we do, revealing knowledge which – being intuitive – we take for granted. The subtle skills we develop through a lifetime of practice and habit can, in this way, be made available to our conscious minds – and so refined, systematised and shared. In turn, by observing the mechanics of our minds, we can better understand how we think: the repertoire of “inner voices” which gatekeep the offerings of the unconscious, and the specific qualities of first-person experience itself.

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Research into inner voices has long been tied to debates about the legitimacy of introspection as a scientific method, since without reliance on an individual’s introspection, meaningful study of inner voices becomes impossible. As early as the 19th century, philosophers such as Auguste Comte argued that objective observation of one’s own inner experience was impossible, since it rested on the assumption that the self was divisible – with one part able to observe the other. Likewise, it was assumed that introspection’s attachment to subjective experience left it woefully compromised as an objective scientific methodology. In the 20th century postwar era, such arguments came to dominate Anglo-American psychology. As Charles Fernyhough’s book The Voices Within argues, this “behaviourist” trend looked to observable phenomena to form the basis of its science of the mind. Interest in inner voices – accessible only through introspection and memory – consequently fell by the wayside. A famous 1977 paper by the psychologists Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson appeared to confirm the suspicion. By analysing the results of a series of experiments, they found participants had little understanding of their cognitive processes, and instead “confabulated” explanations for behaviours which were influenced by external factors.

Later experiments seemed to confirm the problem. At Lund University in 2005, Johansson et al trialled a “choice blindness” experiment to explore the effectiveness of introspection. Participants were invited to select an attractive female face from a series of paired photographs and asked to justify their choice. In between the choice and the justification, the selected photograph was falsified. A photograph of a different woman was presented to the participant as their choice. In 73 per cent of cases, the participant continued to provide an explanation for a choice they did not, in fact, make. Introspective access seemed at best unreliable; at worst, an illusion.

Slowly, however, this negative view of introspection has begun to change. Since the 1990s, scholars working in the field of phenomenology – such as Francisco Varela, Claire Petitmengin, Pierre Vermersch and Michel Bitbol – have worked to demonstrate that the problem with introspection was not one of viability but skill. An experienced participant, especially when assisted by a trained interviewer, could gain reliable access to their mental processes. Through a technique called “explicitation”, interviewers learn to guide their participants in slow motion, giving them access to the hidden, pre-conscious world of their mental machinery.

Explicitation works by keeping participants fixed in a state of evocation (that detached state we adopt when we’re trying to remember something difficult), allowing them to remain with their memories, slow them down, fragment them, and ultimately recall more than consciousness ever allowed in the moment itself. In 2013, Petitmengin et al repeated the “choice blindness” experiment, but this time carried out an explicitation interview between the initial choice and the subsequent justification. This time, participants spotted the deception in around 80 per cent of cases.

In the US, a similar technique called “Description Experience Sampling” (DES), devised by the psychologist Russ Hurlburt, has also been used to successfully capture first-person experience. Participants are equipped with a randomised beeper and asked to record their thoughts every time the beeper sounds. Later, the moment is recalled in detail with an interviewer who helps them reconstruct the fine grain of their thought process at the time. As with explicitation, the practice of the participant and the skill of the interviewer are key: together making the mechanics of conscious thought appreciable, and the results of introspection reliable. Using explicitation and DES, participants can have strange encounters with their pre-conscious selves.

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I experience this first-hand during the workshop, observing – through the state of evocation, and gentle, open prompts – how my mind forms its response to the simple task of selecting a moment from my morning journey. Hazy images, some real, others half-real or pure fantasy, well up from their unconscious store, only to be swept aside at the command of an inner voice, which sounds like me but behaves very differently. Impatient, supercilious, prone to denunciation, the voice marshalls my thoughts, I quickly realise, towards the hidden standards I set for myself: deciding which memories are interesting enough, “me” enough, to share with the rest of the room. The voice reminds me that you don’t just do things, you do them well. And it does say “you” – the second person – even though it is me, just as the you is me too. It is the voice of my ego; the overlord of my imagination.

Sometimes, there is no voice at all. Rather, meaning is communicated somatically: a sweep across the top of my chest appears to pose the question “are you sure?” – a kind of hyper-condensed word gesture that I somehow, innately, understand. Indeed, such surprises are another indication of the technique’s veracity. If our discoveries consistently confirmed our own suppositions, it would be reason to question their integrity.

We are not used to remaining in the evocative state for long periods of time. Asked how we did something, our habit is to generalise: we verbalise what we had to do or intended to do, rather than the precise mechanics of what we actually did. Anne, the workshop instructor, notes that our culture is often about explanation and justification: it is always asking “why?” As a result, we are ill-suited to describing our behaviour without our judgement and assumption getting in the way. By borrowing techniques from psychoanalysis and neuro-linguistic programming, explicitation and DES circumvent that bad habit, forcing us to address with precision that which we usually overlook as a given.

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Since 2012, the psychologist Charles Fernyhough has used DES to run a project on inner voices at Durham University, exploring their development, diversity, function and impact. Following the work of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Fernyhough sees the inner voice as an internalisation of behaviours we observe children doing all the time: vocalising their plans, commentaries and thoughts, as well as perspectives acquired through dialogue with those around them. Just as external vocalisation helps the child think through courses of action and stabilise their plans, so the inner voice can help adults to manage thoughts and imitate dialogic social interactions. This allows problems to be examined from multiple perspectives – all within the self. Since inner speech is much more efficient than verbal speech (one researcher cited by Fernyhough suggests an average pace of 4,000 words per minute using inner speech – ten times faster than verbal), it may also aid accelerated thinking.

Other studies suggest that culture might play a significant role in shaping our inner voices. In 2014, the Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann discovered that the experience of voice-hearing amongst patients suffering from schizophrenia was dramatically altered by the cultural context in which they were situated. Whilst all patients interviewed in the study – from San Mateo (United States), Chennai (India) and Accra (Ghana) – reported both good and bad voices, the reception and character of the voices appeared to vary.

In San Mateo, voices tended to be more violent in nature and were generally experienced by patients as an incursion upon the integrity of the self. They were consequently more likely to view voice-hearing as a pathology with harmful effects on their lives. By contrast, “many participants in the Chennai and Accra samples insisted that their predominant or even only experience of the voices was positive.” These patients were more likely to build relationships with their voices, which offered advice, admonition, mundane instruction and sometimes wisdom.

In a striking case, one Chennai participant described a relationship with a voice which appeared to her as the Hindu god Hanuman: “half monkey, half man; he is a god and he wears a red dhoti and he wears a lot of jewellery. And he carries a big stick with a big round thing because he protects people from wicked people.” At first, the voice was unpleasant, issuing “horrible orders”, such as to drink water from the toilet, but in time became fun, “like her baby brother... she said that they have parties and throw pillows and she pinches his bottom”.

Luhrmann suggests that western culture’s emphasis on individual autonomy means that voice-hearing is more likely to be experienced as a violation of that autonomy, whereas “outside western culture, people are more likely to imagine mind and self as interwoven with others.” In these cultures, voices are interpreted simply as other, notional, people, whom one could not realistically expect to control – or as spirits with a legitimacy and authority of their own.

Fernyhough’s theory is that the auditory hallucinations experienced by many schizophrenics, and by the sufferers of other mental conditions, may be the consequence of an inability to recognise distorted fragments of one’s own inner dialogue. This would seem to correspond to other findings in the field of neuroscience, which demonstrate a breakdown of the so-called “predictive processing” capacity in schizophrenic sufferers. In such cases, the brain’s anticipatory modelling of sensory phenomena is disrupted, such that everyday experiences appear strange and full of inexplicable meaning. In these circumstances, inner voices might be encountered as alien, rather than self-directed, stimuli, losing the shield of innate familiarity which renders them imperceptible to the conscious mind. Auditory hallucinations like these may in fact be a more pronounced version of the same inner speech experienced by most healthy people. This in turn could indicate that Luhrmann’s findings, about the role culture plays in schizophrenic voices, may hold for commonplace inner voices as well.

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Study of the inner voice poses other, more complex, questions about the nature of thought itself. Unlike communication between humans, during self-talk we are not restricted to representational forms – whether verbal, written, signed or symbolic. Instead, we can experience thoughts, desires, epiphanies and emotions through a range of amorphous expressions: as inner movements and ambiences; as rhythms and fluctuating intensities; as kinaesthesis and synaesthesia. At this level of felt meaning, a revelation might be disclosed as a spark of intuition fireworking through the chest, or love as a pervasive atmosphere in the body, extending beyond the boundaries of the skin. Words make awkward moulds with which to fill such transmodal forms of experience, what T. S. Eliot called “the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being” and phenomologist Claire Petitmengin terms the “felt” or “source” dimension. It is only by addressing this level of experience that we can understand how we feel the texture of a notion before finding the language to describe it; or come to feel the resolution to a problem long after we have logically found its answer.

We cannot summon these feelings. Unlike the inner voice, we have little direct role in their creation. They are propositions, emerging from the wellspring of the unconscious, which we can only choose to attend or suppress, and may envelop us anyway. Yet if culture can influence the character of our inner voices, what implications might it also hold for this primordial territory of thought? How might learning to access this felt dimension – through explicitation, or meditation, or any other technology of the self – help us understand something more fundamental about the deep matter from which our subjectivities are composed?

Our inner lives are a reminder that our experiences never truly leave us, but percolate through to a reservoir of sensibility from which our notions, feelings and intuitions are constituted. To access such a world is to swim in the rich, ineffable ocean from which our self is given its geology, and our mind its ecology.

This article is from the New Humanist spring 2021 edition. Subscribe today.