Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share What is the voice inside my head?
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
What is the voice inside my head?
Many of us experience an inner voice: we silently talk to ourselves as we go about our daily lives. CrowdScience listener Fredrick has been wondering about the science behind this interior dialogue.
We hear from psychologists researching our inner voice and discover that it’s something that begins in early childhood. Presenter Caroline Steel meets Russell Hurlburt, a pioneering scientist who devised a method of researching this - and volunteers to monitor her own inner speech to figure out what’s going on in her mind.
She discovers that speech is just part of what’s going on in our heads, much of our inner world in fact doesn’t involve language at all but includes images, sensations and feelings.
Caroline talks to psychologist Charles Fernyhough, who explains one theory for how we develop an interior dialogue as young children: first speaking out loud to ourselves and then learning to keep that conversation going silently. No one really knows how this evolved, but keeping our thoughts quiet may have been a way of staying safe from predators and enemies.
Using MRI scanning, Charles and Russell have peered inside people’s brains to understand this interior voice and found something surprising: inner dialogue appears to have more in common with listening than with speaking.
Caroline also has an encounter with a robot that has been programmed to dialogue with itself. Which leads us to some deep questions: is our inner voice part of what makes us human, and if so, what are the consequences of robots developing this ability? Scientist Arianna Pipitone describes it as a step towards artificial consciousness.
Featuring:
Professor Charles Fernyhough, University of Durham, UK
Professor Russell Hurlburt, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA
Dr Arianna Pipitone, University of Palermo, Italy
Presenter: Caroline Steel
Producer: Jo Glanville
Editor: Cathy Edwards
Sound design: Julian Wharton
Studio manager: Donald MacDonald
Production co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano
(Image: Mixed Race boy looking up Credit: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc via Getty Images)
View all episodes
By BBC World Service
4.7
434434 ratings
Many of us experience an inner voice: we silently talk to ourselves as we go about our daily lives. CrowdScience listener Fredrick has been wondering about the science behind this interior dialogue.
We hear from psychologists researching our inner voice and discover that it’s something that begins in early childhood. Presenter Caroline Steel meets Russell Hurlburt, a pioneering scientist who devised a method of researching this - and volunteers to monitor her own inner speech to figure out what’s going on in her mind.
She discovers that speech is just part of what’s going on in our heads, much of our inner world in fact doesn’t involve language at all but includes images, sensations and feelings.
Caroline talks to psychologist Charles Fernyhough, who explains one theory for how we develop an interior dialogue as young children: first speaking out loud to ourselves and then learning to keep that conversation going silently. No one really knows how this evolved, but keeping our thoughts quiet may have been a way of staying safe from predators and enemies.
Using MRI scanning, Charles and Russell have peered inside people’s brains to understand this interior voice and found something surprising: inner dialogue appears to have more in common with listening than with speaking.
Caroline also has an encounter with a robot that has been programmed to dialogue with itself. Which leads us to some deep questions: is our inner voice part of what makes us human, and if so, what are the consequences of robots developing this ability? Scientist Arianna Pipitone describes it as a step towards artificial consciousness.
Featuring:
Professor Charles Fernyhough, University of Durham, UK
Professor Russell Hurlburt, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA
Dr Arianna Pipitone, University of Palermo, Italy
Presenter: Caroline Steel
Producer: Jo Glanville
Editor: Cathy Edwards
Sound design: Julian Wharton
Studio manager: Donald MacDonald
Production co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano
(Image: Mixed Race boy looking up Credit: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc via Getty Images)
More shows like CrowdScience
View all
Global News Podcast
7,727 Listeners
More or Less
893 Listeners
Newshour
1,068 Listeners
In Our Time
5,478 Listeners
The Documentary Podcast
1,816 Listeners
6 Minute English
1,781 Listeners
Learning English Conversations
1,041 Listeners
The Infinite Monkey Cage
2,077 Listeners
The Naked Scientists Podcast
606 Listeners
Health Check
90 Listeners
The Food Chain
344 Listeners
Discovery
976 Listeners
BBC Inside Science
404 Listeners
Science Weekly
426 Listeners
Curious Cases
822 Listeners
The Inquiry
738 Listeners
The Life Scientific
232 Listeners
Science In Action
333 Listeners
Unexpected Elements
359 Listeners
People Fixing the World
244 Listeners
You're Dead to Me
3,226 Listeners
Americast
741 Listeners
The world, the universe and us
113 Listeners
The Bomb
1,041 Listeners