Charles Fernyhough: 'The Voices in Our Heads' by Hearing the Voice

This podcast features a lecture by Professor Charles Fernyhough on 'The Voices in Our Heads'. It was recorded on Thursday 4 June 2015.

Abstract: A dominant psychological model of voice-hearing holds that it involves a disturbance to the process by which inner speech—our ordinary internal dialogue—is attributed to the self. Accounting for the phenomenological richness and varied pragmatics of voice-hearing requires, however, an equally nuanced conception of the functional and structural heterogeneity of the ordinary voices in our heads. Professor Fernyhough reviews some key recent findings on voice-hearing and inner speech, and explores their implications for three main areas of enquiry: the paradox of the apparent ubiquity of inner speech, the value of reading some forms of voice-hearing as inner dialogue rather than as atypical communicative acts, and the dynamic interaction in voice-hearing of inner speech and memory.