Still, scientists are grappling with a lot of uncertainty.īut what causes inner speech? A researcher at the University of British Columbia, Mark Scott found that there is a brain signal called " corollary discharge" that helps us distinguish between sensory experiences we create internally versus those from outside stimuli – and this signal plays a big role in internal speech. In a 2018 study of just five subjects, the scanner showed that the area of the brain associated with certain topics lit up when subjects said they were thinking about those things, providing a physical link to the abstractions of thoughts themselves. Hurlburt has worked with other researchers, like Charles Fernyhough, to use DES questioning while subjects were inside MRI scanners. His study showed that subjects talked to themselves inwardly about 26 percent of the time they were sampled but many never experienced inner speech while others had it 75 percent of the time (the median percentage was 20 percent.) "And in the course of doing that, you and I together I guess you would say, we decide, 'well, I thought I had inner speech, but I really don't.'" When he asked them for the specific words or sentences, many came up blank. In his research, he found that most subjects struggled to articulate the way they were talking to themselves. He says one key takeaway was that, "You can't expect a good answer on the first day." Essentially, it takes a day or two of DES training before people to find ways to focus on and express what they're experiencing in a given moment. Were they visualizing something? Experiencing a tactile sensation? Feeling an emotion? This line of inquiry is called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). Later, researchers asked the students questions to better understand how the students were thinking when the beepers sounded. This was intentional, so that the research subjects would forget that they had them (and thus, not contaminate their thinking processes with thoughts about the experiment). They were instructed to try and clarify what was happening in their minds at that instant. Each time the beeper went off, he asked subjects to make notes about their experiences in that moment.Īs students went about their days, the beepers would go off at random times. So, Hurlburt, who has an engineering background, designed and patented a device that beeped at irregular intervals. He thought beepers of some kind might work, but back then, there were no cell phones or pagers. "The object of my research is not to explore inner speech or inner monologue or whatever you want to call it, but to explore your experience as it actually is," says Hurlburt. As a graduate student in the early '70s, he began wondering how scientists could investigate subjects' pristine inner experiences, experiences that are in your present consciousness, before your brain has tried to make sense of them or assigned them some sort of interpretation. Regarding the viral kerfuffle over the inner speech haves and have nots, he chuckles a bit and says he frequently hears people claim that they have an ever-present inner monologue – but his experiments show that this is not always true.īut rather than argue with them, he says, "Well, let's find out." For decades, he's been doing experiments on people's inner experiences, their thoughts, feelings and sensations. Russell Hurlburt is a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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