Book review of Charles Fernyhough

Charles Fernyhough:
"The Voices Within" (2016)
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This lightweight book, written by British psychologist Charles Fernyhough, is a very superficial introduction to the topic of thinking. The relationship between language and thought has been the subject of much discussion in philosophy, biology and psychology. Fernyhough's book focuses on the silent thoughts that feel like speech, whether uttered in our own voices or in other people's voices, but "uttered" only inside the mind. There is little content because many pages are filled with autobiographical details or mundane descriptions (for example, we learn that a colleague is "a tall man in his late sixties, with gray hair and spectacles"). The introduction claims that "psychologists are demonstrating that inner speech help s to regulate our behavior", but you won't find any "demonstration", only a collection of dubious psychological experiments. Many experiments use a method developed by Russ Hurlburt, “Descriptive Experience Sampling” (DES), for training people to analyze their own inner communications. Whenever neuroscience is invoked, the results are even more suspicious: the author's team finds neural activity in a region "near" some other region and concludes that there must be some kind of connection. The research methods (described at length) are hardly convincing. He himself writes that some of these experiments demonstrated (at best) correlations, not causation. Out of these dubious experiments, the author concludes that inner speech is best viewed as a dialogue among multiple selves that populate the mind (quote: “a solitary mind is actually a chorus”... " we are the cacophony of our mental voices"). This dialogue helps us "make sense of who we are". He calls it "dialogical thinking". Each of us is simultaneously the author, the protagonist and the narrator of the story (if there are multiple selves in the mind, it's not clear who is "simultaneously the author, the protagonist and the narrator"). He quotes from Joyce, Beckett and even Van Gogh's letters and seems to take them as scientific evidence for his theory. He mentions the theories of George Herber Mead and Charles Sanders Pierce that thought is born out of socialization, to confirm his hypothesis that inside a mind there is an "interplay between different perspectives on reality". Obviously, this amounts to little more than hearsay.

The chapters deal with various forms of inner speech: silent speech, auditory hallucinations, schizophrenia, and therefore we are presented with a parade of medieval mystics and people who claim to have heard the voice of God. Auditory hallucinations, in particular, may simply be twisted forms of memory, related to events of the past. Schizophrenia is a special case of the cacophony of selves.

Along the way the book pays tribute to pioneers like Wilhelm Wundt and especially Lev Vygotsky (apparently the first one to posit that children use private speech as a tool for regulating their behavior and that inner speech evolves from internalizing external speech) as well as to contemporary scholars who are studying the field: Irwin Feinberg, Chris Frith, Richard Bentall, Wilder Penfield, Philip McGuire, Judith Ford, Iris Sommer, Marjorie Taylor, Marius Romme, his graduate student Simon McCarthy-Jones, Angela Woods, Alain Morin, Tanya Luhrmann, Norbert Wiley, etc. And we learn of the existence of the Hearing Voices Movement. I was happy to see Julian Jaynes rediscovered because i think he was on to something in his analysis of how human consciousness changed over the centuries. There is also a one-sentence mention of mindfulness meditation.

The author believes that inner speech is beneficial for many reasons, some of them trivial (if you think silently, predators can't hear you) and some of them more complex (some form of psychological healing and even some form of morality). Occasionally it sounds all trivial: he speculates that inner speech may help memory, but don't we all study by repeating silently what we learned?

The literary trivia are sometimes more interesting that the psychological speculations. We learn for example that people used to read aloud, not silently, and the first documented case of someone reading silently is that of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, mentioned by St Augustine in his Confessions. We also learn that many writers claim to hear the voices of their characters.

The author mentions at the beginning that some people don't report inner speech at all, and the book never answers the simple question: "what's different about them? are they zombies?"

By the end of the book, you are likely to be still confused about the difference between "thinking" and "inner speech". And really nothing in this book amounts to a scientific conclusion. It's all tentative, speculative and only occasionally intriguing.