![]() ![]() ![]() At that point, by some mysterious means that I don’t completely control, I can tune in and hear the internal ‘broadcast’ of my piece of writing. It is only when I hear the words start up in my head that I can begin the actual drafting stage. At first, my writing projects are undramatised theoretical ideas and scenarios and are located on the pages of my notebooks. Having established, then, that word-thinking isn’t the only intelligent or effective form of thinking, I still suspect that most writers do experience thought in the form of words and that, like me, they hear a voice forming whole sentences inside their heads.Īs I mentioned at the start, my experience is that inner speech is the source of my writing. This shows that it is possible to solve problems without using language. Fedorenko arrived at this conclusion by carrying out fMRI scans of brain activity on people solving number puzzles and found that there was no activity in the language area of the brain. For instance, a study led by Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist and researcher at MIT’s McGovern Institute found that there was no correlation between rational processes and word-formed thoughts. The advent of modern technologies to study brain activity like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) opened up yet more ways to study inner speech. So, instead of hearing a voice saying, for instance, ‘I must buy bread’ someone might have a visual image of reaching out to a shelf of loaves or, if the thinker is deaf, seeing hands making sign language for ‘bread’. Others, however, think visually or in mood or colour. It’s now acknowledged that some people hear a strong, distinctive voice, or two or more dialoguing voices like the woman in this newspaper article who heard the fictional Italian couple from the Dolmio advertisements arguing in her head. (There’s an accessible summary of Hurlburt’s research here and some more on the same subject here.) The subjects were then questioned about the type of thoughts they reported and specifically whether they were heard as words or experienced in some other form. In the late 1990s, Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, asked people to wear a beeper and make a note of what they had been thinking about when it went off. Not everyone has inner speechįor a long time it was assumed that people in general, in opposition to animals, thought with words and language but this is now known not to be the case. My hunch is that most wordsmiths are writing down what they ‘hear’ in their minds and that writers are highly likely to experience thinking in the form of words and sentences. The clinical research is fascinating, though beyond my skills as an arts (post)graduate to fully grasp or evaluate, so this article will be mainly concerned with my personal experience of inner speech as a writer. These are forms of inner monologue, a phenomenon that research psychologists have been studying for decades. In other words, I hear that first sentence being spoken inside my mind.Īlso, on any given day, I can hear my own voice silently telling me to get on with things, remember certain other things and going on and on about a load of other rubbish that we won’t go into here. It means I am ready to stop planning and start writing. Sometimes I wake up with the first line of a story, article or novel playing in my head. Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash ![]()
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