‘There are a lot of ways that you can start your day, but the most important way is with prayer.’ –Will Ferrell
Infants seem unable to ‘think to themselves’ and instead ‘talk to themselves‘ when solving problems, usually vocalising the most tricky or novel aspects of the situation. As we grow, we develop the ability to internalise this speech, and can eventually have a purely internal monologue.
Understanding inner speech is also important because it becomes distorted in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
People with psychosis can experience effects like ‘thought insertion’, where they experience external thoughts being inserted into their stream of consciousness, or ‘thought withdrawal’, where thoughts seem to be removed from the mind.
This suggests that there must be something that the brain uses to identify thoughts as self-generated, and that this perhaps breaks down in psychosis, so we can have the uncanny experience of having thoughts that don’t seem to be our own.
