The Voices Within by Charles Fernyhough review – why do we talk to ourselves?

We experience some kind of inner speech for at least a quarter of our waking lives. This helps some, while others set out to reduce the chatter. And how does it relate to God?

When you talk to yourself, who exactly is doing the talking, and who the listening? Walt Whitman wrote: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” But who are these multitudes? And who let them all in? Thus does language tempt us to posit a concert hall of homunculi within the head.

Charles Fernyhough’s fascinating and elegantly humane book is aware of the problem, but doesn’t attempt to solve it (doing so would probably require a true theory of consciousness). Instead he starts with the existence of what is technically termed “inner speech”, and sketches a theory of how it occurs. He inquires into its phenomenology (the feel of the subjective experience of talking to oneself), and he offers an intriguing developmental account of how we come to do it at all, and why it is so useful.

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