Voices in Your Head

Summary

Radiolab: “Voices in Your Head”

Host: Jad Abumrad
Guests: Charles Fernyhough, Molly Martin, Marcus Macias
Date: September 8, 2010
Episode Theme:
This episode of Radiolab ventures into the mysterious nature of the voices we hear inside our heads—tracing the development of internal dialogue from early childhood, exploring the psychology and neurology of “hearing voices,” and investigating what this says about thought and the boundaries of the self.

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Main Theme & Purpose

Radiolab explores the boundary between thinking and language by starting with a provocative question: Do you truly think before you have words? The episode leans into the “voices in your head” theory, moving from the roots of self-talk in early childhood to the phenomenon of hearing other voices—sometimes disturbing, sometimes comforting—inside one’s mind.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins of Thought and Inner Speech

(01:09—06:08)

• Vygotsky’s Theory:
  Developmental psychologist Charles Fernyhough introduces the foundational idea from Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky: Thought emerges from external dialogue before it becomes internalized as “private speech.”
  • Fernyhough: “Think about a small child who’s sitting down solving a puzzle...” (03:37)
  • Children narrate actions aloud, guided by others (parent, teacher); over time, this self-talk migrates inward and silent.
• Stages of Speech Development:
  1. External dialogue with caregiver (parent helps solve a puzzle).
  2. Private speech: Child narrates to self aloud (“Put the ball in the box…”).
  3. Internal speech: This narration becomes silent inner thought after social cues encourage children not to talk aloud.
• Memorable takeaway:
  • Abumrad: “Those thoughts...began as a crowd.” (05:28)
  • Fernyhough: “The logic of it is that all our thinking is full of other people's voices.” (05:59)

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2. Hearing Other Voices: The Experience and Its Origins

(06:08—12:08)

• The Hearing Voices Network in Denver:
  • Jad shares a report from producer Pat Walters who met Molly Martin, psychotherapist and support group leader, and Marcus Macias, a voice hearer.
  • Marcus’s Experience:
    • Voices began in young adulthood, often emerging from environmental white noise.
    • Initially supportive (“be careful, watch out”), but sometimes distressing or hostile (“deep demonic”).
    • Marcus: “I first started hearing them 20 years ago...when I was 20.” (07:03)
    • He has learned to manage the voices with self-care.
  • Prevalence:
    • 5–10% of the general population have experienced hearing someone else’s voice in their head at some point.
• Scientific Perspective:
  • Fernyhough’s take: Misattribution is key; it’s the brain mistaking self-generated private speech for someone else’s speech.
    • Fernyhough: “You get mistaken to be from someone else.” (08:45)
  • Experiment Description:
    • People with schizophrenia (vs. controls) more often misidentify their electronically altered voices as coming from strangers when the pitch is lowered.
    • Abumrad: “What the experimenters found is that most people, most non–voice hearing...made some mistakes. The voice hearers made considerably more mistakes.” (10:04)

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3. When Voices Are Comforting

(10:27—12:08)

• Reframing “Hearing Voices”:
  • Voices aren’t always distressing; they can serve as a source of comfort, echoing caring relationships from the past.
  • Molly Martin’s story: A woman who’d witnessed her father’s murder heard his voice for years, offering guidance and reassurance.
    • Molly Martin: “Every morning when she would wake up, he would tell her to make her bed...if she wanted to use drugs again, her father would say to her things like, ‘Don’t do it, you know it’s bad for you.’” (11:12)
  • The phenomenon is framed as “frozen” positive self-talk, internally preserving a supportive relationship.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Charles Fernyhough on children’s thought:
  • “I don’t think very young children do think.” (02:28)
• On the crowd inside your head:
  • Abumrad: “Those thoughts began as a crowd.” (05:28)
  • Fernyhough: “All our thinking is full of other people’s voices.” (05:59)
• On voice-hearing and misattribution:
  • Fernyhough: “That’s not me, that’s not myself. That didn’t come from me.” (10:18)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:09 — Episode Introduction & Thesis
• 02:07 — Dr. Charles Fernyhough introduces Vygotsky
• 03:37–05:28 — Child development & internalization of thought
• 05:59 — “All our thinking is full of other people's voices”
• 06:22–07:56 — Molly Martin & Marcus Macias: the experience of hearing voices
• 08:45–10:27 — Science and experiment: misattribution of voices
• 10:59–11:51 — Positive side: comfort from internal voices

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Overall Tone & Style

The episode is curious, analytical, and human-centered, blending insights from child psychology and cognitive science with deeply personal testimonies. Jad’s narration moves fluidly between theory and lived experience, and the guests’ openness grounds abstract concepts in real-world emotion.

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Summary Takeaway

“Voices in Your Head” traces the roots of thought to our earliest social exchanges, showing how the voices of others become the voices inside us—and, in some cases, are experienced as literally someone else. The episode ultimately suggests that the boundaries between “my inner voice” and “another’s voice” are far blurrier—and more meaningful—than we might think.

Transcript

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. Drum WNY T, C C npr. Hey, I'm Jan Abumra. This is Radiolab, the podcast. Robert. Robert is not here. He is away. So it's just me, unfortunately. But I will do my best. So in this podcast, I want to dig a little deeper into something that we ran into in our last new full episode, which was on words. Caper, eagle, clock, green barrel, Ca. I look at hat, colonel. Door. Door. So, yeah, we did an hour on the power of words, and we ended up talking with this guy. Hello? Hello, is this Dr. Fernyhough?

[Charles Fernyhough]

Hi, can you hear me now?

[Jad Abumrad]

Named Charles Fernyhough.

[Charles Fernyhough]

I'm a writer and developmental psychologist from Durham University.

[Jad Abumrad]

And we were having this conversation with him about what happens to young kids when they learn words. Orange juice, apple, doj. Thinking like that, you know, like what happens to the way they see the world? And in the middle of the chat, he said something kind of radical, which was that before they have words, I.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Don'T think very young children do think.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like think, period. Was there a period at the end of that sentence? You don't think that they think, period?

[Charles Fernyhough]

I don't think they think in the way that I want to call thinking. Alright, which is a bit of a cheat.

[Jad Abumrad]

But let me say, what he meant is that thinking, as he defines it, is basically just words sounding Silently in your head. And before you have those words in your head, you can't think. This is a controversial idea, which we debated back and forth. But for the next few minutes, we're not going to debate it. We're going to jump into it farther. Because whether or not you think it's true, if you follow the idea all the way through as we're about to do, it does lead you to some interesting places. So, first of all, this whole idea, says Charles, goes back to this Russian guy, Russian psychologist, named Vygotsky, Lev Vygotsk.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Vygotsky.

[Jad Abumrad]

And is he a contemporary dude?

[Charles Fernyhough]

No, he died in the 30s. He was active.

[Jad Abumrad]

Anyhow, he came up with this idea, this really interesting notion of how kids learn to think. And it all begins, he said, on the outside.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Think about a small child who's sitting down solving a puzzle.

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Does that look like it goes somewhere?

[Jad Abumrad]

It goes here.

[Charles Fernyhough]

You're sitting down and you're working together on a puzzle, and all you've got to do is get these shapes into this board in the right kind of order. If you watch any kid with their parent anywhere in the world doing this kind of thing, you'll see them thinking together.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, that doesn't have an edge.

[Charles Fernyhough]

The child, for example, picks up a picture of a boat and says, you know, where am I going to put this boat piece? And then the mum says, well, have a look at the shape. And then the kids looks at the shape and says, oh, it's got that pointy bit there. And the mum says, right, well, can you see anywhere on the board that.

[Michaels Shop Announcer]

Has a pointy bit right there?

[Charles Fernyhough]

And so on.

[Jad Abumrad]

According to Vygotsky, this is the beginning of thinking, this kind of dialogue. And at this point, it's completely external. It's all happening in that space between the child and her mother.

[Michaels Shop Announcer]

We don't know where it goes yet.

[Jad Abumrad]

But if you put it together and.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Only over time does it become internalized.

[Jad Abumrad]

And how that happens, Vygotsky thought, is that as the child gets older, she'll start to take on the dialogue herself. She'll start to talk to herself.

[Charles Fernyhough]

This is the stage we call private speech.

[Jad Abumrad]

We've all seen kids do this, right, where they narrate every single thing they're doing. Put the ball in the box, take the ball out of the box.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Now what then happens is a few years further down the line, these kids.

[Jad Abumrad]

Who are narrating everything they're doing, then go to school, and the teachers tell them, shh, don't talk out loud.

[Charles Fernyhough]

So they kind of get the message that they need to start doing this internally.

[Jad Abumrad]

So they start to whisper to themselves out loud, and then eventually they whisper to themselves silently because the words are now in their head. And that.

[Charles Fernyhough]

That, according to Vygotsky's theory, that is thinking.

[Jad Abumrad]

Only then, he says, is the child having a thought. Now forgetting the particulars for a second. The main point here is that those thoughts that are humming along silently in your mind, those thoughts began as a duo with your mom, or a trio with your mom and your dad, or a quartet with your mom and your dad and your sister. In other words, those thoughts began as a crowd.

[Charles Fernyhough]

The logic of it is that all our thinking is full of other people's voices.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, most of us know that the voices in our head are just us. But what got us interested in this whole Vygotsky thing is that maybe this idea has something to say to people who actually do hear other voices in their head.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Molly. Hi. Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming up here. Yeah, no problem. As we were thinking about this, it just so happened that our producer, Pat Walters, had taken a trip to Denver, had a little time on his hands, did a little research, and ended up tracking down this lady.

[Molly Martin]

And I'm Molly Martin, and I am a psychotherapist, and I run the Hearing Voices Network of Denver.

[Jad Abumrad]

They met up at this hotel. Molly works with people who hear voices in their heads, and she runs a support group for people to share their experiences. The day Pat was there, she introduced him to a fellow named Marcus.

[Marcus Macias]

Hi, I'm Marcus Macias. I'm a voice hearer myself. I hear voices so I could kind of share my experiences. And just.

[Molly Martin]

Can you kind of tell me this story of.

[Marcus Macias]

Well, yeah, you know, I first started hearing them 20 years ago, so I've been hearing them for 20 years. And so I'm 40 now. So it was when I was 20, when I first started hearing them.

[Jad Abumrad]

When it started for him, he says the voices would kind of materialize out of background noise, like the hum of a refrigerator or the whir of a fan.

[Marcus Macias]

When I first started hearing them, they were kind of guiding a little bit, you know, the guiding voices.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like, he says, initially, the voices would help him out. Like if he was in an argument and about to say something mean, the.

[Marcus Macias]

Voices would warn him, be careful, watch out. They say things like that, you know, kind of like they're helpful. But then there was, like, other negative ones.

[Jad Abumrad]

He's had periods in his life, he says, where the voices have even turned deep demonic.

[Marcus Macias]

Yeah. So it. That was intense. Things are a lot better now, though. See, I'm learning how to manage them, you know, because I'm taking care of myself, you know, so.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so why do we bring this up? Well, clearly, for a lot of people like Marcus, hearing voices involves some psychiatric issues, which sometimes for people can be serious, really serious. But here's the weird thing. The experience of hearing somebody else's voice in your own head is actually way more common than you would think. Surveys have been done about this, and the number seems to be between 5 and 10% of normal, healthy people have that experience or have had it at one time. Which brings us back to this Vygotsky situation. What might be happening in those cases, at least, if you ask Charles, is a kind of misattribution of your own inner voice. Those voices in your head, which are. You get mistaken to be from someone else.

[Charles Fernyhough]

A nice, simple, elegant demonstration of this is that you take some people who are hearing voices, people with, in this case, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who hear voices, and you sit them down at a microphone with some headphones on, and you show them some words on a screen, just flash up some words on a screen, and their task is to repeat the words, to read the words out loud.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, if you can imagine, these subjects are seeing these words on the screen, they're repeating them into the mic, and they've got headphones on, so they're actually hearing their own voices as they're doing. This trick is the researchers have rigged it so that the voice in their headphones, their voice actually gets lowered just a little bit right before they hear it. What that means is that if I were to say, hello, my name is Jad, what I'd hear in my headphones is, hello, my name is Jada.

[Charles Fernyhough]

And as you know, if you lower the pitch of the voice by a few semitones, it becomes much harder to.

[Jad Abumrad]

Recognize it, because when I'm speaking in this lowered voice, you can still kind of recognize it's me, but it's a little bit hard. Now, what the experimenters found is that most people, most non voice hearing, quote unquote, healthy people, when they were presented with the sound of their own voice lowered like this, and then asked, is this you? Is it a stranger, or are you not sure? They did make mistakes, Some mistakes.

[Charles Fernyhough]

The voice hearers made considerably more mistakes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Not only that, when they heard their voices lowered, they would very, very often say, that voice is coming from a stranger.

[Charles Fernyhough]

That's not me, that's not myself. That didn't come from me. Now, of course, that is potentially a frightening experience. That's potentially a very distressing experience.

[Jad Abumrad]

But not always, because let's just imagine Vygotsky was right, that the internal voice of our thoughts is actually a blend of all of those external voices from our childhood. So in other words, our mom, our dad, our sisters, brothers, whatever, they're all in there in some way. And that can actually be a comfort. Back at that hotel in Denver, Molly Martin had told Pat about a woman who had seen her father murdered.

[Molly Martin]

He was shot in front of her. She was, it was a robbery and it was, I believe, at a convenience store.

[Jad Abumrad]

And for years afterwards, she says, this woman would hear her dad's voice.

[Molly Martin]

She would tell us that every morning when she would wake up, he would tell her to make her bed and he would remind her throughout the day to do more positive things. And if she was doing something, for example, if she wanted, she was a drug addict and if she wanted to use drugs again, her father would say to her things like, don't do it, you know, it's bad for you. This is a horrible, you know, more looking after her. I think she might have been 11 when he was killed, but it was a good relationship during that time.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yeah.

[Molly Martin]

And then it just kind of like stuck.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Like frozen.

[Molly Martin]

Yeah, I think so. I think so.

[Jad Abumrad]

If you want to read some more about hearing voices, you can do that on our website, Radiolab.org thanks to Charles Fernie Ho, who wrote a great book called A Thousand Days of Wonder. Also thanks to Molly Martin, Marcus Macias, Stella Story and Carrie Donahue and Joanna and Alex Lau. They made the homemade sonic ID that you heard at the very beginning. Okay, so before we go, just want to let you know we have a new [e-mail] it's new design, it's all organized and if you go to the site, in fact, I'm gonna do it right now. Alright, here we go. Radiolab.org if you go there and you scroll down to the middle, you'll see a whole bunch of frightening looking people wearing T shirts. That is the Radiolab staff, myself and Robert included. And you will all see us wearing a T shirt depicting a goat standing on a cow's back. This is a very meaningful image to us, perhaps to some of you. And if you just click a little bit more and you just follow the link to chopshopstore.com you will see that we. Oh, what a cute baby. We have toddler sizes. I have a toddler, I'm gonna buy one. For my toddler. I'm gonna buy 70. In fact, here we go. Seven, zero. All right, I'm sorry. So I should sign off. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening. Catch you in two weeks. Hello. My name is Christopher Caldwell from Chico, California. I'm a Radiolab listener, and the Radiolab podcast is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation. End of message.

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