The Voices Within - Charles Fernyhough discusses hearing voices and inner speech with Dr Raj Persaud

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and google play store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links



The Voices Within





The Voices Within is a book about the voices in our heads. It is published by Basic Books in the US and by Profile Books/Wellcome Collection in the UK.

The Voices Within was picked as a top neuroscience book of 2016 by Forbes and a science book of the year by the Observer and ABC. It was chosen as a top spring science book by Nature and selected as a summer reading pick in the Guardian and Times Higher Education. It was the subject of an essay-review in the New Yorker.

I spoke about the themes of the book on the Diane Rehm Show, and discussed them in this Q&A with The Atlantic. These pieces for TIME Ideas and the LA Times explore the benefits of talking to yourself. I spoke about these ideas on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week; you can listen again here. You can also see me speaking about the themes of the book in this talk for 5x15 and in this Royal Institution lecture. The book featured in a Guardian Books podcast. An abridged extract from the book was published by BBC Future.

[azlanfoodscapes]

This internal dialogue is merely thinking - Socrates said thinking is the talking of the soul to itself. I also have conversations with avatars of person I know. For example, if I have a philosophical issue to resolve, I would start my internal dialogue with the question: how would Bertrand Russell solve this problem. Or Aristotle, or Socrates, or Plato. Its not like I’m channeling these people - there is no reception of external communication. It merely shifts the perspective from me to how the best expert I know would solve the problem and thence new insights emerge - one that would not emerge had I not posed the question to my avatar of the expert concerned.

In the dream state, I could lucid dream and orchestrate a conference with simultaneous conversation with several of these avatars.

By avatar I mean an icon that represents all I know of the personality involved - its the sum of all my memory of what I know of that person. The sum of neuro-peptides associated with that character.

Intuition, on the other hand, is not only internal - sometimes I seem to “pluck” ideas and insights out of thin air. Deepak Chopra explains this by saying that space is mostly empty space - the space between atoms that make up matter. But this empty space is not one of nothingness but is a void filled with information. We can access this information by stilling the mind - to go to that place between thoughts. When we stop listening to our internal dialogue, we tune in to this universal depository of all information, all knowledge. This idea is not to download everything available there - the throughput and size of the information is infinite and trying to do so sent one into a impossible state - but to tease out and receive the information needed for solving a particular problem.

I don’t know of many people who think about thinking the way I do. Twenty years ago, I learnt and mastered Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and upped the efficiency of my thinking. Its since before second nature to think in this way…

[weekek]

It would be very interesting to study people who have D.I.D (dissociative identity disorder) their experiences could be different from people with no mental health problem, or maybe it's more similar that I presume... Kinda different from schizoprenia but sometimes as hard to understand "who's talking" ...