[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Paper.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Eagle.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Clock.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Green.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Barrel.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Cat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Cat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Kernel.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Door.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Door.]

JAD: So yeah, we did an hour on the power of words, and we ended up talking with this guy.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Hello?

SOREN WHEELER: Hello, is this Dr. Fernyhough?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Hi, can you hear me now?

JAD: Named Charles Fernyhough.

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

JAD: And we were having this conversation with him about what happens to young kids when they learn words.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Orange juice.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Apple.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: OJ.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Thinking.]

JAD: Like that, you know? 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 ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I don't think very young children do think.

JAD: 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, all right? Which is a bit of a cheat. But let me say ...

JAD: 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 gonna debate it. We're gonna 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.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Russian psychologist.

JAD: Named ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Vygotsky.

JAD: Lev Vygotsky. And is he a contemporary dude?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: No, he died in the '30s. He was active in ...

JAD: Anyhow, he came up with this idea. It's a 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Does that look like it goes somewhere?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: No, 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 gonna put this boat piece?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Where can I put this boat piece?]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: 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 has a pointy bit?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Right there.]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And so on.

JAD: According to Vygotsky, this is the beginning of thinking, this kind of dialogue. And at this point ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: It's completely external.

JAD: It's all happening in that space between the child and her mother.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: We don't know where it goes yet. But if you put it together ...]

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And only over time does it become internalized.

JAD: 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: 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 ...

JAD: These kids 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: 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: And that, according to Vygotsky's theory, that is thinking.

JAD: 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: 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.

MOLLY MARTIN: Pat?

PAT WALTERS: Yeah. Molly, hi.

MOLLY MARTIN: Hi, nice to meet you.

PAT: You too. Thanks for coming up here.

JAD: 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: 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 kinda share my experiences.

PAT: Can you kind of tell me the 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: 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? A guiding voice?

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

MARCUS MACIAS: "Be careful. Watch out." They say things like that, you know? Kind of like they were helpful. But then there was, like, other negative ones.

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

MARCUS MACIAS: Yeah, so that was intense. Things are a lot better now, though. You see, I'm learning how to manage them, you know? Because I'm taking care of myself.

JAD: 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 and five and ten percent 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: There's 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: Now if you can imagine, these subjects are seeing these words on a 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, [lowered] "Hello. My name is Jad."

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

JAD: [lowered] Because when I'm speaking in this lowered voice, you can still kind of recognize it's me, but it's a little bit harder.

JAD: 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 [lowered], 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: Really?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah.

JAD: 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: But not always. Because let's just imagine that 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 ...

MOLLY MARTIN: About a woman ...

JAD: ... who had seen her father murdered.

MOLLY MARTIN: He was shot in front of her. It was a robbery, and it was, I believe, at a convenience store.

JAD: 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. If she was doing something, for example—she wanted—she was a drug addict, and if she wanted to use drugs again, her father would say to her things like, you know, "Don't do it," you know, "It's bad for you." You know, more looking after her. I think she might've been 11 when he was killed, but it was a good relationship during that time.

PAT: Yeah. And then it just kind of like stuck with her.

MOLLY MARTIN: Yeah, I think so. I think so.

JAD: If you want to read some more about hearing voices, you can do that on our website, Radiolab.org. Thanks to Charles Fernyhough, who wrote a great book called A Thousand Days of Wonder. Also thanks to Molly Martin, Marcus Macias, Stella Stori and Carrie Donahue and Joanna and Alex Lau. They made the homemade sonic ID that you heard at the very beginning.

JAD: Okay, so before we go, just want to let you know we have a new website at Radiolab.org. It's a new design. It's all organized. And if you go to the site—in fact, I'm gonna do it right now, all right, 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 you go, 70. All right, I'm gonna make this purchase, so I should sign off. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening. Catch you in two weeks.

[LISTENER: 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.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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