Voice-talk

Hearing voices by definition involves language, whatever a voice hearer, a psychiatrist or a researcher decide that voices really are: messages from supernatural beings, re-experiences of traumatic events, or psychological errors. But what kinds of speech are voices? We have already presented the arguments of Seglas and Janet (Chapter 4), who saw verbal hallucinations as voice hearers' own automatic inner speech. More recently, Gould (1949) reported that she amplified sub-vocal speech in individuals hearing voices, and found that the reported content of verbal hallucinations corresponded closely to that of sub-vocalisations. Green and Preston (1981) recorded the electrical activity from lips (of which voice hearers are not aware and which they cannot control directly), related it to the reports of verbal hallucinations, and found a reasonable correspondence between the two (cf. Cacioppo and Petty, 1981). Recent positron emission tomography studies indicate that during verbal hallucinations the areas of brain usually involved in processing speech are active (Cleghorn et al., 1992; McGuire et al., 1993). Suzuki et al. (1993) reported that during verbal hallucinations, a left superior temporal cortex—a speech perception area—is activated. McGuire et al. (1995, 1996) reported that when voice hearers imagine other people speaking, the same areas of the brain are activated as when they hear voices. But since verbal hallucinations are not experienced as one's own inner speech they have in addition been construed to be impaired inner speech. Hoffman (1986) and Frith (1992, 1995), for instance, explained them as inner speech which is wrongly attributed to external sources. In Hoffman's account such misattributions were a function of pre-conscious perceptual inferences, and Frith explained them by reference to lesions of the neuro-cognitive internal monitoring device. ¹ Looking inside the brains of individuals hearing voices, McGuire et al. (1995) reported a reduced activity in the areas of cortex thought to be ‘concerned with the generation and monitoring of inner speech’ (‘the left middle temporal gyrus’ and ‘the rostral supplementary motor area’). Experimental neurophysiological studies therefore also suggest that inner speech and hearing voices are related.