Chatter

by Ethan Kross

  dawn of civilization: Halvor Eifring, “Spontaneous Thought in Contemplative Traditions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-Wandering, Creativity, and Dreaming, ed. K. Christoff and K. C. R. Fox (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 529–538. Eifring conceptualizes spontaneous thought as a kind of mind-wandering, which, as noted above (see “when we slip away”), often involves interior monologue. More broadly, the idea that inner speech plays a prominent role in religion throughout history has been discussed by several scholars. Christopher C. H. Cook notes, for instance, “the attribution of voices to divine sources in contemporary religious experience is indisputable”: Christopher C. H. Cook, Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine (London: Routledge, 2019). For additional discussion, see Daniel B. Smith, Muses, Madmen and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity (New York: Penguin Books, 2007); T. M. Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted, “The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity,” American Anthropologist 112 (2010): 66–78; Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2016); and Douglas J. Davies, “Inner Speech and Religious Traditions,” in Theorizing Religion: Classical and Contemporary Debates, ed. James A. Beckford and John Walliss (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 211–223.

  one in ten people: K. Maijer et al., “Auditory Hallucinations Across the Lifespan: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Medicine 48 (2018): 879–888.

  vocal impairments: Ron Netsell and Klaas Bakker, “Fluent and Dysfluent Inner Speech of Persons Who Stutter: Self-Report,” Missouri State University Unpublished Manuscript (2017). For discussion, see M. Perrone-Bertolotti et al., “What Is That Little Voice Inside My Head? Inner Speech Phenomenology, Its Role in Cognitive Performance, and Its Relation to Self-Monitoring,” Behavioural Brain Research 261 (2014): 220–239, and Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. There is, however, evidence that people who stutter make errors during internal speech just as they do when they talk out loud when asked to perform tongue-twisters, “Investigating the Inner Speech of People Who Stutter: Evidence for (and Against) the Covert Repair Hypothesis,” Journal of Communication Disorders 44 (2011): 246–260.

  silently signing to themselves: Deaf people who use sign language “talk to themselves” too, but the way their inner speech manifests shares both similarities and differences with hearing populations. Margaret Wilson and Karen Emmorey, “Working Memory for Sign Language: A Window into the Architecture of the Working Memory System,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2 (1997): 121–130; Perrone-Bertolotti et al., “What Is That Little Voice Inside My Head?”; and Helene Loevenbruck et al., “A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Inner Language: To Predict and to Hear, See, Feel,” in Inner Speech: New Voices, ed. P. Langland-Hassan and Agustin Vicente (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 131–167. One brain imaging study found, for example, that the same regions of the left prefrontal cortex that supports inner speech in hearing populations becomes activated when profoundly deaf individuals were asked to silently complete a sentence (for example, “I am…”) using inner signing. Philip K. McGuire et al., “Neural Correlates of Thinking in Sign Language,” NeuroReport 8 (1997): 695–698. These findings are broadly consistent with research demonstrating an overlap between the brain systems that support spoken and signed language usage in hearing and deaf populations. To understand how signed and spoken language can share a common neural basis, it’s useful to consider the fact that both types of languages are governed by identical sets of organizing principles (e.g., morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonology): Laura Ann Petitto et al., “Speech-Like Cerebral Activity in Profoundly Deaf People Processing Signed Languages: Implications for the Neural Basis of Human Language,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97 (2000): 13961–13966.

  four thousand words per minute: Rodney J. Korba, “The Rate of Inner Speech,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 71 (1990): 1043–1052, asked participants to record the “inner speech” they used to solve verbal word problems and then speak the solution out loud in fully predicated speech. Participants silently verbalized the solution approximately eleven times faster than they were able to express the solution in “expressive speech.” As this study demonstrates, although we are capable of thinking to ourselves in full sentences, inner speech can also take a more condensed form that occurs much faster than how we talk out loud. For discussion, see Simon McCarthy Jones and Charles Fernyhough, “The Varieties of Inner Speech: Links Between Quality of Inner Speech and Psychopathological Variables in a Sample of Young Adults,” Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011): 1586–1593.

  State of the Union speeches: I defined “contemporary American presidents’ annual State of the Union speeches as referring to all presentations delivered from 2001 until the latest date that data was available in 2020. Gerhard Peters, “Length of State of the Union Address in Minutes (from 1966),” in The American Presidency Project, ed. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters (Santa Monica, CA: University of California, 1999–2020). Available from the World Wide Web: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​node/​324136/.

  sabotage us: Psychologists have historically used different terms to refer to ostensibly similar chatter-related processes (for example, “rumination,” “post-event processing,” “habitual negative self-thinking,” “chronic stress,” and “worry”). Although in some cases subtle differences characterize these different forms of repetitive negative thinking (that is, rumination tends to be past focused, whereas worry is future oriented), scientists often talk about them as constituting a single construct of “perseverative cognition” or “negative repetitive thoughts.” In this book, I use the term “chatter” to capture this concept. For discussion of these issues, see Jos F. Brosschot, William Gerin, and Julian F. Thayer, “The Perseverative Cognition Hypothesis: A Review of Worry, Prolonged Stress-Related Physiological Activation, and Health,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 60 (2006): 113–124; and Edward R. Watkins, “Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought,” Psychological Bulletin 134 (2008): 163–206.

  Chapter One: Why We Talk to Ourselves

  fourteen months: For the date range of the project, see Irving’s webpage at the University of Manchester: www.research.manchester.ac.uk/​portal/​en/​researchers/​andrew-irving(109e5208-716e-42e8-8d4f-578c9f556cd9)/​projects.html?period=finished.

  a hundred New Yorkers: “Interview: Dr. Andrew Irving & ‘New York Stories,’ ” June 10, 2013, Wenner-Gren Foundation, blog.wennergren.org/​2013/​06/​interview-dr-andrew-irving-new-york-stories/; and Andrew Irving, The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice (New York: Hau Books, 2017).

  earlier fieldwork in Africa: For a discussion of Irving’s fieldwork in Africa see Andrew Irving, “Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25 (2011): 22–44; and Sydney Brownstone, “For ‘New York Stories,’ Anthropologist Tracked 100 New Yorkers’ Inner Monologues Across the City,” Village Voice, May 1, 2013.

  avid time traveler: Thomas Suddendorf and Michael C. Corballis, “The Evolution of Foresight: What Is Mental Time Travel, and Is It Unique to Humans?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (2007): 299–351.

  often dealt with negative “content”: Irving noted that although there was variability in what participants thought about, he was struck by how many people thought about negative topics such as economic instability and terrorism. Brownstone, “For ‘New York Stories,’ Anthropologist Tracked 100 New Yorkers’ Inner Monologues Across the City.”

  nature of the default state: Eric Klinger, Ernst H. W. Koster, and Igor Marchetti, “Spontaneous Thought and Goal Pursuit: From Functions Such as Planning to Dysfunctions Such as Rumination,” in Christoff and Fox, Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Tho
ught, 215–232; Arnaud D’Argembeau, “Mind-Wandering and Self-Referential Thought,” in ibid., 181–192; and A. Morin, B. Uttl, and B. Hamper, “Self-Reported Frequency, Content, and Functions of Inner Speech,” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Journal 30 (2011): 1714–1718.

  nonverbal forms: See “when we slip away” note from the introduction.

  neural reuse: Michael L. Anderson, “Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Principle of the Brain,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010): 245–313.

  phonological loop: Alan Baddeley, “Working Memory,” Science 255 (1992): 556–559. Also see Alan Baddeley and Vivien Lewis, “Inner Active Processes in Reading: The Inner Voice, the Inner Ear, and the Inner Eye,” in Interactive Processes in Reading, ed. A. M. Lesgold and C. A. Perfetti (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1981), 107–129; Alan D. Baddeley and Graham J. Hitch, “The Phonological Loop as a Buffer Store: An Update,” Cortex 112 (2019): 91–106; and Antonio Chella and Arianna Pipitone, “A Cognitive Architecture for Inner Speech,” Cognitive Systems Research 59 (2020): 287–292.

  in infancy: Nivedita Mani and Kim Plunkett, “In the Infant’s Mind’s Ear: Evidence for Implicit Naming in 18-Month-Olds,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 908–913. For discussion, see Ben Alderson-Day and Charles Fernyhough, “Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology,” Psychological Bulletin 141 (2015); and Perrone-Bertolotti et al., “What Is That Little Voice Inside My Head?”

  language development and self-control: Lev Vygotsky, Thinking and Speech: The Collected Works of Lev Vygotsky, vol. 1 (1934; New York: Plenum Press, 1987). Also see Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, “Inner Speech”; and Perrone-Bertolotti et al., “What Is That Little Voice Inside My Head?”

  research on socialization: For research highlighting the complexity of the role that parents play in socialization, see W. Andrew Collins et al., “Contemporary Research on Parenting: The Case for Nature and Nurture,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 218–232. A more recent illustration of the role that parents play in children’s emotional lives comes from a large meta-analysis, which revealed statistically significant positive links between parental behavior and several emotional adjustment outcomes. See Michael M. Barger et al., “The Relation Between Parents’ Involvement in Children’s Schooling and Children’s Adjustment: A Meta-analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 145 (2019): 855–890.

  shape our own verbal streams: For broader discussions of the role that language plays in the transmission of cultural ideas, see Susan A. Gelman and Steven O. Roberts, “How Language Shapes the Cultural Inheritance of Categories,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114 (2017): 7900–7907; and Roy Baumeister and E. J. C. Masicampo, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions,” Psychological Review 117 (2010): 945–971.

  broader cultural factors: Hazel R. Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98 (1991): 224–253.

  Religions and the values they teach: Adam B. Cohen, “Many Forms of Culture,” American Psychologist 64 (2009): 194–204.

  inner speech earlier: Laura E. Berk and Ruth A. Garvin, “Development of Private Speech Among Low-Income Appalachian Children,” Developmental Psychology 20 (1984): 271–286; Laura E. Berk, “Children’s Private Speech: An Overview of Theory and the Status of Research,” in Private Speech: From Social Interaction to Self-Regulation, eds. Rafael M. Diaz and Laura E. Berk (New York: Psychology Press, 1992), 17–54.

  imaginary friends may spur internal speech: Paige E. Davis, Elizabeth Meins, and Charles Fernyhough, “Individual Differences in Children’s Private Speech: The Role of Imaginary Companions,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 116 (2013): 561–571.

  among many other desirable qualities: Amanda Grenell and Stephanie M. Carlson, “Pretense,” in The Sage Encyclopedia of Contemporary Early Childhood Education, ed. D. Couchenour and J. K. Chrisman (New York: Sage, 2016), 1075–1077.

  spontaneous thoughts related to goals: For illustrative studies, see Arnaud D’Argembeau, Olivier Renaud, and Martial Van der Linden, “Frequency, Characteristics, and Functions of Future-Oriented Thoughts in Daily Life,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 25 (2011): 96–103; Alain Morin, Christina Duhnych, and Famira Racy, “Self-Reported Inner Speech Use in University Students,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 32 (2018): 376–382; and Akira Miyake et al., “Inner Speech as a Retrieval Aid for Task Goals: The Effects of Cue Type in the Random Task Cuing Paradigm,” Acta Psychologica 115 (2004): 123–142. Also see Adam Winsler, “Still Talking to Ourselves After All These Years: A Review of Current Research on Private Speech,” in Private Speech, Executive Functioning, and the Development of Verbal Self-Regulation, ed. A. Winsler, C. Fernyhough, and I. Montero (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3–41.

  run mental simulations: D’Argembeau, Renaud, and Van der Linden, “Frequency, Characteristics, and Functions of Future-Oriented Thoughts in Daily Life”; D’Argembeau, “Mind-Wandering and Self-Referential Thought”; and Morin, Duhnych, and Racy, “Self-Reported Inner Speech Use in University Students.”

  Historically, psychologists thought of dreams: Erin J. Wamsley, “Dreaming and Waking Thought as a Reflection of Memory Consolidation,” in Christoff and Fox, Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, 457–468, presents a cogent review of dream research.

  share many similarities: Kieran C. R. Fox et al., “Dreaming as Mind Wandering: Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging and First-Person Content Reports,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 1–18; Tracey L. Kahan and Stephen P. LaBerge, “Dreaming and Waking: Similarities and Differences Revisited,” Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011): 494–514; Lampros Perogamvros et al., “The Phenomenal Contents and Neural Correlates of Spontaneous Thoughts Across Wakefulness, NREM Sleep, and REM Sleep,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 29 (2017): 1766–1777; and Erin J. Wamsley, “Dreaming and Waking Thought as a Reflection of Memory Consolidation.”

  dreams are often functional: For a discussion of the role that dreams play in simulating threats, see Katja Valli and Antti Revonsuo, “The Threat Simulation Theory in Light of Recent Empirical Evidence: A Review,” American Journal of Psychology 122 (2009): 17–38; and Antti Revonsuo, “The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dreaming,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2001): 877–901. Also see J. Allan Hobson, “REM Sleep and Dreaming: Towards a Theory of Protoconsciousness,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (2009): 803–813.

  creation of our selves: Arnaud D’Argembeau et al., “Brains Creating Stories of Selves: The Neural Basis of Autobiographical Reasoning,” Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience 9 (2014): 646–652; Raymond A. Mar, “The Neuropsychology of Narrative: Story Comprehension, Story Production, and Their Interrelation,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 1414–1434; and Baumeister and Masicampo, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions”; Kate C. McLean et al., “Selves Creating Stories Creating Selves: A Process Model of Self-Development,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 11 (2007): 262–278. For a broader discussion of the role that language plays in autobiographical reasoning, see Robyn Fivus, “The Stories We Tell: How Language Shapes Autobiography,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 12 (1998): 483–487.

  stopped functioning well: To tell Jill Bolte Taylor’s story, I drew on her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), and her TED Talk, “My Stroke of Insight,” www.ted.com/​talks/​jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight?language=en, both of which I quote from. I am grateful to an article by Alain Morin that analyzed Jill Bolte Taylor’s case in the context of private speech for pointing me to this example: Alain Morin, “Self-Awareness Deficits Following Loss of Inner Speech: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s Case Study,” Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2009): 524–529
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  inner experiences consistently dwarf outer ones: Killingsworth and Gilbert, “Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.”

  Chapter Two: When Talking to Ourselves Backfires

  first wild pitch: To tell Rick Ankiel’s story, I drew on Rick Ankiel, The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch That Changed My Life (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017), which I quote from, as well as this article: Gary Waleik, “Former MLB Hurler Remembers 5 Pitches That Derailed His Career,” Only a Game, WBUR, May 19, 2017, www.wbur.org/​onlyagame/​2017/​05/​19/​rick-ankiel-baseball; and Rick Ankiel, “Letter to My Younger Self,” The Players’ Tribune, Sept. 18, 2017, https://www.theplayerstribune.com/​en-us/​articles/​rick-ankiel-letter-to-my-younger-self-cardinals.

  national TV: Waleik, “Former MLB Hurler Remembers 5 Pitches That Derailed His Career.”

  crowd oohed a bit louder: MLB.com. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/​watch?time_continue=5&v=KDZX525CSvw&feature=emb_title.

  never pitch professionally again: Baseball-reference.com: https://www.baseball-reference.com/​players/​a/ankieri01.shtml.

  influence our attention: Sian Beilock is one of the world’s foremost experts on choking under pressure. I drew on the work she describes in Sian L. Beilock and Rob Gray, “Why Do Athletes Choke Under Pressure?,” in Handbook of Sport Psychology, 3rd ed., ed. G. Tenenbaum and R. C. Eklund (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), 425–444.

  Attention is what allows us: Michael I. Posner and Mary K. Rothbart, “Research on Attention Networks as a Model for the Integration of Psychological Science,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 1–23.