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You want some? Okay. Okay. Hey, I'm Jenna Boon-Rodd.
This is Radio Lab, the podcast Robert. And 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.
Super Eagle, Clock Green, Bello, Cats, and the Guy's Hat, Cardinal, Door, Door, Door. So yeah, we did an hour on the power of words and we ended up talking with this guy. Hello. Hello.
I'm Charles Roney, who's a writer and developmental psychologist from Durham University. And we were having this conversation with him about what happens to young kids when they learn words. Or do you tackle doo-jae? Thinking.
You know, like what happens to the way they see the world? In the middle of the chat, he said something kind of radical, which was it before they have words? I don't think very young children do think. Like think, period?
Was there a period in that sense? You don't think that they think, period? I don't think they think in the way that I want a cool thinking, all right, which is a bit of a cheat. What he meant is that thinking is 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 named Vygotsky. Lev Vygotsky. And is he contemporary dude?
No, he died in the 30s. He was active in the 30s. Anyhow, he came up with this idea. It's a really interesting notion of how kids learn to think.
It all begins, he said, on the outside. Think about a small child who's sitting down solving a puzzle. Does that look like it goes somewhere? It goes here.
You're sitting down and you're working together on a puzzle. 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. Now the child 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 kid looks at the shape and says, oh it's got that pointed bit there. And the mum says, right, well can you see anywhere on the board that has a pointed bit? Right there.
And so on. According to Vygotsky, this is the beginning of thinking. This kind of dialogue. And at this point is completely external.
It's all happening in that space between the child and her mother. That's where it goes yet. But if you put it together. And only over time does it become internalized.
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. This is the stage we call private speech. 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. Now what then happens is a few years further down the line. These kids who are narrating everything they're doing, then go to school and the teachers tell them, shh, don't talk out loud. They kind of get the message that they need to start doing this internally.
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, according to Vygotsky's theory, that is thinking. 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 in your system. In other words, those thoughts began as a crowd. And the logic of it is that all our thinking is full of other people's voices. 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. Yeah, hi. Hi. Thanks for coming up here.
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 late. And I'm Molly Martin and I am a psychotherapist and I run the hearing voices in the work of Denver. They met up at this hotel. She works with people who hear voices in their hands and she runs a support group of people to share their experiences.
The day Pat was there, she introduced him to a fellow named Marcus. Hi, I'm Marcus Macias. I'm a voice here myself. I hear voices so I can kind of share my experiences.
You kind of tell me in this story of... 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. 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 wherever fan. When I first started hearing them, they were kind of guiding a little bit.
He says initially the voices would help him out. Like if he was in an argument and about to say something mean, the 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. He said periods in his life he says were the voices of even turned demonic. Yeah, so it 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. 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 five and 10% of normal healthy people have that experience or have had it at one time, which brings us back to this for God's situation.
What might be happening in those cases, Lisa BS 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. That'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 down at a microphone and some headphones on and you show them some words on the screen. Just flash up some words on the screen and their task is to repeat the words, to read the words out loud.
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 and their headphones, their voice, actually gets lower just a little bit right before they hear it. What that means is that if I were to say, hello, my name is Chad, what I'd hear in my headphones is, hello, my name is Chad. And as you know, if you lower the picture, the voice by a few semitones, it becomes much harder to recognize it.
Because when I'm speaking in this lowered voice, it can still kind of recognize it to me, but it's a little bit hard. No, 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 it a stranger or you're not sure? They did make mistakes, some mistakes. The voice here is made considerably more mistakes.
Really? Yeah, not only that, when they heard their voices lowered, they would very, very often say, that voice is coming from a stranger. It'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.
But not always. Because let's just imagine Vagatski 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, MURD. He was shot in front of her. It was a robbery, and it was, I believe, at a convenience store. And for years afterwards, she says this woman would hear her dad's voice.
She would tell us that every morning, 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 was a drug addict, and she wanted to use drugs again. Her father would say to her, things like, you know, don't do it.
It's bad for you. It's horrible. Looking after her. I think she might have been 11 when he was killed.
But it was a good relationship during that time. Yeah, and then it's kind of stuck but bruised. Yeah, I think so. I think so.
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, I just want to let you know, we have a new website, radiolab.org. It's a new design. It's all organized. If you go to the site, if I'm going to do it right now, 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'll 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 going to buy one for my toddler. I'm going to buy 70 in fact.
Here I go. Seven zero. So I should sign off. I'm Jan Abumran.
Thanks for listening. Catch you in two weeks. Hello, my name is Christopher Cole from Chico, California. I'm a radiolab listener and the radiolab podcast is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation.
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