Charles Fernyhough on our internal dialogues

We are fans of thinking, here at The School of Life. There’s nothing we like more than to take the phone off the hook, switch off the computer and come over all pensive. We find we can think anywhere: walking down Marchmont Street, lazing in the bath or crushed together with fellow thinkers on the Piccadilly Line. There’s nothing you need for a good muse other than to be conscious, not too intoxicated, nor in immediate mortal peril. Thinking is an eminently versatile pastime.
 
But what is it, exactly? Which bits of your mental life does the term ‘thinking’ usefully describe? We have certain ideas about what this under-examined activity involves. When know when we are doing it, for example, and we can always report (presumably accurately) on what we are thinking about. Above all, thinking seems inextricably linked to language. Imagery, music and memory play their parts, but thinking is nothing so much as a conversation with oneself.
 
I would argue that thinking comes to have the qualities that it does because of the particular story of its emergence in childhood. Here, the best theory around is that of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky argued that the thinking we do as adults bears traces of its emergence from social interactions early in life. Our dialogue with the self is an internalised version of the dialogues we had with other people, back when we were small.

To my mind, this raises some fascinating questions about the phenomenology of thinking. If thinking is an internalised dialogue, it should have a lot in common with social dialogues. How are we to find out? For a long time it was assumed that describing the emotional, perceptual and cognitive minutiae of conscious experience was best left to novelists and poets; it could not be the business of replicable, verifiable scientific inquiry. That has changed, though, not least because of the rise of phenomenological approaches to cognitive science (see Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s recent book on the topic, for example). Psychologists and philosophers are now asking questions about the subjectivity of consciousness that would have raised jeers a decade or two ago. This is a research programme we can all get involved with. What are your thoughts like? Are you a word-thinker or an image-thinker? Or would you say that your thoughts happen in some non-symbolic medium, a pure language of thought?
 
I will be saying more on this in my New Generation Thinkers essay on Radio 3 today. There is much more on the developmental stuff in my book The Baby in the Mirror and its associated blog, The Ladybird Papers. Start ruffling those brows now.

Charles Fernyhough was involved in developing The School of Life’s family course which will run on 15 and 16 November. Find out more HERE.
 
Charles discussed children’s thinking on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can listen again HERE. He is The School of Life's expert on childhood.

Comments

[Dan]

Hello again.

I've been thinking more about the way in which my thinking occurs and have realised that, perhaps the most dominant form it takes, is through an almost constant stream of imaginary scenes in which I am most often interacting with others in various scenarios.

It's when I hear these others speak, that I'm most likely to describe myself as having 'heard' voices, though perhaps 'experienced' is a better word - since my ears are not involved at all in this process. So, I don't feel that the dialogue takes place very often, if at all, without an accompanying series of images.

There is a wonderful article available on the Center For Freudian Analysis and Research website that very much relates to the inner experience of "voice", which, for me at least, has some really interesting parallels with much of what you say. You can find it here:
http://www.cfar.org.uk/pdf/voice.pdf

I've also recognised some similarities between your work and that of Object Relations theories in psychoanalysis?

Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but I didn't want to take it for granted that such theories were already known to you and I have found them very enlightening myself, as a layperson.

[Charles Fernyhough]

I think that one of the implications of Vygotsky's writings is that thoughts are always shared, always partly social, even when they seem to happening privately, silently and internally. His work pushes us away from a conception of thinking whereby thoughts are private mental products that have to be packaged for transmission to other individuals. Because of the way it develops, our thinking is inherently social. It is intimately connected to the social dialogues we have been having from the beginnings of our lives.

Your comment captures something else, though, that is very special about thinking: it can unfold at a very different pace to normal spoken language. Mind-time is not necessarily like real time. Because of the way it is condensed, a single act of thinking has a great deal of possible language compressed into it. That's why a thought can seem to be instantaneous and yet far richer than a single act of speaking could ever be.

[Dan]

When I was young, my father once told me I was 'a thinker'. Growing older, this began to feel like a particularly punishing curse, something I was doing too much, in a culture where it's valued too little. I’m not sure where that would leave me with Vygotsky, but it seems to me that thoughts are there to be shared. That this sharing forms the basis of communication and that communicating our ponderings helps us feel less alone in the world(?).

These are the thoughts inspired in me by your article. They came to me rapidly in an image, or scene, which I feel was from memory. These were followed by a multitude of thoughts, in English, but faster than I could ever speak them. Those words were then clarified in a much longer process whereby I wrote them down and expressed them to you (whoever you are). But the satisfaction came only at the ability to communicate and share those thoughts. That’s my thinking.