Jay D.

Glass

A Neurobiological Model
for the Inner Speech of
Conscious Thought
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Abstract: One component of our conscious self-awareness is the voice

we hear inside our heads, a form of inner speech. This voice of our
conscious thoughts is an exact reflection of our personal voice, with
our vocabulary, favourite phrases, and regional idioms. In this paper
I present a neurobiological model for the mechanism behind these
language-based conscious thoughts. Central to this model is the pro-
cess of associative conditioning. Through repeated pairings of the
neural processes of speech with those of auditory perception of the
words spoken, when the action of speech is triggered, but in this case
vocalization is inhibited, the neural mechanisms underlying its per-
ception are activated and create hearing the unspoken words. Inter-
estingly, the model predicts the form in which the inner voice of the
deaf who have no spoken language and communicate through Sign
actually experience their thoughts.

Keywords: thought; consciousness; conditioning; neurobiology; per-

ception; deaf; inhibition; inner speech.

1. Introduction
Our conscious self-awareness, our thoughts, that we experience as an
inner speech is at least in part related to our language. An individ-
uals thoughts use the specific language, with its slang, curses, idioms,
and favoured expressions, that the individual uses in their spoken lan-
guage. This relationship between language and consciousness and its
Correspondence:
Email: offlinej@aol.com

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20, No. 910, 2013, pp. 714

 8 J.D. GLASS

role in a variety of human mental capabilities has been discussed by

philosophers and psychologists (Humphrey, 2011; Searle, 2002;
Vygotsky, 1986). Once the relationship between psychological pro-
cesses and neurobiology began to develop, understanding human con-
sciousness was approached by those using neurobiology (Edelman,
1992; Crick, 1995; Dehaene and Changeux, 2011).
In this paper I would like to examine one specific aspect of the
neurobiological basis for our conscious self-awareness, the relation-
ship between language and this inner speech of our consciousness
experience. I propose a model based upon established physiological
processes that shows how these processes, acting in a sequential man-
ner, can produce the voice inside our head that is our conscious
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thoughts, even though no words are actually spoken. This paper is

limited to just a presentation of the model. The numerous implications
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of this model to the multiple issues about the relationship between

human mental processes, both conscious and unconscious, language,
and inner speech are beyond the scope of this paper.
A fundamental part of the model is the process of associative condi-
tioning. In a nearly simultaneous but sequential and in an associative
fashion, the neural activity underlying the perception of our speech
becomes conditioned to the neural processes that create speech. After
the conditioning becomes established, when speech is initiated but we
withhold our vocalization, the prior associative conditioning gener-
ates a perception of that speech as an echo of speech (ES). It is this
perception that constitutes the component of consciousness, our in-
ner speech that mimics our natural language. As described below, the
theoretical model is based upon a sequence of neurological events,
each of which has been documented in the literature.
A first test of the ES hypothesis is to examine for evidence that the
required neurobiological functions exist for each step in the process,
from the initiation of speech, the inhibition of its vocal expression and
finally, the creation of the perception of its echo. A second test, one of
prediction, is to examine if the form of the inner voice that occurs
during the thoughts of the deaf who have no spoken language and
communicate through sign language would be predicted by the model.

2. The Model and Tests of its Validity

The sequence that leads from the intention to speak and then to its
articulation has been studied in detail, both behaviourally and biologi-
cally (Wise et al., 1999; Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; Hagoort and
Levelt, 2009). This preparatory sequence has been broken down into
 CONSCIOUS THOUGHT: NEUROBIOLOGICAL MODEL 9

specific markers of neural activity correlated to the organizing of the

components of speech, such as syntax, phonemes, and semantics, that
occurs over about 500 msec. preceding actual speech (Terao et al.,
2001; Obhi and Haggard, 2004; Galgano and Froud, 2008; Sahin et
al., 2009) and is described from initiation to articulation in specific
timed segments (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004).
The neurobiological basis whereby the cortical mechanisms of
speech can be interrupted prior to the actual activation of the muscles
involved in speech is well documented. Beginning rostrally in the
periaqueductal grey and ending caudally in the spinal cord is a com-
plex of local networks as well as descending inputs of cortical, basal
ganglia, and cerebellar origin that are part of a complex control system
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for the neuronal control of the muscles of vocalization (Jrgens, 2002;

Simonyan and Horowitz, 2009). This evidence suggests that voli-
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tional control, including inhibition, has its origins in the mediofrontal

cortex including anterior cingulate gyrus and presupplementary
motor area. The actual blocking of speech may occur at any step
between the cortical initiation and the brainstem and spinal cord loca-
tions of the motoneurons that directly excite the muscles of
vocalization.
An important piece of the ES hypothesis is that activity within the
auditory cortex that occurs without an external stimulus, the echo,
encodes the same information as when evoked by a specific sound and
is consciously perceived as a specific sound. In humans, investigating
the subjective experience of sound, presentation of a visual stimulus
such as a dog evoked in the auditory cortex activity that can be identi-
fied with functional magnetic resonance imaging as the response to
the barking of a dog (Meyer et al., 2010). In a PET scan study of neu-
ral correlates of inner speech, trials designed to evoke inner speech
produced activity in cortical areas associated with speech perception
(McGuire et al., 1996). When listening to a song well-known to the
subject, functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that when a
section of the song was silent, cortical activation occurred that was
similar to the activation both before and after the silent section. Dur-
ing the silent section, subjects reported subjectively hearing the song,
including its lyrics, during these gaps (Kraemer et al., 2005). It is
therefore possible to have specific cortical activity associated with an
imagined but not actually present auditory stimulus.
The underlying physiological process critical to the ES model is the
associative conditioning between sets of neurons that would occur if
each set is repeatedly activated one after the other. In ES, the neural
activation in auditory cortex, normally evoked by the sound of speech,
 10 J.D. GLASS

becomes conditioned to the neural activity of one or multiple aspects

of the steps involved in the immediately preceding intention to speak.
After a sufficient number of repeated pairings, the neural activity of
the intention to speak triggers activation in the neurons normally
evoked by the speech, even though in this case there is no actual
vocalization.
The description of such a cognitive process of neuronal plasticity as
responsible for producing in the brain at least some types of learning
was initially introduced on purely a cognitive theoretical basis: It
may be laid down as a rule, that, if any two mental states be called up
together, or in succession, with due frequency and vividness, the sub-
sequent production of the one of them will suffice to call up the other,
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and that whether we desire it or not (Huxley, 1872). This theoretical

proposition was then converted into a biological one: that any two
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cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will
tend to become associated so that activity in one facilitates activity
in the other (Hebb, 1949).
These theoretical propositions were given physiological reality by
the work of Eric Kandel, for which he received the Nobel Prize. He
demonstrated just such plasticity from one cell repeatedly activating
another using the well-defined neuronal circuitry of Aplysia (Kandel
and Tauc, 1965; Jin, Kandel and Hawkins, 2011).
A significant test of a prediction from the ES hypothesis is the ques-
tion of what type of inner speech is experienced by those who are deaf
and have no spoken language to create the ES that forms the inner
speech of the hearing. For Signers it is the use of their hands that
serves the articulation function of their speech. Instead of audition,
the analogous sensory feedback would be proprioceptive, kinaes-
thetic, and somatosensory from hand and arm movements. Visual
feedback may also be involved since the person making the signs typi-
cally does have direct view of their actions and the initial learning of
Sign involves teaching through visual images of the appropriate ges-
tures. Such direct sensory feedback from muscle movements creating
plasticity in the brain has been previously described (Held and Hein,
1963; Jeannerod, 2003).
Fascinatingly, studies on patients who communicate through Sign
have shown that when they think about things and problem solve con-
sciously, their mind does in fact experience an echo of these sensory
experiences associated with the gestural system used to express the
information contained within their thoughts (Sacks, 1989; Marschark
and Hauser, 2012). Sacks, in his book interestingly titled Seeing
Voices, interviewed a person who was born to deaf parents, learned
 CONSCIOUS THOUGHT: NEUROBIOLOGICAL MODEL 11

both Sign and English as a child, and told him that she often falls back
into Sign and thinks in Sign whenever she has to puzzle out a complex
intellectual problem even though she now lives in a hearing world
(Sacks, 1989). A deaf person who received training in one of the ear-
lier programmes to teach the deaf a communication system, in this
case involving pictures as well as gestures, told William James
(1892): Not only could I think in pictures but almost spontaneously I
was also able to learn how to think and reason.
That those who use Sign for language experience an equivalence to
inner speech associated with their thoughts that is based upon simi-
lar principles as for those who vocalize for language would match
other evidence in the neurological similarities between the two forms
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of expression. Cortical activation during signing, the impact of lesions

upon signing, and the critical period for learning signing (Newman et
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al., 2002; Horwitz et al., 2003; Emmorey, 2006) as well as the Amytal
test of left hemisphere specialization (Damasio et al., 1986) all show
neurologically that the learning and expression of Sign mimics the
learning and expression of spoken language. Studies specifically of
inner speech induced by silent articulation of sentences in deaf sub-
jects who have learned Sign since infancy show the same cortical acti-
vation as for hearing subjects (McGuire et al., 1997). Minor
differences in some neurological studies are thought to relate to the
visuo-spatial character of Sign in comparison with spoken language
(Emmorey et al., 2003; 2005). Behaviourally, the errors made in
memorizing lists for both speaking and signing subjects show the
same core confusional factors (Locke and Locke, 1971; Bellugi,
Klima and Siple, 1975).
For the deaf individual the inner speech of their consciousness is no
different from that of a person who uses spoken language, an associa-
tively conditioned sensory echo of the action that would have been
taken to express the thought if it had not been inhibited prior to overt
expression. To be inclusive, the term Echo-of-Speech (ES) should be
changed to Echo-of-Language (EL).

3. Conclusions
In this paper I proposed a neurobiological model, EL, that explains a
possible mechanism for the language component of the inner speech
of our conscious experience. The model proposes that the perception
of language even though none has been spoken is an echo created
through the prior associative conditioning of the neural processes
behind the action of speaking with the neural processes that create our
 12 J.D. GLASS

hearing and perception of that speech. Interestingly, the EL model pre-

dicts the sensory feedback that actually creates the content of the con-
scious self-awareness of the deaf who have no verbal language but
instead speak in sign language.
As proposed in the EL model, this aspect of our consciousness, our
inner and silent speech, is simply a by-product, an artefact, of the vari-
ety of the associative conditionings that can occur within the dense
interconnectedness of the human brain as well as our capacity for
behavioural inhibition. The model has implications for a variety of
issues in the consciousness dialogue such as the biological and evolu-
tionary basis for human and/or animal conscious experience as well as
the role of language in thoughts such as problem solving and sensory
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experience that make up in part our self-aware consciousness.

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Paper received August 2012; revised January 2013.

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