This is a rather neat
idea. We have evolved to internally
mirror the sounds we are making in order to cancel them out. This mechanism naturally lets us mimic our
own voice internally to express our thoughts.
So a necessary feedback system allows us to hear ourselves think.
Now we need to trace
out this system to allow our minds to drive external devices. I wonder if it can be used also to map images
and the like. I really would love to
flick web pages through my mind on demand.
I think we are going there anyway, but this natural feedback system
shows us the way.
This is a surprising
insight.
Brain signal said to
create inner 'voice' we hear even if we're silent
by United Press International
Washington
DC (UPI) Jul 16, 2013
A Canadian researcher says he's identified a kind of brain signal that could explain why we "hear" speech in our heads even in the absence of actual sound.
Internal
speech a person "hears" inside their head is a ubiquitous but largely
unexamined phenomenon, Mark Scott of the University of British Columbia said.
Experiments
suggest a brain signal called corollary discharge, which helps us
distinguish the sensory experiences we produce ourselves from those produced by
external stimuli, plays an important role in our experiences of internal
speech, he said.
Corollary
discharge is a type of predictive signal generated by the brain that helps to
explain, for example, why other people can tickle us but we can't tickle
ourselves, he said.
The
signal predicts our own movements and effectively cancels out the tickle
sensation.
The
same mechanism is involved in how our auditory system processes speech, Scott
said; when we speak, an internal copy of the sound of our voice is generated in
parallel with the external sound we hear.
"We
spend a lot of time speaking and that can swamp our auditory system, making it
difficult for us to hear other sounds when we are speaking," Scott
explained. "By attenuating the impact our own voice has on our hearing --
using the 'corollary discharge' prediction -- our hearing can remain sensitive
to other sounds."
That
internal copy of our voice produced by corollary discharge can be generated
even when there isn't any external sound, he suggested, so the sound we hear
when we talk inside our heads actually may be the internal prediction of the
sound of our own voice.
Scott
has published the results of his experiments in the journal Psychological
Science.
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