Hallucinations - Inner Speech

Dr. Sukhi Shergill describes some of the problems schizophrenic patients experience in recognizing their own inner speech.

If you stop and just ask anybody “what are you thinking now?” about half the time they’ll be thinking using words, and that’s what we describe as inner speech. And we think that when patients with schizophrenia experience auditory hallucinations, what they’re actually doing, is hearing their own inner speech. But because they have a problem recognizing their own inner speech, they’re actually attributing it to somebody else. We’ve got this very nice neuroimaging data from brain scans showing that the Broca’s area is involved when people are generating this inner speech or when they’re thinking in words, even when they’re not actually speaking out loud.