Life in the chatter box.

The article looks at research into inner speech, or the phenomenon of talking to oneself with verbal thoughts and streams of consciousness. Psychologist L. S. Vygotsky speculated that inner speech developed from social interactions with parents and other caregivers that become internalized. The author describes a study of self-reported inner speech in which 60 percent of subjects characterized their inner speech as having the qualities of a conversation. Other topics include brain imaging studies which link inner speech to the brain region left inferior frontal gyrus and Broca's area, experiments on verbal thought repetition on task performance and self-control, and auditory verbal hallucinations in mental disorders such as schizophrenia.