What's Going On Inside My Head?: A Let’s Talk picture book to start conversations with your child about positive mental health

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At the end of each episode, you’ll get tangible advice from the experts on how to use your brain more effectively, to harness its vast power and make it work more efficiently under different circumstances. Famira Racy, co-ordinator of the Inner Speech Lab at Mount Royal University, Canada, and her colleagues recently used a method called thought listing – which, unsurprisingly, involves getting participants to list their thoughts at certain times – to take a broader look at why and when people use inner speech, as well as what they say to themselves. Fortunately, the imaging revolution was not far away. During a remarkable decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, X-ray computed tomography (CT) took us all to another level. Activities that help include taking enough breaks during any project, including going out in nature, to rejuvenate ourselves. Also, she said, “if you have some really important task to do, take a really good break before you begin it. Make sure you’re really, refreshed and ready to do it.”

But those categories leave room for variation, too. Take inner speaking, which can come in the form of a single word, a sentence, some kind of monologue, or even a conversation. I have to actually boss my brain sometimes – tell myself that I am in control of what goes on inside my head. Cognition works by creating concepts—abstract groups of similar objects, events, people, or ideas. Concepts band together into prototypes, which are mental images of particular things. Concepts and prototypes allow us to think fast and save processing time—but they also lead to misjudgment when we are faced with something “out of the box.” At about the same time, another technique, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), a nuclear imaging technique, was developed which allowed the distribution of chemical reactions within the brain to be mapped. The sky seemed the limit.

The avant-garde

For example, the left and right frontal lobes govern many crucial aspects of personality. There was a very famous case that highlighted this particular connection to neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. They found that the students in the study were talking to themselves about everything from school to their emotions, other people, and themselves, while they were doing everyday tasks like walking and getting in and out of bed. Though it has the same limitations as much research on inner speech – namely, you can’t always trust people to know what or how they were really thinking – the results appear consistent with previous work. In a 2015 study, Malgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl, a psychologist at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, asked students to describe the different kinds of inner voices they conversed with and came up with a list of four common internal interlocutors: the faithful friend; the ambivalent parent; the proud rival; and the helpless child. Each voice might pop up in different situations – an ambivalent parent-type might offer caring criticism, but a proud rival-type is more likely to be focussed on success rather than offering support. We might adopt these different roles to help ourselves get through situations like a tough test or sports game. Are you able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s simply your inner-critic’s opinion?

These voices in our head are affecting the narrative that is in our brain and God has given us the ability to take control of that narrative. When he says, “Above all else, guard your heart,” he would not tell us to do that if he would not also equip us to be able to do it. When life gets you down, are you able to turn that negative voice inside your head into something positive? But Mark set me straight. “Humans can’t do two or more things at the same time in parallel. We’re just not built like that. What we’re actually doing is shifting our attention,” she said. You really are your own worst critic. And the danger is, sometimes you can start to honestly believe what you are thinking is true.Welcome to On the brain, a new Conversation series by people whose job it is to know as much as there is to know about the body’s most complex organ. Here, Professor Geoffrey Donnan, a world-renowned stroke researcher and director of the Florey Neuroscience Institute, summarises major highlights in brain diagnoses and ponders the future of treatments for brain disease. Enjoy. The critical age for language development is the age of 1.5–3 years. A child not taught to speak at this age, without any experience of social interaction, will probably never be able to speak or understand human speech. I would actually end up jeopardising my relationships because I didn’t want them to leave me – so I left them first. A 2013 review by Hurlburt and his colleagues points to huge individual differences between people in how much time they spend talking to themselves in their head that have been uncovered through studies using DES. The average frequency of inner speaking across those who took part in the research, at 23%, masks a huge range: from 100% – i.e. for some people, every time they were sampled they had some kind of internal monologue or inner conversation going on – to 0% – i.e. some people were never speaking to themselves internally. Later studies suggested that some of these changes may have been temporary—and part of his social functions had also recovered over the years. Nevertheless, the case of Phineas Gage shows us that personality (which is something non-physical) can be affected by changes in the physical body.