Zen and the Art of Dissatisfaction
PART 7: Voices Within – Exploring the Inner Dialogue
The Canadian-born British experimental psychologist and philosopher, Bruce Hood, specialises in researching human psychological development in cognitive neuroscience. Hood works at the University of Bristol, and his research focuses on intuitive theories, sense of self, and the cognitive processes underlying adult magical thinking. In his book The Self Illusion: Why There Is No ‘You’ Inside Your Head (2012), Hood argues that our internal dissatisfaction stems from a form of psychological uncertainty. It is still very common to think that some kind of internal self or soul is the core that separates humans from other animals. It is also very common to think that after the human body dies, this core continues to live forever through some form of reincarnation, either here or in another parallel dimension. Our understanding of the internal self does not arise from nothing. It is the result of a long developmental process that takes time to build. According to Bruce Hood, this is an illusion because the sense of self has no permanent anchor or form, yet people experience it as very real and often claim it to be the essence that makes us who we are.
In neurosciences the human consciousness is often divided into various conceptual meanings that together form human consciousness. The first of these meanings is the awareness, referring to whether we are awake or not, such as when we are asleep, we are in a state of mild and temporary form of unconsciousness. The second significant concept related to consciousness is attention, which moves between different activities, depending on what requires our attention at the moment. The third concept of consciousness is experiential consciousness, which defines subjective experiences occurring within ourselves, such as how salt tastes, or what is the sensation a red colour evokes. The fourth meaning of consciousness is reflective consciousness. If something happens to us at the level of experiential consciousness, we begin to consciously ponder how we should act. For instance, if we hammer our finger with a mallet, this experience immediately enters our experiential consciousness as a very intense experience, but almost simultaneously, the same event jumps into our reflective consciousness, where we start weighing the severity of the injury and what we should do to ease pain and prevent further calamity. Should I cry for help? Should I go to the hospital? Or shall I just take a photo and post it on Instagram? Conscious thought flows in this way.
Reflective consciousness speaks of experience, and it leads to conscious thinking, which is characterised by the inability to think about more than one thing at a time. One important form of conscious thought is self-awareness, which also involves the awareness of our own body. The concept of self represents conscious thought and is formed by beliefs and thoughts about an individual’s personal history, identity, and future plans.
Self-awareness is also referred to as the self or sense self, a concept I have and will be using in my writings. However, it’s important to note that this term does not refer to identity. This same issue is often explored in the fields of psychology and sociology.
The sense of self can be seen as an evolutionary tool or a feature, which helps the organism to stay alive. It makes the organisms feel that they are very important, more important than anyone or anything else. However, this sense of self can also transform over time and through adverse experience into a process that turns against itself. These processes have been seen underlying conditions such as severe depression, in which our sense of self has gone into a deep rut and goes through endless loops of self loathing.
American journalist and Harvard professor Michael Pollan writes in his book How to Change Your Mind (2019) that modern psychedelic therapies have shown promising results for patients with depression. In his book, Pollan writes about the research conducted by British neuroscientist and psychologist Robin Carhart-Harris (2010) has researched the effect of the brain's default mode network (DMN) on the formation of the self, ego, or sense of self. The DMN is a neurological process that turns on when the person is not engaged in goal-directed activity. This process has also been linked to the formation of a the sense self.
The human experience of the self is a biographical anchor created by multiple overlapping neural processes of our brain. We get a feeling that everything that happens in my life happens to me. The self is that which experiences all things. That inner center is significant particularly to me. Without our internal awareness and experience of the self, we would never have conceived of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a UN committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. It protects the persons right to physical integrity. We believe that every human being is unique and valuable because we all have an inner sense of self.
However, humans are not the only animals with some form of internal self-awareness. When visiting the London Zoo in 1838, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) saw an orangutang named Jenny becoming upset when a keeper teased her with an apple. This made Darwin reflect on the orangutang’s subjective experience. He noticed Jenny looking into a mirror and wondered if she recognised herself in the reflection.
American psychologist Gordon G. Gallup (1970) experimentally studied self-recognition in two male and two female wild chimpanzees, none of whom had previously seen a mirror. Initially, the chimpanzees made threatening gestures in front of the mirror, perceiving their reflections as threats. Eventually, they began using the mirror for self-directed behaviours, such as grooming parts of their bodies they couldn’t see without it, picking their noses, grinning, and blowing bubbles at their reflections.
Bruce Hood (2012) writes that this process is crucial in human development because, without it, humans would struggle in socially challenging and complex environments. Human children fail the mirror test until around 18 months of age. Before this, they may think the reflection is of another child and look behind the mirror. However, by 18 months, they understand that the person reflected in the mirror is themselves. But humans and chimpanzees are not the only animals to pass the mirror test. Crows, dolphins, and orcas also pass the test. Elephants do too, but cats do not (although my guess is that cats could pass the test if they wanted).
The sensation of self, which the human mind creates, which feels like a concrete structure, and which is referred to as the self, ego, or "I," is a process aimed at protecting us from both internal and external threats. When everything functions as it should, our inner narrator keeps the organism on track, helping it achieve its goals and meet its needs, especially eating, seeking shelter, and reproducing. This process works well under normal circumstances, but it is inherently conservative. Our experience of the self is a process, not a fixed entity, though it often feels like one. It emerges as a result of various mental functions and manifests as an internal narrator, or even as an internal dialogue.
The dialogue generated by the self often sounds like someone is explaining things to us, as if to a blind person, about what’s happening around us. We enter a room and might hear someone say inside our mind, “Look, what a nice place this is! Those wallpapers are beautiful, and the furniture is great, but those electrical outlets needs replacing!”
Sometimes, we might hear an internal negotiation, such as whether to run through a red light to catch a tram. Running through traffic might put us in physical danger or cause us to be socially judged. Social shame is one of the worst things a person can experience, and our internal narrator picks up on such details immediately and warns us to at least consider the possibility. At times, our narrator can turn into an internal tyrant, turning its energy against us.
This narrator, or brain talk, sounds very reasonable, but it often shows how our minds are trying to preserve the structures formed earlier, built from previous experiences. Unfortunately, sometimes we’re left with that inner narrator and nothing else, which can leave one feeling out of place. And when this narrator becomes rigid and inflexible, it has the power to push us into states of psychological distress, even driving us into despair.
In cases where brain talk gets stuck in repetitive loops, as is often the case with anxiety, depression, or psychosis, people feel their lives are determined by this narrator, inner force living inside ones head. A stuck self could feel isolated in its inner world and find it impossible to reach outside. The idea of having self-awareness — of being someone in this world — becomes crushed under the weight of these loops. For some, it is as if the voice of our mind becomes detached from the physical person, forcing it into another dimension where everything becomes dark, and disconnected from the social world.
American author David Foster Wallace (1962–2008), who had much experience of this process, reminded us in his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 of the old cliché that the mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master. However, this cliché expresses a terrible truth. According to Wallace, it is no coincidence that people who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They are shooting that terrible narrator turned into a master — a terrible dark lord.
Mind out of a Dolmio pasta sauce commercial
People experience their brain talk in a unique and private way. Most of us have some form of inner voice. A voice that guides, directs, and commands us. A voice that warns “Watch out! Car!” or “Remember to buy toilet paper.” For many of us, this voice sounds like our own, but for some people, their inner narrator is not a straightforward speech that scolds, advises, or reminds them of things. For some, brain talk may take the form of an Italian arguing couple or a calm interviewer. Or it may not be a voice at all, but a taste, feeling, or colour. In some cases, there is no voice at all, only deep and calm silence.
English journalist Sirin Kale (2021) wrote an interesting article on this internal narrator, presenting a few rare examples of different types of inner voices. One of the people interviewed for the article, a 30-year-old English woman named Claudia, hears her inner dialogue in a unique way. Claudia has never been to Italy, nor does she have Italian family or friends. She has no idea why the loud, arguing Italian couple has taken over her inner voice. Claudia says, “I have no idea where this came from. It’s probably offensive to Italians.” The arguing couple in Claudia’s mind sounds like something straight out of a Dolmio pasta sauce commercial. They are expressive and prone to waving their hands and shouting. When Claudia needs to make a decision in her life, this Italian couple takes the reins.
The Italian couple living inside Claudia’s mind argues passionately about almost anything. Claudia finds it very helpful because they do all the work for her. The couple is always in the kitchen and surrounded by food. Claudia has not yet named her Italians, but they have helped her make important decisions, including encouraging her to quit her job and pursue her lifelong dream of going to sea.
Kale writes that the Italian woman in Claudia’s mind supported her resignation, but her husband was more cautious. The Italian man said, “It’s a stable job!” and the woman responded, “Let her enjoy life!” The woman won, and Claudia left for a job on the seas in Greece. Overall, this Italian couple has helped Claudia live a happier life, and they’ve even calmed down a bit. Claudia says, “Less shouting. They just argue now.”
Dr Helene Loevenbruck of Grenoble Alpes University’s, mentioned in the article, claims that the brain talk arises in the same way as our thoughts turn into actions. Our brains predict the consequences of actions. The same principle of predicting actions also applies to human speech. When we speak, our brains create a predictive simulation of speech in our minds to correct any potential mistakes. The inner voice is thought to arise when our minds plan verbalised actions but decide not to send motor commands to the speech muscles. Loevenbruck says this simulated auditory signal is the small voice we hear in our minds. Loevenbruck explains that for the most part, we hear something she refers to as inner language, a more comprehensive term for this phenomenon. This is because, for example, people with hearing impairments do not hear an inner voice but might see sign language or observe moving lips. (Loevenbruck et al., 2018).
In exploring the sense of self and inner voice, we've seen how the self emerges as a process rather than a fixed entity. It is shaped by our own evolution, culture, and personal experience. Our brain talk can guide us, deceive us, or even take on unexpected forms and destroy us, yet it remains central to our sense of identity. It feels like the core for which everything happens. But is the self really real? And if not, if the self is an illusion, as neuroscientists and psychologists suggest, what does that mean for how we live? In the next post, I’ll dive into Buddhist perspectives on the self—examining how centuries-old wisdom aligns with modern psychological insights.
Resources:
Carhart-Harris, RL, & Friston, KJ (2010). The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas. Brain, 133(4), 1265-1283.
Gallup, GG (1970). Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition. Science. 167 (3914): 86–87.
Hood, B (2012). The self illusion: How the social brain creates identity. HarperCollins Publishers.
Kale, S (2021) The last great mystery of the mind: meet the people who have unusual – or non-existent – inner voices. Guardian 25 Oct 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/25/the-last-great-mystery-of-the-mind-meet-the-people-who-have-unusual-or-non-existent-inner-voices> Visited 1 April 2025.
Loevenbruck et al. (2018). A cognitive neuroscience view of inner language: to predict, to hear, to see and to feel. In Inner Speech: New Voices. Peter Langland-Hassan & Agustín Vicente (eds.), Oxford University Press, 131-167.
Pollan, M (2019). How to change your mind the new science of psychedelics. Penguin Books