Reviewer's Note_Park Han-seon 005

1.
Funny Cheese Pieces 007
2.
Turn on the gas stove 035
3.
The Psychology of Self-Talk 057
4.
Inside a Child's Head 077
5.
The Natural History of Thought 099
6.
Voices on Paper 127
7.
The Brain Talks 153
8.
It's not me 181
9.
Someone Lives in My Head 195
10.
The Voice of the Dove 219
11.
The Brain That Listens to Itself 245
12.
Chatty Muse 269
13.
Message from the Past 303
14.
The Unspoken Voice 335
15.
Talking to Yourself 359

Americas 394
Search 438

2016 Forbes Neuroscience Book of the Year
Nature's Best Science Books of Spring 2016
The Guardian's 2016 must-read summer list
2016 Observer Science Book of the Year
2016 ABC Science Book of the Year
2016 Times Higher Education Must-Read Summer Books

A psychological report on the inner friends, muses, gods, and tyrants who speak to us, encourage us, criticize us, inspire us, and reign over us.
Athletes who talk to themselves, people who hear voices when no one is around, writers who converse with characters in their novels, Hesiod hearing the voices of the Muses on Mount Helicon, Ambrose's silent reading, Joan of Arc hearing the voice of God telling her to save Orléans, Marjorie Kemp and Sister Julian of Norwich who heard divine revelations and saw visions... These are the phenomena and materials covered in this book.
What is the author trying to reveal through this? What is the unusual, perhaps even abnormal, experience of hearing voices in one's head that he wants to reveal?

You hear voices in your head?
A psychiatrist would diagnose schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia, commonly called schizophrenia, is a disease of fear and avoidance that is 'so terrible that it cannot even be spoken of.'
As Thomas Szasz put it, schizophrenia has been "the sacred symbol of psychiatry," and auditory hallucinations are considered the most representative symptom of schizophrenia (pp. 197-199).

What if someone around you says they are 'hearing voices'?
'If you were a voice-hearing person, people would immediately think,
Oh, he might be a dangerous person.
I am not a dangerous person.
Yeah, just because someone tells me scary stories in my head doesn't mean I'm that scary person.' (p. 204)

“Hallucinations have now become madness.” (p. 5)
In fact, auditory hallucinations are a symptom that appears not only in people with schizophrenia but also in people with other mental disorders, and even in people without any psychotic symptoms.
However, when someone says they hear voices, both doctors and the general public are afraid and avoid them.
The media's treatment of schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations is no different.
According to the book, an analysis of 200 newspaper articles published between 2012 and 2013 found that most of the articles linked auditory hallucinations to loss of control, violence, and self-harm, and most linked them to crime, suicide, and suicidal impulses (p. 203).

Opening the black box of human consciousness and mind!
There's someone in my head.
It talks to me, sometimes criticizes and encourages me, sometimes condemns and dominates me, and sometimes gives me creative inspiration.
Who is this being? This book is about the inner voice of this being.
From the traditional biomedical perspective on which psychiatry is based, auditory hallucinations are the waste of the nervous system, meaningless errors in the brain.
But this book sees it differently.
Hearing voices in one's head cannot be simply considered a symptom of schizophrenia; rather, voices in one's head can provide a clue to accessing the black box of human consciousness and mind.

Exploring the inner voice of humans through Vygotsky's concepts of internal and external speech.
The book suggests that there may be some connection between the concepts of 'inner speech' and private speech by Piaget and Vygotsky, who studied human consciousness in the 1920s and 1930s, and voice hallucinations.
The author, who explores Vygotsky's claim that inner speech arises when the external speech we speak out loud is internalized, reveals the social origins of human consciousness in children's soliloquy and argues that inner soliloquy is a kind of communicative dialogue with the inner self.
The inner speech has a conversational nature.

Auditory hallucinations are a clue to solving the mystery of how the human mind and thinking work.
Based on achievements in various fields such as history, literature, philosophy, art, psychotherapy, and brain imaging research, we dissect the identity of the 'voice within me.'
This book examines the meaning of anecdotes about children talking to themselves while playing with toys and making up imaginary playmates to talk to, athletes who talk to themselves both criticizing and encouraging themselves, Ambrose who practiced the extremely strange act of silent reading, which was uncommon in his time, the relationship between writers and readers who speak to readers through words even when no one speaks and listen to the writer through reading, Van Gogh who sent numerous letters to his brother Theo to explain and converse with his work, Julian of Norwich and Marjorie Kempf, famous medieval mystics who heard the voice of God, and Joan of Arc, in the context of dialogical thinking. It points out that there is a very close relationship between the inner voice of a human being, the workings of thought, and voice hallucinations.
Just as external conversations are socially formed, the inner self of humans also appears in various faces.
The self is not a single entity, but rather a collection of fragments that communicate with one another.
“Everyone is fragmented.
There is no such thing as a single self.
We are all fragmented, struggling to create the illusion of a coherent 'I' at every moment.
“Everyone is dissociated to some degree.” (332)

The question we should be asking is not, "What is your problem?" but, "What is your story?"
The voice in our head is a messenger that conveys the message our ego wants to say.
Even if it is a tyrant who torments you.
The voice is the conversation our inner self has with itself, it is meaning, it is an expression of our desire to communicate.
An athlete's soliloquy, a medieval mystic who heard the voice of God, a patient suffering from voice hallucinations, an artist's creative work are all communicative messages from the inner self.
So if someone around you says they hear voices, it's time to put aside your fears and apprehensions and consider Eleanor Longden's words:
Eleanor Longden, who gave a sensational TED Talk about her experiences with organized sexual abuse as a child, which left her with terrible auditory hallucinations (she says she wanted to drill a hole in her head to hear the voices) and the events that led to her suffering (one psychiatrist even said she would rather have cancer than schizophrenia because it was “easier to treat”), says:
“The question we should be asking is not, ‘What is your problem?’ but, ‘What is your story?’” (p. 310)