Why voices appear in your head and how to deal with them

Listen to your inner voice - this advice is often given when you need to make a difficult choice or make a decision whose consequences are difficult to calculate. Where did the idea of ​​a wise advisor who lives in our heads and knows more than we ourselves come from? And should you really trust him? This question is answered by one of the strangest theories of the evolution of consciousness, which has recently attracted increasing interest.

The voice that we are asked to trust in a difficult situation does not actually sound in silence, but conducts an “internal dialogue” with us. This is a mental process during which we role-play our thoughts: we ask ourselves questions and answer, blame ourselves and make excuses, joke and laugh. At the level of neurophysiology, internal dialogue is structured in the same way as a conversation with a living person. It involves the same speech centers plus zones that are responsible for ideas about the way of thinking of other people. That is, we don’t just mentally pronounce words, but model someone else’s reaction. The prototype of our “internal interlocutor” is first our parents (usually our mother), and later - people who personify certain qualities (positive or negative) for us. There is an internal dialogue in the left hemisphere; there speech is generated and there it is interpreted. But it was not always so.

Bicameral Mind

Just 3,000 years ago (yes, this is not a typo - back in the days of Ancient Egypt), the speech centers in the brain were distributed differently, says American psychologist Julian Jaynes. The right hemisphere could serve as the generator of internal speech, and the left hemisphere as the receiver. He calls this model of the psyche “bicameral” by analogy with parliament, where one chamber develops laws and the other approves them. Ancient man literally listened with one hemisphere to the other, as if a real interlocutor was addressing him. Unlike us, he did not understand that the voice in his head was his own. He was sure that spirits, gods or dead ancestors were addressing him this way, and he blindly followed their instructions. All this might seem completely crazy if not for two facts.

Firstly, in modern people, the inner voice can also turn into an external one, if for some reason the ability to separate fantasies from real sensations, and thoughts from facts is turned off. Such conditions are described in detail in psychiatry as schizophrenia and paranoia. Second, we all experience a similar “double consciousness” every night in our sleep, as if taking a time machine back to our evolutionary past. Everything we dream is created by our brain. In a dream, each of us is not only a spectator and the main character, but also the author of the script, the director, the scene and the characters. It is we who give them the ability to speak, threaten, stand on their heads or ask for forgiveness. We share our consciousness with them. At the same time, the creations of our mind behave completely independently, often hostile, always unpredictable, and sometimes seem so alive that some people perceive dreams in which the dead appear as real contact.

How to hear your inner voice

Some people try to hear themselves through yoga and meditation, others achieve a state of trance. But everything can be made simpler. Use one of the psychological techniques:

1. Divide a sheet of paper into three columns.
2. In the first column on the right, write down all your desires at the moment.
3. In the column on the left, write down the desires and thoughts that conflict with the desires from the first list.
4. Re-read both lists.
5. Invite yourself to discuss what you have written. If you want, write down the dialogue (in summary or in full).
6. Now try on everything from the right list. What gives you positivity and warmth? What does your inner voice respond positively to? These are your true desires.
7. Place the letter “I” next to such desires.
8. If some desire does not respond warmly to you, then think about whose it is. Perhaps this was imposed on you by your mom or dad. Place the letter M or P next to it.
9. Do the same with the left list.
10. If you see a contradiction between your remaining desires from the first and second columns, then write down the middle ground between the conflicting elements in the middle column. If you understand that your desires are blocked by the desires of your parents (other people), then feel free to refuse the second one.

Do this exercise in complete silence. Choose a time and place where you can talk to yourself calmly, where nothing and no one will distract you.

God as a hallucination

So, for more than 200 thousand years since the advent of speech, the life of ancient man was like a mental disorder, an endless dream or a psychedelic trip? Yes and no. Hallucinations were common for him. But they served rather as a guide in conditions of uncertainty. “Only when confronted with a problem that required a new approach or a more complex solution than tradition dictated,” Jaynes writes, “could the nervous tension of having to make a decision trigger the appearance of auditory hallucinations.” Now, to enter such a state, we would need something stronger. Then there were enough figurines, religious buildings and home altars.

On an individual level, the ability to delegate difficult decisions to a “personal god” is a useful strategy for coping with stress. Don’t think, don’t weigh the pros and cons, don’t try to analyze the facts, just trust someone or something you don’t know. On a collective level, there is more. According to Jaynes, civilization is the ability to live in cities where no one knows anyone. The inner voice replaced our means of communication for the creators of the first megacities, helping to overcome disunity and connecting subjects with rulers, and the living with the dead.

“Who were these gods who controlled ancient people like robots and transmitted their messages through them? These were voices inside - their instructions were heard by the heroes of the Iliad as clearly as Joan of Arc and as some current patients with epilepsy and schizophrenia. The gods were a way of organizing the work of the central nervous system.” Julian Jaynes

Does this hypothesis have scientific basis? Julian Jaynes' book The Birth of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was published in 1976. In addition to ancient texts and artifacts, he relied on the revolutionary experiments of Roger Sperry, who, back in the 1960s, showed that surgically separated hemispheres of the brain begin to behave like two different personalities. Since then, new data has accumulated. Anthropologist Brian McVeigh supplemented Jaynes's examples with a wealth of archaeological evidence that the religiosity of all known early civilizations was implicated in hallucinations. And modern MRI studies have confirmed that auditory hallucinations are indeed associated with activity in the speech areas of the right hemisphere. (A detailed list of them is compiled on the website of the Julian Jaynes Society.) But noted Jaynes admirer, philosopher Daniel Dennett, believes that the main value of his “amazing and crazy” theory lies in one “bloody wonderful idea.”

PsyAndNeuro.ru

In 1913, Karl Jaspers wrote in “General Psychopathology”: “...psychopathologists deal with extensive material for which psychology has not yet described “normal” correspondences.” Little can be added to this phrase today: sometimes psychiatry and psychology do not seem to notice each other, colliding on the same territory. One of the complex issues that interests both psychiatrists and psychologists is inner speech (IS), an almost every minute phenomenon in our lives, which we are not used to thinking about. But when you try to describe it, it begins to look strange and alien: what do you call what is happening in our head? Inner voice? I tell them - to myself? Or can I hear it? And if I imagine a conversation with someone, does that mean there is someone else’s voice in my head? The phrases that inevitably come to mind are those that describe the distorted, disturbed thinking of psychiatric patients; but if they are appropriate for everyone, then what is the “disorder”? Let's try to figure out what psychologists managed to find out about the norm and how it turns into pathology.

Something as obvious to everyone as inner speech still needs to be seen. To be fair, it is considered a difficult subject to study due to extreme variability and subjectivity; internal speech is practically inaccessible to an external observer. With one exception: the so-called private speech, what Jean Piaget called “egocentric speech” in children. Many people speak when alone, and this often alarms others, but for specialists it has never been considered a pathological sign in itself [1]. In fact, “thinking out loud” performs a regulatory function: it helps to cope with emotions [2] and perform complex tasks [3]. Moreover, the more difficult the task, the more a person is inclined to pronounce his actions out loud: at this moment, internal speech seems to become external, therefore it is believed that private speech is directly related to VR and is sometimes called one of its forms.

An intuitive solution to the problem is self-reports in which people describe their inner speech. Various studies have tried to use diaries and structured interviews, but one of the most developed instruments to date is the VISQ (Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire), which has been studied by a team of psychologists led by Alderson-Day for many years [4]. The latest version consists of 35 questions that reveal the following characteristics of VR, quite recognizable from personal experience:

– dialogical or monologue character, “participation” of other people in internal dialogue

– connection with motivation, evaluative activity and self-esteem

– VR condensation - a tendency in the process to shorten sentences, omit endings, approaching the fastest possible transfer of meaning

– literal and metaphorical use of language

– peculiarities of perception of one’s own thoughts, tendency to refer to oneself, “talk about oneself” (in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd person)

In addition to retrospective self-reports, in which the subject is asked to characterize his or her VR as a whole, there are methods that involve reporting on momentary experience. The participant in the experiment is asked to wear a device in laboratory or natural conditions that emits signals (for example, sound), and describe his feelings at the moment of the signal [5].

Both retrospective and in-the-moment accounts have many methodological limitations; their main meaning is that most people are unaccustomed to self-reflection, are far from terminological precision (for example, they call completely different experiences in one word), face insurmountable difficulties when trying to determine at what moment and in what sequence certain thoughts appeared, and generally have serious biases about their own thought processes [6]. In the same way as scientists do regarding their own theories: accompanying experiments with numerous instructions and consultations, and simply formulating questions, they inevitably put into them their understanding of the problem. The quality of research also leaves much to be desired; Here is a quote from one of the recognized phenomenologists on the problem of VR:

…our studies have never been designed to study subjects who were a representative sample of some larger population (we never tried to select a representative sample of a larger population).

The study of VR can be made a little more objective by experiments where scientists try to “disturb” the course of VR and see how this affects the performance of various tasks. A typical example of such an experiment is a dual task. The subject is offered a task that needs to be solved “in his head,” perhaps using inner speech, but at the same time he is asked, for example, to pronounce a certain sound. This setup of the experiment takes into account the fact that we already know that tasks are completed more easily when we pronounce them, because internal speech contains the “rudiments” of external speech, and is easily transformed into it due to its connection with the articulatory system. Thus, if task performance deteriorates when articulation is suppressed, we can consider that we have “caught” inner speech [7]. You can do without the second task if it is possible to conduct electromyography: when a person is “ready” to speak, his muscles involved in articulation tense, even if in the end he does not do so [8].

In addition, tasks involving VR can be accompanied by various types of neuroimaging and encephalography [9], but they face the same problems as self-reports. It is difficult to understand which processes the recorded brain activity relates to: reading a task, completing it, or reacting to a sound signal.

There is no single definition of inner speech that would cover all its manifestations. A conversation with a friend in which you had to answer differently, reading a book to yourself and the process of choosing between ice cream and cake are obviously distinguished by a greater number of characteristics than are currently introduced into scientific use. Trying to classify VR, scientists rather identify features that are easier to describe and link to the results of research in related fields (in psychiatry and neuropsychology). Nevertheless, we were able to find out the following about what VR is like in different people and even in one person:

1) Expanded and reduced VR [10]

Developed internal speech is more similar to external speech, has more characteristics of a “real” text, and we can more easily imagine how it sounds: for example, we “see” rhyme when reading a poem. The same pattern applies to it as to egocentric speech: in a state of psycho-emotional stress and when solving a complex problem, a person tends to move from condensed to expanded VR [11].

In his classic works, Vygotsky called the abbreviated or “condensed” VR “thinking in pure meanings” [12]: it is devoid of most of the characteristics of oral speech, due to which it becomes less “clear” but more “fast.” Here doubts arise whether speech is necessary for thinking at all. In philosophy, this issue has always been problematized, while natural science unconditionally accepted that speech, language and thinking based on them are the key difference between humans and animals. This confidence is illustrated by a famous passage from Engels, where he ridicules Dühring’s “idealism”:

Let us quote only the following: “Whoever is able to think only through speech has not yet experienced what abstract and genuine thinking means.” If so, then animals turn out to be the most abstract and genuine thinkers, since their thinking is never obscured by the intrusive interference of speech [13].

Now we know much more about the behavior of animals and can no longer categorically state that they are incapable of forming concepts, planning activities and assimilating symbols [14].

Some phenomenologists insist on recognizing the phenomenon of “non-symbolized thinking,” when a certain idea is realized directly, without the participation of words: for example, a person notices an acquaintance on the street and thinks whether he will come up to say hello [15]. For this “question” or “expectation”, internal reasoning is not needed; it is easy to imagine that animals do this.

Rather, it would be correct to imagine the forms of VR from expanded to “pure thinking” as a continuum, a spectrum: described, for example, VR with partial omission of words, with meaningless words, or without words at all, but with preservation of the feeling of VR, in the form of, for example, internal speech rhythm [16]. Therefore, the disagreements between Engels and Dühring may not be so fundamental; perhaps they just have a different subjective experience of inner speech.

2) Active and passive VR, verbal imagination [16]

On the same continuum, different types of VR appear to be located depending on how passively they are experienced. Just as users of social networks are from time to time fascinated by the question: “Is the voice you think is male or female?”, not everyone can immediately answer, hear

he is his inner voice or
tells
them.

The most common feeling among respondents is that VR is an active phenomenon, that is, they are completely in control of it. But we often encounter a type of experience in which VR seems to happen on its own, “comes to mind,” although the person recognizes himself as its only possible source. Another option is inner hearing, when a person “hears” inner speech and perceives it passively, as if his own or someone else’s voice is replaying in his head. In this case, the sensation of the sound of this voice may be absent or may be as pronounced as for active VR. In the same way, the respondent calls himself, his own thinking, the only possible source of such experience, that is, with all the alarming turns in the description, inner hearing is not a clear phenomenon of influence or passivity in schizophrenia. However, studies have assessed it as a rather rare [15] and alarming [7] phenomenon. It has been suggested that a tendency to experience inner hearing may predispose to verbal hallucinosis [7]. But even here we have not yet moved into the field of psychiatry: a small percentage of the population has subclinical verbal hallucinosis of an inpatient course and does not need help [16]. That is, it should be recognized that there is a situation where the characteristics of the nervous organization and/or subjective perception of VR fit the definition of hallucinosis, but not the criteria of a mental disorder.

As an example of inner hearing, Hurlburt [17] cites a situation familiar to many, when a familiar song “sticks” in the head: its sound characteristics are clearly remembered, but at the same time they are not felt like sound; It cannot be said that the one who has a song “stuck” in his head sings it himself - the performer sings it. This description already evokes other associations: often this form takes what a psychiatrist could call obsessive, and a psychotherapist could call intrusive, but rare works comment on this phenomenological similarity.

Another form that may explain the appearance of VR fragments, the content of which is less controlled than usual, is the so-called verbal memory and verbal imagination. Many properties identified in psychological experiments make verbal imagination similar to the concept of VR: it is also amenable to interference in dual-task experiments and involves the same neuroanatomical areas [18]. In this regard, a hypothesis is put forward that, in its origin and essence, VR is verbal imagination [19], but there are many arguments against it: for example, the content and functions of VR.

3) About whom, for what and how much

The generally accepted opinion is that VR occupies us almost constantly, but when trying to measure its frequency using the method described above with reports “by signal”, it turned out that there are people who have never registered VR in themselves during the whole day when a signal was given, and the frequency of their VR was estimated at 0%; There were also those whose incidence of VR was 100% [17]. The median VR was only about 20% [20].

As for the content of inner speech, the study on a sample of students obtained quite predictable results. Mostly, respondents thought about themselves – close people, friends and colleagues occupied a significantly smaller place in their minds. Among the topics, one’s own emotional state and the current situation dominated, and among the functions of VR, planning, memorizing information, self-motivation and decision-making came to the fore [21].

Two fundamental points of view on the origin of VR were formulated back in the middle of the last century, and all current theoretical constructions are based on them. The founder of behaviorism D.B. Watson believed that our activity is not much different from the activity of animals, based on conditioned reflexes. The motor act is not only speech, but also the notorious thinking - it was he who first suggested that during VR there is tension in the laryngeal muscles. He also found a lot of other evidence that VR is accompanied by motor activity close to articulation: whispering, mooing, moving lips. On this basis, he concluded that our “internal” activity is just a reduced external activity; its difference consists only in a decrease in the severity of the actual motor response [7,12].

The theory of the Soviet psychologist L.S. became more popular. Vygotsky, which continues to be developed in our time [7,12]. He suggested that when a child develops VR, his experience of communication with adults is internalized. He partially supported Watson's opinion, but believed that speech undergoes significant changes during internalization:

• shortening syntax
• lexical agglutination, when we silently use hybrid words for complex concepts
• The “personal” meaning, based on personal experience and not always understandable to others, prevails over the “conventional” meaning of the word
• saturation of lexical units with meaning, when, also in connection with personal experience, they acquire a broader meaning than in general use, in external speech.

It is interesting to note that the appearance of these signs in external speech (hybrid words - neologisms, focus on word meanings that are incomprehensible to the interlocutor and have personal meaning) in classical pathopsychology indicates thinking disorders of the schizophrenic type [23].

Speaking about the formation of VR in a child, it is also worth mentioning the concept of the Theory of Mind (ToM), or “model of someone else’s consciousness” - the ability to attribute to others, as well as to oneself, a wide range of states of consciousness (relating to cognition and motivation), as well as the ability based on This idea of ​​the state of others is to understand the meaning of their actions and try to predict them [24]. It is assumed that ToM, as it exists in adults, is the result of the interaction of two functional systems: early forms of recognizing the intentions of others and gradually developing speech [25]. The functional organization characteristic of ToM and speech in children undergoes significant changes with age: there are many more common structures [26]. That is, we are talking about mutual influence, and the formation of VR is under the influence of the ToM function; ToM, as it were, is included in inner speech, intertwined with it [7].

From the point of view of neuropsychology, VR is based on a number of processes [7]

• a functional network that enables speech in general. This includes communication with the motor cortex (in the form of subvocal articulation, tension of the laryngeal muscles, up to muttering and moving the lips) and “waiting for feedback” - the vigilance of sensory systems, which during external speech are designed to control whether the planned speech act is performed correctly (proprioception from articulatory muscles [27], auditory perception of one’s own speech [28]).
• lexical memory, which provides the VR process with “pure meanings”, and phonetic memory, necessary for their development into a form reminiscent of one’s own or someone else’s speech;
• long-term memory, from which we retrieve something to think about, and short-term memory, in which we retain to remember what we just said and read;
• the ToM system and the so-called social cognition - the ability to assess the relationship a person has with other members of society, and build behavior in society based on these assessments.

Separately, all these processes are being quite actively studied by neuroimaging methods, but there are not yet enough studies that would approach the issue using VR optics.

The most famous neuroimaging phenomenon that appears to be related to VR is the default mode network, a network of passive modes of brain operation, that is, a system of neurons active in a state of passive wakefulness. Phenomenologically, this state corresponds to the so-called mind wandering: a state of absent-mindedness, “daydreaming.” Studies assess the verbal component of mind wandering differently; apparently, most of the time is occupied by visual imagination, and virtual reality accounts for only about 30% [29]. Various researchers have discovered areas in the passive mode network whose activity is associated with ToM and such components of speech as, for example, semantic memory.

As for the works devoted directly to the neuroimaging of VR, their main idea is the extreme similarity of the neural organization of VR with that for ordinary, “external” speech [9], however, there are also differences that are of interest. The regions involved in VR are those necessary for the production and perception of speech, such as the inferior frontal gyrus, supplementary motor area, superior and middle temporal gyri. Internal speech, like external speech, is characterized by predominant left-sided lateralization, but certain functions were specifically localized in the right hemisphere, such as, for example, the ability to imagine someone else’s voice [30]. An interesting but predictable finding was the involvement of regions traditionally associated with ToM in VR processes, especially conversational ones, such as the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cuneus and precuneus, and the parietotemporal region, which includes the posterior superior temporal gyrus, angular gyrus, and inferior temporal lobe.

Knowledge of these processes and their neural mechanisms can form the basis for an idea of ​​the organization of VR, and, what is even more interesting, serve as the basis for studying the physiological causes of VR pathology in various mental disorders. Many clinical descriptions inevitably include the patient's self-report of the features of VR, but the path from such a clinical description to a satisfactory understanding of the disease is not short. First of all, it is necessary to understand that among adapted indices that do not meet the criteria for a mental disorder, BP is extremely variable, and many of its features that are considered pathological in traditional psychopathology are in fact regularly found in the “norm”. Further, inner speech, like just speech, like all higher nervous functions, is simply a term under which it is convenient for us to unite disparate phenomena; the illusion that we see an image in chaotically located elements. In fact, both from the point of view of functional organization in the brain and from the point of view of neuropsychology, VR is the result of the interaction of components of an extremely complex network. All brain domains that are related to VR are known to us from studies of other functions, and all neuropsychological processes that are necessary for the implementation of VR are also involved in other types of nervous activity. By gaining a complete understanding of how these systems function outside of pathology, we would gain more information from comparisons with pathologically functioning systems. And, since “pathology” is as variable as the “norm,” studies of the “deep phenotyping” type may be more promising for VR, when one object is studied comprehensively, rather than combined with others into groups that, when the paradigm changes, will turn out to be random.

Author of the text: Shishkovskaya T.I.

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Old hardware - new software

There are many mysteries in the history of our species. One of them is the dramatic acceleration of scientific and technological progress in the last 2000 years. Major inventions of antiquity (the boat, the bow and arrow, sewing needles) were accomplished at a rate of about once every 10,000 years. And then - as if someone had turned on the afterburners - humanity in a short time covered the path from the wheel to Tesla and Hubble. At the same time, the structure of the human brain has remained virtually unchanged over the past 50,000 years. Jaynes's theory provides a possible solution.

The reason is not the hardware evolution, but the software revolution. We didn't change the hardware. Taking advantage of the plasticity of the brain, we simply downloaded new software onto it, which turned out to be more effective. To do this, it was necessary to add one option to our consciousness - the ability to separate: fantasies from reality, thoughts from facts, our “I” from other “I”, the inner voice from the order from the outside. How technically did this happen? Jaynes suggests that the main stimulus was the creation of writing. By being able to record the voice in one's head, one was able for the first time to think about its orders instead of blindly following them. And he realized that this voice belonged to himself. The split consciousness became united. But not immediately and not completely.

“We are in the process of transitioning to a new mentality. Everywhere we are still surrounded by remnants of our “bicameral” past: our presidents swear an oath to long-silent gods, placing their hands on texts written down by the last people who heard divine voices.” Julian Jaynes

After the release of a new system, there are always those who want to stick with the old, time-tested software. Until now, people are trying to simulate duality of the psyche with the help of religious rituals and practices. Even people who are far from religion, in a situation of uncertainty, are tempted to entrust the decision to “external forces” - cast lots, tell fortunes, act on a whim.

There is strength in fear

We are all afraid of something. Phobias are a cry from the very depths of the subconscious. Surprisingly, fear is the other side... of strength. Look into his face to get to know yourself from an unexpected side

If you're afraid

...darkness

In fact, this means that you are a positive person in all respects, endowed with a rich imagination. Even too rich! It is this that populates the darkness with monsters and scenes from watched horror films.

Use this ability for good: choose a creative profession, try writing a script or a novel. And the darkness can always be dispersed with the weak light of a night lamp. But is it necessary if it inspires your brain to be creative?

...blood

This phobia characterizes you as a bastion of calm. Surely you have mastered Zen, you are always very collected, and you feel your body as an inviolable temple. It is possible that you are an adherent of a healthy lifestyle and inspire others to do so. This is why the sight of blood terrifies you so much. After all, this is a signal that harmony is broken, something is wrong with the body-temple!

Your strength lies in the example that you are able to set for others, in your ability to calm, inspire, and organize the world around you.

... spiders

Arachnophobia indicates that you are an individual, a strong personality, even a leader by nature. After all, the fear of spiders is associated with the subconscious fear of getting caught in someone’s web, of being tied hand and foot, of being followed and not leading. Learn to delegate authority at work and trust your loved ones more. You can’t always carry everything on yourself!

...clowns

Your strong point is honesty and straightforwardness. The ability to read people's emotions and clearly understand their intentions has historically been the key to survival. This is why clowns scare you so much - because you don’t know what lies behind their grimaces.

If the fear is too strong, remember that “the biggest stupid things in the world are done with a serious expression on your face.” Allow yourself to have fun and relax more often.

...snake

This fear means that you are... an excellent friend and family man, you can always be relied upon and at any moment you are ready to rush to the defense of those you love. After all, a snake is an image of danger hanging deep in the genes, not only for you personally, but also for those around you.

If you are afraid of snakes, you are afraid for other people. And although this phobia does you credit, sometimes it’s worth wondering: do you sometimes forget about yourself? After all, only relationships in which there is true reciprocity are truly strong and last a long time.

... loneliness

You are the life of the party, you just need to be the center of attention. This is all great, but maybe you're just avoiding yourself? If you are in a happy marriage, and the fear of loneliness does not leave you, you definitely need to get to know yourself better: learn to meditate, find the beauty in solo activities, for example, reading.

If you are really lonely, you need to accept yourself all the more, because the most interesting person (and therefore attractive to others!) is the one who is not bored with himself.

Mindfulness as a Debugging Tool

In the TV series Westworld, inspired by the theory of Julian Jaynes, this model is projected onto the evolution of humanoid biorobots. Anthony Hopkins's character explains to his assistant Bernard that their artificial intelligence was designed in such a way that, in a situation of choice, they would perceive the programmed commands as prompts from an invisible interlocutor, and over time, perhaps, they would learn to distinguish his voice from their own and modify their program themselves. We've already done this. But by evolutionary standards, we downloaded new software quite recently. For now we are all beta testers. Therefore, we need to constantly catch bugs and send regular reports to the developer, that is, to ourselves. This debugging tool is called “mindfulness.” In its simplest form, it really is about listening to your inner voice. But not in search of answers, as the people of antiquity did, but in order to understand whether he really belongs to us or is simply repeating someone else’s opinion. As a result, we will finally say goodbye to the good old “bicameral” world - with its romantic gods and miracles that camouflage prosaic causes and consequences. But at the moment of a difficult choice, we will less and less often have to flip a coin or follow inexplicable impulses similar to someone else’s will.

Listen to your body

Should you trust your instincts when it comes to important choices? One day, a well-known automobile company shared the results of an interesting survey. Of those buyers who carefully selected a car, meticulously studying and comparing the options of different models, only 25% were subsequently satisfied with the purchase. Among those who bought a car, “falling in love with it at first sight,” that is, making an intuitive decision, the percentage of satisfied people reached 60%. It turns out that girls, choosing “that little red car over there,” are not so wrong? Is your intuition really correct?

What is intuition from a scientific point of view? It’s as if two operating systems exist in parallel in our brain. System No. 1 is controlled by the right hemisphere and those areas of the brain that were formed in prehistoric times, when reptiles inhabited the earth, and reaction speed was the key to survival. System No. 2, slower, analytical, is controlled by the left hemisphere and those parts of the brain that were formed in the later stages of evolution. Instinct (intuition) lurks somewhere in the depths of system No. 1.

Sixth sense or third eye

Scientists often give primacy to the “sixth sense” to the right half of the brain, which is considered creative. Inspiration lives there and thanks to it we take completely illogical actions in life. In this hemisphere, all our “experience”, feelings and thoughts are collected in the subconscious.

But the left hemisphere is responsible for logic, and it analyzes all actions and makes its decision. Our voice of “reason” lives there, which most people follow, and it drowns out the voice of “intuition”.

Therefore, it is worth developing both halves of our brain, this is what all successful people do. Give your body time to teach you to recognize this “inner voice,” especially if you are learning to develop intuition on your own.

✔️ Advice. Start by using your right and left hand when writing. For example, write a question with your right hand and an answer with your left hand. Over time, new “neural connections” will begin to appear in your brain, and then the voice of “intuition” will begin to give clues.

A spoon of tar

However, some people manage to tell themselves unnecessary things. And then the constructive dialogue turns into destructive. Here are just a few examples of how NOT to talk to yourself.

Getting hung up on negative thoughts: constantly scolding yourself, blaming yourself, criticizing, whining, complaining about life, considering yourself the most unhappy person in the world. This is a direct path to depression and neurosis. After all, you undermine self-confidence and put yourself in the position of a victim.

Endlessly “chew” the events of days gone by: “Oh, why did I do that then! Because of this, everything went wrong!” What's the point of poking around in the past? He is no longer there. Such thoughts distract you from the present. Life passes by, and with it new acquaintances, work, opportunities.

Overreflect and withdraw into yourself. It takes a lot of strength and energy. In addition, instead of solving pressing problems - enrolling your child in a music school, making repairs, cleaning the apartment - you live in an imaginary world.

How to understand what you want? 5 tips from Barbara Sher

More details

“Life” examples of tips from intuition

Remember your cases. Often, for example, my inner voice warns me about “traffic jams,” but I stubbornly move in the wrong direction and end up in a traffic jam. And then I reproach myself for “why not use” this hint that was in my head.

And recently, a friend of mine told me that before his wedding he lost his passport and could not find it. Then I found him, got married, and many years later still got divorced. That was the hint. We ourselves often do not notice such hints and calls from the Universe.

You can also give an example about D.I. Mendeleev, who dreamed of his periodic table. But you understand that she couldn’t dream “out of the blue,” this is a direct continuation of the work of the subconscious.

✔️ Advice. To do this, many psychologists advise writing “morning pages.” The technique is quite simple. Prepare 5-6 sheets of A4 paper and a pen in the evening, and place them near the bed. Woke up in the morning and without getting out of bed, take these sheets of paper and start writing everything that comes to your mind. There is no need to evaluate what is written, connect it with something, or think about something. Here you just need to write and that’s it. Then you can get up and go about your business.

You can return to these sheets in the evening or in a few days, perhaps some important hint for you will appear there. This will only happen if you train your intuition yourself.

On the right hemisphere

Now we watch our hands: when something greatly outweighs or overly predominates - for example, too much rational calculation to the detriment of spontaneity and creativity, then there is a need to somehow correct this imbalance, restore balance. Hence the interest in all kinds of “right-brain” activities. It seems that half of Moscow and some other large cities of Russia are passionate about “right-brain” drawing. Trainings on spontaneity and creativity are neck and neck in popularity with time management, seminars “How to make your first million” and “How to find the man of your dreams.”

Such a phenomenon as intuition lives in the same “right-hemisphere” irrational sector. The Internet offers hundreds of links on how to develop your intuition online, without leaving your home and very, very quickly. Because a modern person even needs to develop intuition at a stunning pace and solely for rational reasons: so as not to waste time making decisions, in order to immediately see which game is worth the candle, where to invest money and where to look for the man of your dreams.

One of my good friends, a tough business woman without much sentimentality, but with spiritual needs, believes that yoga and meditation help her get in touch with her intuition. “I need to calm down and listen to the voice of my intuition,” she declares, and another, detailed business plan is already lying on the table in front of her. Surprisingly, the intuition that my friend manages to hear during meditation always agrees with the income plan. But he likes to make adjustments to the expenditure side. I am deeply shocked by such thriftiness, unexpected for an irrational function. On the other hand, nothing surprising: rational people often mistake their secret desires and plans for intuitive insights.

Your inner monologue affects your mental well-being

Happy is the one who knows how to calm his internal dialogue; the feeling of relief from this can be palpable.

According to one study, we talk to ourselves at the equivalent of 4,000 words per minute (by comparison, the President's State of the Union address, which is typically about 6,000 words, lasts more than an hour). It's no surprise, then, that listening to internal monologue can be exhausting, whether it's a rambling stream of thoughts or compulsive rehashing of events, free-associative jumping from one thought to another, or frantic internal dialogue.

Such noise can be paralyzing and it can harm us. What we experience inside can overshadow almost everything else if we allow it to happen. For example, research published in 2010 shows that internal experiences consistently outshine external ones, meaning that once a brooding thought takes hold, it can ruin even the best party, or cause us to miss out on the most anticipated new job.