Abstract

One component of our conscious self-awareness is the voice we hear inside our heads, a form of 'inner speech'. This voice of our conscious thoughts is an exact reflection of our personal voice, with our vocabulary, favourite phrases, and regional idioms. In this paper I present a neurobiological model for the mechanism behind these language-based conscious thoughts. Central to this model is the process of associative conditioning. Through repeated pairings of the neural processes of speech with those of auditory perception of the words spoken, when the action of speech is triggered, but in this case vocalization is inhibited, the neural mechanisms underlying its perception are activated and create 'hearing' the unspoken words. Interestingly, the model predicts the form in which the 'inner voice' of the deaf who have no spoken language and communicate through Sign actually experience their thoughts