Research · Concept
The voice in your head, and where it comes from
Inner speech is the silent voice in your head — the running commentary, the rehearsal of what to say, the way you talk yourself through a hard problem. It feels obvious once you notice it, but where it comes from is one of the most interesting questions in psychology.
Vygotsky's answer (1934) was that inner speech is social speech turned inward: children first think out loud, in dialogue with others, and gradually internalise that dialogue until it runs silently. Charles Fernyhough later refined this into a continuum — inner speech can be fully expanded (a real back-and-forth, complete with different points of view) or condensed (compressed to a flash of meaning with no words at all).
This is the soil my first paper grew out of. The inner voice I describe — DIVP — is what happens when the expanded, dialogical mode never fully condenses: it stays a genuine conversation partner, with its own tone and persistence, well past the age it usually fades.