What's Going On Inside My Head?: A Let’s Talk picture book to start conversations with your child about positive mental health

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They found that the students in the study were talking to themselves about everything from school to their emotions, other people, and themselves, while they were doing everyday tasks like walking and getting in and out of bed. These results can’t be generalised to everyone, but they do provide food for thought when it comes to our own inner experiences – especially for those of us who haven’t really stopped to consider what is actually running through our minds day in, day out. At the end of the day, you debrief with a psychologist who asks questions to get at exactly what was in your head in that moment, and what form it took: words, pictures, an emotion, a physical sensation, or something else.

Interestingly, the technique was an extension of a serendipitous finding by clinicians during the First World War. Activities that help include taking enough breaks during any project, including going out in nature, to rejuvenate ourselves.

When we look at current events and just look at all the chaos that’s out in the world right now, especially in 2020, it’s amazing. But the person we talk to inside our head is not always a stand in for someone else – often, that other voice is another aspect of ourselves. It wasn’t until I ventured outside of my head and spoke to someone about it, actually opened up and sought another opinion, that I realised what I had been doing to myself for so many years. But yes, I think it is a full-circle moment for me when it comes to the Chris Stapleton [connection].

He ran a study that involved training five people in DES, and then recording what went on in their brains while they underwent an fMRI scan. The app allows users to create short videos set to music or other audio, and share them with others. For the first time, neurologists could actually see brain pathologies such as intracerebral haemorrhage – when a blood vessel bursts within the brain – with startling clarity. In his years of studying the inner workings of people’s minds, Hurlburt has come up with five categories of inner experiences: inner speaking, which comes in a variety of forms; inner seeing, which could feature images of things you’ve seen in real life or imaginary visuals; feelings, such as anger or happiness; sensory awareness, like being aware of the scratchiness of the carpet under your feet; and unsymbolised thinking, a trickier concept to get your head around, but essentially a thought that doesn’t manifest as words or images, but is undoubtedly present in your mind. To speak to each other, humans need certain brain regions, ears, vocal tracts—but most importantly, social interaction.Cellular biology involves the study of cellular structure and function in all its facets – how it acts as a minute factory with inputs, outputs and energy sources. So we have internal interruptions, and it could be an urge, it’s a memory of something that we have to do, it’s this desire to look at social media – so we distract ourselves,” Mark said. This might seem obvious, but Mark said that our attentional resources are not limitless; like a gas tank, if we use up too much without refilling, we’ll hit Empty. A 2013 review by Hurlburt and his colleagues points to huge individual differences between people in how much time they spend talking to themselves in their head that have been uncovered through studies using DES. The first is the world, the flesh, the devil, and then the fourth voice that’s in our head is the Holy Spirit.

Several brain regions are involved in the process simultaneously—mainly the hippocampus and the temporal lobes. Though the number of participants was small, the results, published in 2018, suggest that what people say they are thinking about and what’s going on in their brains does match up. Jesus is speaking and he says, “But the counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you all things.Or as one of her colleagues sometimes puts it: “Inner speech is your flashlight in the dark room that is your mind. I’m constantly thinking about what I need to do next, worrying about things that could go wrong, and trying to come up with ideas. Common brain fog causes include eating too much and too often, inactivity, not getting enough sleep, chronic stress, and a poor diet. You're not thinking those thoughts, because you need to think those thoughts, or because you want to think those thoughts, or because they arise to you naturally – you're doing it because you've been told to.

Or as American philosopher William James put it in 1890: “The attempt at introspective analysis… is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. The most common symptoms may include headaches, seizures or convulsions, and difficulty thinking, speaking or finding words. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. If you experience any of these symptoms, it’s important to see a doctor so that the cause can be investigated. So when there is a problem with the brain, like a tumor, it can cause problems with sensation in different parts of the body.

A child not taught to speak at this age, without any experience of social interaction, will probably never be able to speak or understand human speech.