Seminar

"I was sitting on a bench, five minutes with myself,
Lost in my thoughts that spoke to me without words."
Do you hear a voice when you silently read these words by Grand Corps Malade (ndlr: a French singer)? Inner speech, or endophasia, has multiple functions: memory, reasoning, decision-making, planning, self-awareness. These functions are associated with various forms. Endophasia can be condensed or deployed sensorially. It can manifest itself in the form of monologues or dialogues, intentionally or unintentionally. These variations also depend on the individual. Some people have inner voices that are almost real, while others, who have verbal auditory aphantasia, have no sense of an inner voice. The ConDialInt neurocognitive model accounts for this diversity by conceiving endophasia as an exaptation of the predictive mechanisms involved in speech control: the inner voice would emerge from an interruption in the production process upstream of motor execution. The degree of condensation would depend on the precocity of the interruption, while dialogicity would be based on variations in predictive processes and intentionality would be linked to the degree of control exercised over these predictions. This model, which is compatible with neuroanatomical data, sheds light on atypical forms of endophasia, such as aphantasia or verbal auditory hallucinations, and opens up new perspectives on the diversity of inner speech experiences.