What do we mean by 'thinking'?

Jad and the team at Radiolab have just released a new show, called Words. I talked to them about the role of language in the development of children's thinking. You can listen to the podcast here. And you really should check out the accompanying video as well.

Quite a few things came out of the discussion which I wanted to comment on some more. So I have written a post on my PT blog to explain in more detail how I see things working here. The post is called "What do we mean by 'thinking'?", and you can check it out here.

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Thinking about almost everything

A quick plug for the new publication from Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study. With an introduction by Durham's Chancellor, Bill Bryson, Thinking About Almost Everything is a multi-disciplinary collection of short pieces on ideas that are motivating research and thought today. You'll find articles on the role of feelings in thinking, the dual nature of thought, irrationality in decision-making, and the active nature of vision. Beyond the psychological, the book contains contributions from disciplines as diverse as quantum mechanics and music theology (that was a new one on me as well). 

I have contributed a piece on mental voices, which connects with a few of the ideas already chewed over in this blog. You can order the book at a special discount here. 

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Shh... quiet please

Children and silence: surely two incompatible notions. As followers of this blog will know, I have spent much of my time recently arguing that young children's thought processes are all on the outside, at least initially. Children conduct their dialogues of thought externally, for all to hear. For this reason alone, being with a toddler is a noisy place to be.

But it somehow feels odd to be making that statement. Some of my most profoundly happy memories of parenthood are of moments when I have been with one or the other of my small children, saying nothing and hearing nothing said in return, nor expecting any such bids for verbal connection. It is possible to be peaceful and silent with a child, I think, in a way that other adults rarely let us be. Sara Maitland captures this in her wonderful new non-fiction work, A Book of Silence. She cites the claim of Donald Winnicott, the famous English psychoanalyst, that the capacity to enjoy silence stems from 'the child's experience of being alone in the presence of the mother'. These are moments when all bodily needs have been attended to, and there is nothing left but to enjoy the presence of the other. In Chapter 4 of The Baby in the Mirror, I describe a similar epiphany in a moment of profound peace I shared with Athena, when she was six weeks old. It was an early morning, and she had just been fed. She wanted human contact, and even as a very small baby she was an expert in obtaining it. We simply lay and looked at each other in the dawn light, saying nothing and wanting nothing except the presence of the other. This tiny human was an expert in the art of silence, and she was teaching me something.

Maitland's funny, humane and wide-ranging work makes us think about the developmental aspects of silence in other ways, too. In a fascinating section on silent reading, she explores the idea that the internalisation of reading—its transformation from overt speaking-aloud to the silent processing of text—marked a critical moment in the evolution of the modern self. 'The practice of silent reading led to individual, or independent thinking', as Maitland puts it. St Augustine was the key figure in this transition, although Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, seemed to have given Augustine the idea.

You can read reviews of A Book of Silence in the Times, the Guardian, the Independent and the Economist. An extract from the book is published in the Guardian. I will be in conversation with Sara Maitland at St. Chad's College, Durham, tomorrow night (Wednesday 19th November) from 7pm.

The Baby in the Mirror has been chosen by Marina Warner as a Book of the Year in the New Statesman. You can read the full article here.

Finally, all the books mentioned in this blog can be ordered through Amazon.co.uk: simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the icons in the carousel on the right.

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Thinking about thinking

I've been blogging away from home this week, on the topic of tonight's radio talk. You can see my post on the School of Life's blog by clicking here.

I'll be saying more on the topic at our IAS-sponsored Thinking with Feeling workshop in Durham on Saturday.

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Talk on children's thinking

The talk mentioned in the previous post will be broadcast on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can see a few more details here.

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Off to Broadcasting House

I write this on a train to London, where I'm due to record a talk for Radio 3 on children's thinking. I'll be talking about Vygotsky's theory of inner speech development and drawing some connections to the experience of voice-hearing. I'll post further details on the talk when I know them. 

Writing the talk has made me think a lot about how we might get more reliable information about young children's experience. I see this as a big part of my fellowship at the IAS, and the book on thinking that I am working on. Watch out for some more ideas on this as I go on. As ever, I'd be fascinated to hear any ideas or suggestions! 

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Swept up in the stream

As for his sister before him, bedtime for Isaac is a time for pondering the mysteries of consciousness. The other evening, Lizzie was settling him to sleep when, somewhat out of the blue, she quoted a line from The Gruffalo's Child, one of his favourite storybooks. Aha! Oho! Tracks in the snow! Whose are these tracks and where do they go? Nothing in particular had triggered this comment: there were no animal tracks on his orange duvet, and certainly no snow. It was just one of those thoughts that pop into your head for no particular reason, as thoughts do. Irrational they might seem, but unbidden, irrelevant thoughts such as these are occurrences with which, as adults, we are all perfectly familiar.

'Ah,' Isaac observed, 'so now you've got two things going round in your head!'

Baffled, Lizzie asked him to explain. Earlier, he reminded her, she had suddenly started singing the theme tune from a computer game they had been playing. When Isaac had asked her why, she had responded: 'Because it was going round in my head'. Isaac was simply recalling his mother's report of that earlier unbidden thought, and imagining it being joined in its lonely cranial revolutions by this new one.

What do children understand about where thoughts come from? As I noted in an earlier post, young children can get quite confused about the provenance of the contents of their minds. At times, they can give surprisingly materialistic explanations. Just before falling asleep one evening, Isaac mentioned the kids' spy drama MI High, of which his big sister is a fan. Lizzie asked him why he had suddenly started thinking of that. 'The thought was in my neck,' he replied, 'and then it just popped up into my head.' Perhaps he would give the same account of his mother's Gruffalo-themed musings. I envisage little thought pods lying dormant somewhere in the spinal column, and then hatching when local conditions are right, to flood the cortex with colour.

I'm not sure that we adults have much better theories about how thoughts can suddenly break into consciousness like this. One thing we can do, though, is look at what people understand about the controllability of their thoughts. In a series of studies, John Flavell and colleagues have asked this question of young children. One experimental procedure involves introducing children to a special chair called the 'No-Thinking' chair. When you are sitting in this chair, the child participant is told, you can make your thoughts stop altogether. Would you like to try? Recent studies show that, until at around age eight, children really do claim that their stream of consciousness ceases altogether when they are sitting in the chair. Slightly older children, in contrast, recognise that the tap of thoughts cannot simply get turned off. Ideas about mental uncontrollability seem to be very important later in life, in determining how adults respond to intrusive thoughts such as worries, obsessions, and possibly even hallucinations. Understanding the often chaotic flow that runs through our minds is, it seems, a process that gets started early in life.

Later, we ask Isaac whether he can stop these thoughts going round in his head. He sounds optimistic. 'Sometimes, like when I go to sleep, they stop, but when I wake up they start again. And after I've had my breakfast they really start!'

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All children are psychotic

Psychosis is a misunderstood term. Journalists are always confusing it with psychopathy, just as they often still insist that a 'schizophrenic' is someone with a Jekyll-and-Hyde-style split personality. (I could blame T. S. Eliot for this, but that would require another post.) In newspaper-speak, calling someone psychotic seems to mean that they are especially nasty and especially cold-hearted, in the mould of Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (I once saw both described thus, within a page of each other, in a British Sunday newspaper). If I were one of the large number of people who suffer in silence from a psychotic disorder, I would feel angry and more than a little betrayed. The irony is that psychosis found favour as a term among those many clinicians and researchers who were tired of the deep-rooted misconceptions about schizophrenia, and who now find that their preferred term has become as semantically garbled as its predecessor. 

In fact, psychosis refers to a group of psychiatric disorders which involve some disturbed relation to reality. The hallmarks of psychosis are symptoms like hallucinations (the perception of entities that are not actually present) and delusions (irrational, unshakeable beliefs about how things are). Among patients who receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, one of the most common such symptoms is auditory verbal hallucinations, or hearing voices when no one is speaking. There is good evidence that these experiences are not confined to those with psychiatric diagnoses. Although voice-hearing can be a distressing, frightening and debilitating experience, several recent surveys have shown that a sizeable minority of healthy people hear voices and live with them quite comfortably. It may be entrenched in our cultural understanding as a first sign of madness, but voice-hearing is a phenomenon that affects people right across the spectrum of sanity and insanity.

It may also be an experience that is particularly prevalent in childhood. Last month saw the appearance of our article on children's susceptibility to imaginary verbal experiences, and the culmination of some research conducted over a number of years in Australia, the UK and the US. The roots of our work lay in some classic studies with adult psychiatric patients. In the 1970s, an experiment by Mintz and Alpert showed that voice-hearing schizophrenia patients (when compared to non-voice-hearing patients) produced especially vivid auditory imagery in the absence of any relevant stimulation. In the 1990s, Feelgood and Rantzen found a similar pattern among healthy adults who scored highly on a measure of susceptibility to hallucinations. Their experiment involved playing college students a recording of white noise and asking them whether they could hear any words being spoken. The students who were more prone to hallucinations were more likely to report having heard voices speaking amidst the noise. As described in his popular book on the psychology of psychosis, Madness Explained, Richard Bentall has suggested that voice-hearing happens because hearers have a difficulty in distinguishing between real and imagined events. Under certain circumstances, the individuals affected become tricked into believing that an experience, like a voice, that they have imagined has actually been perceived from the outside. 

This is a mistake that is particularly likely to occur in childhood. Young children have rich imaginative lives, but they also have a rather weak understanding of the boundary between reality and fantasy. Asking children to decide whether an experience is internally or externally generated may therefore be a tall order. We wondered whether one indicator of children's susceptibility to such confusions might be their reporting of imaginary companions. Dating at least as far back as Julian Jaynes' classic (and controversial) study of the origins of consciousness, several observers have noted that engaging with an imaginary playmate bears similarities with the experience of hallucinations. In a 2001 article, a team from the Isle of Wight found that children (aged 9–11) who admitted having had an imaginary companion were more likely to report hearing words in a recording of a human voice which had been treated so that the language was unintelligible. In our own study, we made some improvements to methodology and found the same results in two younger samples of children (ages 4–8). Children who reported having an imaginary friend were more likely to say that they heard words being spoken in a recording of jumbled-up, meaningless speech sounds, and this relation could not be accounted for by any obvious factors like age, gender or IQ. 

There are several reasons why children might be susceptible to confusing an imagined experience with a real one. Although kids often show a good understanding of the distinction between fantasy and reality, they can give out rather mixed signals when asked whether their imaginary friends are real or not. My niece, Annabel, had an imaginary friend called Mr Plate, who liked eating peas but was very badly behaved. When I asked her whether Mr Plate was real, she was indignant. Of course he was only pretend; how could I possibly think otherwise? And yet when I asked her whether I, a reality-rooted adult, would be able to meet and talk to Mr Plate, she promised that this could be arranged. I think we can get too caught up on the question of whether children know the difference between what is real and what is not real. Much more fruitful, in my view, is to ask what children understand about their own mental experience. In the strange world of childhood, what is internal is also external. Thoughts bleed into reality, as what is objectively real gradually takes up residence in the world of the mental. Drawing the boundary of one's individual mind, as a hermetically sealed entity that is unknowable to others, is a childhood's work.  

One issue is that young children have a rather weak understanding of how thinking operates. Indeed, they probably do not start to think, in the sense of experiencing a predominantly verbal stream of consciousness, until they have had a chance to internalize the linguistic social dialogues that are going on around them. In Chapter 8 of The Baby in the Mirror, I look at the work of the great Soviet psychologist, L. S. Vygotsky, whose writings have transformed our understanding of how thinking develops in childhood. Vygotsky argued that the ongoing internal conversation we call 'thinking' develops when the child's social interactions become reconstructed internally, in their own private experience. The implications of this theory, such as that our thinking has the quality of a dialogue with ourselves, are profound. But one simple implication is that inner speech arrives in children's heads at a certain point in development, and therefore, for a time, will seem unfamiliar. It is possible that young children have these experiences of hearing internal voices engaging with each other in the dialogue of thought, but simply do not recognise them as thinking. Instead, they may attribute them to some external agency, such as an imaginary friend. 

This still leaves us with a paradox. Psychologists such as Marjorie Taylor and Stephanie Carlson have argued, on the basis of their own careful empirical studies, that engaging with imaginary companions is generally a 'good thing' for children's development. Some studies, for example, have shown that children with imaginary companions do better at tasks measuring social understanding and creativity. And yet our view of imaginary companions seems to depict such children as having a weaker grasp of how thinking works. The solution to the paradox may lie in the unexamined assumption that what may be a cause for concern in adulthood must also ring alarm bells when it occurs in childhood. A child's mind must be a strange place to be. Trying to project oneself imaginatively into these unfamiliar spheres of existence is exhilarating, but not always straightforward. 

I don't say much about imaginary companions in the book, because it covers a developmental period when pretend friends are not really yet in evidence. In fact, Athena's friends have been almost exclusively real ones. Her brother is much more of a fantasist. Isaac doesn't yet have a distinct, named imaginary companion, but he is always telling us about his 'other house', where there are pet lions and reindeer and pigs that keep breaking into the kitchen and making a terrible mess on the floor. 'Is your other house real,' I ask him, 'or only pretend?' He is adamant that it is as real as this one is. I ask him whether I might be able to go to his other house one day, and he says yes, although—and I detect a subtle attempt to protect his fantasy—it is a long way away and I would probably fall asleep on the way. 

So: all children are psychotic. There is some truth in the statement, if we accept that experiences that can be abnormal in adulthood can be perfectly typical in childhood. Young children's experiences have some similarities with the unusual perceptions and beliefs that both healthy adults and psychiatric patients report, and they may also share some common underlying cognitive mechanisms. One thing that's certain is that we need to use the term 'psychosis' properly, and concentrate on the specific experiences that we want it to refer to. If we are careful to do that, understanding the strange world of the young child could have benefits that extend far beyond the playground. 

(With apologies to Douglas Coupland for the title.)

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