Self-awareness deficits following loss of inner speech: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's case study

In her 2006 book “My Stroke of Insight” Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor relates her experience of suffering from a left hemispheric stroke caused by a congenital arteriovenous malformation which led to a loss of inner speech. Her phenomenological account strongly suggests that this impairment produced a global self-awareness deficit as well as more specific dysfunctions related to corporeal awareness, sense of individuality, retrieval of autobiographical memories, and self-conscious emotions. These are examined in details and corroborated by numerous excerpts from Taylor’s book.     

Descartes discarded? Introspective self-awareness and the problems of transparency and compositionality

What has the self to be like such that introspective awareness of it is possible? The paper asks if Descartes’s idea of an inner self can be upheld and discusses this issue by invoking two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent. In the latter, it can best be conceived of as a form of mental quotation. Various proposed analyses of direct and indirect quotation are discussed and tested regarding their applicability to thought. It is concluded that, on the assumption of compositionality, the inner self is only insofar accessible to awareness as it has an accessible phonological (or otherwise subsymbolic) structure, as apparently only inner speech does.     

Me, myself, and lie: The role of self-awareness in deception

Deception has been studied extensively but still little is known about individual differences in deception ability. We investigated the relationship between self-awareness and deception ability. We enlisted novice actors to portray varying levels of deception. Forty-two undergraduates viewed the videotaped portrayals and rated the actors’ believability. Actors with high private self-awareness were more effective deceivers, suggesting that high self-monitors are more effective at deceiving. Self-awareness may lead to knowledge of another’s mental state (i.e., Theory of Mind), which may improve an individual’s deception ability.     

左脑还是右脑？—— 自我觉知神经机制的述评

自我觉知是个体对自己有所认识或意识的内部主观状态, 自我认知加工的任务都激发了自我觉知, 因此, 其复杂性导致脑机制研究存在很多的争议。对自我觉知神经机制的研究多从认知神经精神医学和涉及自我觉知任务的脑成像的角度进行, 很多研究发现自我觉知更多地激活了右脑, 针对具体的任务而激活不同脑区;但复杂的、高水平的自我觉知任务往往涉及内部言语加工, 需要左脑的加入。现在越来越多的研究认为皮质中线结构对自我觉知具有重要作用。今后有关自我觉知神经机制的研究可望从自我觉知的性质、所涉及的具体任务水平及社会文化背景的差异等方面有所进展。     

Unsymbolized thinking

Unsymbolized thinking—the experience of an explicit, differentiated thought that does not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols—is a frequently occurring yet little known phenomenon. Unsymbolized thinking is a distinct phenomenon, not merely, for example, an incompletely formed inner speech or a vague image, and is one of the five most common features of inner experience (the other four: inner speech, inner seeing, feelings, and sensory awareness). Despite its high frequency, many people, including many professional students of consciousness, believe that such an experience is impossible. However, because the existence of unsymbolized thinking indicates that much experienced thinking takes place without any experience of words or other symbols, acknowledging the existence of unsymbolized thinking may have substantial theoretical import.     

Right hemispheric self-awareness: a critical assessment

In this commentary I evaluate the claim made by that since self-recognition results from right hemispheric activity, self-awareness too is likely to be produced by the activity of the same hemisphere. This reasoning is based on the assumption that self-recognition represents a valid operationalization of self-awareness; I present two views that challenge this rationale. Keenan et al. also support their claim with published evidence relating brain activity and self-awareness; I closely examine their analysis of one specific review of literature and conclude that it appears to be biased. Finally, recent research suggests that inner speech (which is associated with left hemispheric activity) is linked to self-awareness-an observation that further casts doubt on the existence of a right hemispheric self-awareness.     

A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order: The Case of Wu Zhao (r. 690–705)

Medieval Chinese held that the circumscribed social space women might inhabit in life was encoded in the nature of their bodies. Gender conceptions common to China’s three religions—Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism—confirmed that women were allied to the passive and inner. Accounts of the only woman in Chinese history to occupy the throne in her own name, Wu Zhao, follow Chinese historians in portraying her as contravening this cosmology. Drawing on recent studies of the religious history of the body, I argue instead that Wu Zhao constructed a legitimizing strategy that took seriously, in ways not contemplated before, these fundamental tenets of Chinese religion.     

Broca’s aphasia, verbs and the mental lexicon

Verb production is notoriously difficult for individuals with Broca’s aphasia, both at the word and at the sentence level. An intriguing question is at which level in the speech production these problems arise. The aim of the present study is to identify the functional locus of the impairment that results in verb production deficits in Broca’s aphasia. Levelt’s (1989) model is used as a theoretical framework for this study. Two experiments have been conducted, one on verb movement and one on verbs with alternating transitivity. The results suggest that the functional impairment in Broca’s aphasia should be located in Levelt’s “grammatical encoder.”     

(Un)Changing Menopausal Bodies: How Women Think and Act in the Face of a Reproductive Transition and Gendered Beauty Ideals

Biomedical literature suggests that menopause primarily represents negative change in women’s lives. Feminist literature on menopause proposes that it can represent positive change or is a neutral experience for individual women. Conflicting characterizations result from different empirical emphases; biomedical research has focused on bodily change, and feminist research has highlighted social contexts for menopause. Results from interviews with a snowball sample of 61 women in 2001 illustrate how a change discourse on menopause and gendered beauty ideals combine to create a context within which some women believe that changes in their physical appearances can be attributed to menopause and that bodily change is problematic. In addition, during focus groups and in-depth interviews, women suggested that, in the face of these discourses or ideologies and changing external bodies, they face a “category crisis.’’ Interviewees also discussed how they attempt to prevent/mask bodily change in order to remain attractive, visibly feminine, and desirable in the eyes of men. Findings from this qualitative study illustrate that we must continue to explore women’s perceptions and experiences of bodily change during menopause, as we lack a full understanding of this developmental transition and its biosocial contexts.     

The varieties of inner speech: links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults

A resurgence of interest in inner speech as a core feature of human experience has not yet coincided with methodological progress in the empirical study of the phenomenon. The present article reports the development and psychometric validation of a novel instrument, the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (VISQ), designed to assess the phenomenological properties of inner speech along dimensions of dialogicality, condensed/expanded quality, evaluative/motivational nature, and the extent to which inner speech incorporates other people’s voices. In response to findings that some forms of psychopathology may relate to inner speech, anxiety, depression, and proneness to auditory and visual hallucinations were also assessed. Anxiety, but not depression, was found to be uniquely positively related to both evaluative/motivational inner speech and the presence of other voices in inner speech. Only dialogic inner speech predicted auditory hallucination-proneness, with no inner speech variables predicting levels of visual hallucinations/disturbances. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Motor movement matters: The flexible abstractness of inner speech

Inner speech is typically characterized as either the activation of abstract linguistic representations or a detailed articulatory simulation that lacks only the production of sound. We present a study of the speech errors that occur during the inner recitation of tongue-twister-like phrases. Two forms of inner speech were tested: inner speech without articulatory movements and articulated (mouthed) inner speech. Although mouthing one’s inner speech could reasonably be assumed to require more articulatory planning, prominent theories assume that such planning should not affect the experience of inner speech and, consequently, the errors that are “heard” during its production. The errors occurring in articulated inner speech exhibited the phonemic similarity effect and the lexical bias effect—two speech-error phenomena that, in overt speech, have been localized to an articulatory-feature-processing level and a lexical—phonological level, respectively. In contrast, errors in unarticulated inner speech did not exhibit the phonemic similarity effect—just the lexical bias effect. The results are interpreted as support for a flexible abstraction account of inner speech. This conclusion has ramifications for the embodiment of language and speech and for the theories of speech production.     

Sexual Experience: Foucault,Phenomenology, and Feminist Theory

This paper explicates Foucault's conception of experience and defends it as an important theoretical resource for feminist theory. It analyzes Linda Alcoff's devastating critique of Foucault's account of sexuality and her reasons for advocating phenomenology as a more viable alternative. I agree with her that a philosophically sophisticated understanding of experience must remain central for feminist theory, but I demonstrate that her critique of Foucault is based on a mistaken view of his philosophical position as well as on a problematic understanding of phenomenology.     

Behind the Mirror: Reflective Listening and its Tain in the Work of Carl Rogers

Although Rogerian reflective listening is considered a fundamental therapeutic practice, it is widely misunderstood. This article endeavors to dispel myths about Rogers’ reflective approach through detailed readings of his work, while also opening up a central problematic in Rogers’ thinking. Rogers struggled repeatedly with the dilemma of how the therapist can faithfully reflect the client's experience while avoiding insincerity. The metaphor of a mirror and its tain, or back surface, is used to guide a close analysis of how Rogers grappled with the tension between the therapist's reflective listening process and his or her inner experience while reflecting. It is shown that each of Rogers’ revisions of his conceptualization of reflective listening constitutes a dialectical shift that opens a different approach to the problem of the tain, eventually concluding in an interactional formulation of reflection as the provision of tentative therapist understandings designed to be amended in response to client feedback.     

How left inferior frontal cortex participates in syntactic processing: Evidence from aphasia

We report on three experiments that provide a real-time processing perspective on the poor comprehension of Broca’s aphasic patients for non-canonically structured sentences. In the first experiment we presented sentences (via a Cross Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) paradigm) to Broca’s patients at a normal rate of speech. Unlike the pattern found with unimpaired control participants, we observed a general slowing of lexical activation and a concomitant delay in the formation of syntactic dependencies involving “moved” constituents and empty elements. Our second experiment presented these same sentences at a slower rate of speech. In this circumstance, Broca’s patients formed syntactic dependencies as soon as they were structurally licensed (again, a different pattern from that demonstrated by the unimpaired control group). The third experiment used a sentence-picture matching paradigm to chart Broca’s comprehension for non-canonically structured sentences (presented at both normal and slow rates). Here we observed significantly better scores in the slow rate condition. We discuss these findings in terms of the functional commitment of the left anterior cortical region implicated in Broca’s aphasia and conclude that this region is crucially involved in the formation of syntactically-governed dependency relations, not because it supports knowledge of syntactic dependencies, but rather because it supports the real-time implementation of these specific representations by sustaining, at the least, a lexical activation rise-time parameter.     

The effect of leader moral development on ethical climate and employee attitudes

This study examines the effect of leader moral development on the organization’s ethical climate and employee attitudes. Results indicate that the relationship between leader moral development and ethical climate is moderated by two factors: the extent to which the leader utilizes his or her cognitive moral development (i.e., capacity for ethical reasoning), and the age of the organization. Specifically, the influence of the leader’s moral development was stronger for high utilizing leaders, those whose moral actions were consistent with their moral reasoning. Additionally, the influence of the leader’s moral development was stronger in younger organizations. Finally, as predicted, congruence between the leader’s moral development and the employee’s moral development was positively associated with job satisfaction and organizational commitment and negatively associated with turnover intentions.     

Madness Decolonized?: Madness as Transnational Identity in Gail Hornstein’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Agnes’s Jacket</Emphasis>

The US psychologist Gail Hornstein’s monograph, Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009), is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an “anti-colonial” struggle to reclaim the experiential world “colonized” by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals makes recourse to the inner world and (corresponding) cultural world of the mad as well as to the ethno-symbolic cultural materials of dormant nationhood. This rhetoric is augmented by a model in which the mad comprise a diaspora without an origin, coalescing into a single transnational community. The mad are also depicted as persons displaced from their metaphorical homeland, the “inner” world “colonized” by the psychiatric regime. There are a number of difficulties with Hornstein’s rhetoric, however. Her “ethnicity-and-rights” response to the oppression of the mad is symptomatic of Western parochialism, while her proposed transmutation of putative psychopathology from limit upon identity to parameter of successful identity is open to contestation. Moreover, unless one accepts Hornstein’s porous vision of mad identity, her self-ascribed insider status in relation to the mad community may present a problematic “re-colonization” of mad experience.     

Signal detection theory,the exclusion failure paradigm and weak consciousness—Evidence for the access/phenomenal distinction?

Block [Block, N. (2005). Two neural correlates of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 46–52] and Snodgrass (2006) claim that a signal detection theory (SDT) analysis of qualitative difference paradigms, in particular the exclusion failure paradigm, reveals cases of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. This claim is unwarranted on several grounds. First, partial cognitive access rather than a total lack of cognitive access can account for exclusion failure results. Second, Snodgrass’s Objective Threshold/Strategic (OT/S) model of perception relies on a problematic ‘enable’ approach to perception that denies the possibility of intentional control of unconscious perception and any effect of following different task instructions on the presence/absence of phenomenal consciousness. Many of Block’s purported examples of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access also rely on this problematic approach. Third, qualitative difference paradigms may index only a subset of access consciousness. Thus, qualitative difference paradigms like exclusion failure cannot be used to isolate phenomenal consciousness, any attempt to do so still faces serious methodological problems.     

A neurocognitive and socioecological model of self-awareness

In the past, researchers have focused mainly on the effects and consequences of self-awareness; however, they have neglected a more basic issue pertaining to the specific mechanisms that initiate and sustain self-perception. The author presents a model of self-awareness that proposes the existence of 3 sources of self-information. First, the social milieu includes early face-to-face interactions, self-relevant feedback, a social comparison mechanism that leads to perspective taking, and audiences. Second, contacts with objects and structures in the physical environment foster self-world differentiation in infants; this environment also contains self-focusing and reflecting stimuli, such as mirrors and video cameras. Third, the self can develop bodily awareness through proprioception and can reflect on itself using imagery and inner speech. Furthermore, self-awareness is mainly mediated by the prefrontal lobes. The author establishes various links among these different neurological, social, ecological, and cognitive elements of the model.     

Sartre,Developmental Psychology and Burgeoning Self-Awareness: Ricocheting from Being to Nothingness

While the genesis of self-awareness at approximately 18 months old is a dramatic landmark in human development, there is at this stage no explicit awareness on the toddler's part of his/her truly standing apart from others. Only much later does a distinct sense of self shift into focus, and here Sartre provides us with a compelling theory of a first reflective experience of self-awareness. He explains this phenomenon by emphasizing a violent shift in ontological status, one in which the pre-adolescent child is precipitated from functional unity with a primary caregiver to an individuated state involving self-awareness as privative, i.e. where the child becomes aware of existing only in the form of not-being-the-adult. For Sartre this new experience of self is not therefore positive but rather formal or empty; there has in fact been a psychic transition, from being to nothingness. In addition, Sartre also states that all children first explicitly experience themselves in this fashion. These claims find support in the work of developmental psychologist Margaret Mahler. In fact, in spite of the vast developmental discrepancies between toddler and pre-adolescent child, given the appropriate environmental triggers privative subjectivity will be shown to involve a regression to the much earlier rapprochement stage of development described by Mahler.     

Conjoining Mathematical Empiricism with Mathematical Realism: Maddy’s Account of Set Perception Revisited

Penelope Maddy’s original solution to the dilemma posed by Benacerraf in his (1973) ‘Mathematical Truth’ was to reconcile mathematical empiricism with mathematical realism by arguing that we can perceive realistically construed sets. Though her hypothesis has attracted considerable critical attention, much of it, in my view, misses the point. In this paper I vigorously defend Maddy’s (1990) account against published criticisms, not because I think it is true, but because these criticisms have functioned to obscure a more fundamental issue that is well worth addressing: in general – and not only in the mathematical domain – empiricism and realism simply cannot be reconciled by means of an account of perception anything like Maddy’s. But because Maddy’s account of perception is so plausible, this conclusion raises the specter of the broader incompatibility of realism and empiricism, which contemporary philosophers are frequently at pains to forget.