Discussion about this post

User's avatar
tailcalled's avatar

My understanding is that inner speech doesn't correlate with much of interest today, so I would be inclined to think it's an accident. Perhaps just a question of which thoughts get wired close to the auditory part of the brain (idk much about neurology 😅).

Expand full comment
Erik Lockwood's avatar

Schizophrenia is 2-3 times more common among Africans than it is in at least some other groups; Europeans, for example (most of the data come from the historically biracial America). Assuming one takes this at face value rather than attributing it to measurement error, and assuming that Jaynes's hypothesis is true, you would need some selective force to explain why the diminishment of schizophrenia relative to "normal" inner speech is more advanced in some populations than others. Schizophrenia diagnoses obviously tend to happen when the voices in your head are actually maladaptively interfering with your life, so it's not as though we can write this off as mistakenly treating benign hallucinations as pathologies. Also, if I remember correctly, schizophrenia has a paternal age effect, i.e. spermatic mutations make it significantly more likely, which seems suggestive of a simple mutational load hypothesis rather than being a consequence of any kind of strategy. So ... I dunno.

Expand full comment
34 more comments...

No posts