When you ask people to reflect on their own inner experience
what's going on in their heads is, they're walking to work or lying in the bath
or chopping vegetables in the kitchen, people tend to report there's an awful lot of language
people tend to say that they talk to themselves a lot silently in their head
as they're going about their business
So as a psychologist I'm interested in where these internal voices come from
what they're doing there what are their functions what was it like to have these experiences
and in the more recent part of my career I've been interested in a more unusual phenomenon
that of hearing voices or to use its medical term auditory verbal hallucinations.
So I and my colleagues at Durham figured what we should try to do
is look at the experience from lots of different perspectives lots of different academic disciplines
so we don't just have the psychologists and neuroscientists
we have theologians, we have philosophers, we have medieval historians and literary scholars and so on
and we're trying to understand this experience from as broad a range of perspectives as possible
and that becomes really interesting so one of the things that struck me quite early on in this research
was the need to take a richer, broader view of it than would typically be the case in psychology.
In neuroscience, I mean, we could reduce these experiences to events in the brain
but we'd lose pretty much all of their meaning and significance
These are experiences that mean things to people they can mean things in a negative way
that can be very frightening, very troublesome, very distressing experiences
but they can also be very positive.
They exist across cultures and across historical periods and they've been interpreted differently
in different periods of history as well.
From my point of view one of the most interesting historical case studies
has been that of the early 15th century mystic Marjorie Kemp
who wrote an extraordinary book known as the book of Marjorie Kemp
and she should be bit better known, to be honest, because she wrote the first book
in the English language that can be considered an autobiography
she was the first person to write about her own life in English
which makes her a literary giant just for that reason
she was an extraordinary character, she was a mother of 14
she'd failed as a businesswoman twice
sometime around the birth of her first child she started to have voices and visions
which she interpreted in a spiritual, in a religious framework
and then later in life she had further revelations which led her to dedicate herself to telling
the world about her experiences so she would go knock on the doors of princes and bishops
she'd dress all in white, she'd command attention, ask people to listen to listen to her stories and experiences
it was a very risky thing to do and we have rich vivid accounts of what her experiences were like
so in her earliest experience she wakes up from asleep and she sees this figure sitting at the end of her bed
and the figure is dressed in a purple cloak and he says to her:
'Daughter why have you forsaken me when I never forsook you'
it's Jesus Christ, she sees Christ sitting at the end of her bed
But her experiences they can be very clearly auditory she talks about hearing the voice of God
as clearly as if there'd been another person in the room with her
but she also writes about experiences that don't fit so neatly into the idea of hearing voices
As this kind of intoning voice, this commanding voice
for example she talks about hearing this sort of rustling sound
which she takes to be the sound of the Holy Spirit comparing it to a pair of bellows
you know things that you would pump the fire up with.
Another time she hears the Holy Spirit as the voice of a Robin, a robin redbreast
so it becomes the voice of a bird or in another occasion the voice of a dove so she has this range of experiences
these diverse, rich, complex experiences, they go with visual sensations they go with bodily sensations
Experiences like Margery's are meaningful they're meaningful in all sorts of different ways
and those meanings are constructed in different ways, by different people, at different times
by looking into the past we can see some of those processes of meaning making in action
we can see them in the context, the social and the religious and the cultural context in which they emerge
The idea that Margery's experiences were a kind of internal dialogue
is really liberating, its helped me to rethink my own cognitive psychology model of how these things work
but it gives us a different way of thinking about prayer as well another spiritual meditation
The idea that Margery is having a conversation with a beloved figure that she's sort of internalized
that she carries it around with her sometimes that conversation is a very condensed inner dialogue
where she's very close to the figure, that there's a sense of being with her God
different way of thinking about the spiritual meditation.
At other times the dialogue is more what I call expanded
so it has more of the to-and-fro conversational quality of the dialogue
and that's the point to which Margery hears God speaking to her as an external voice.
So this has been really influential for me, for my thinking and it helps us to think differently about what prayer is
and how it works and the different ways in which somebody can seek comfort and solace
from being with a spiritual entity.