Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence

Does everyone have an inner monologue? What purpose do they serve? What if you don't have one? Listen in to find out these answers and MORE.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know, where the inner voices in your head. It
turns out, no, good job, Chuck, good job, you got this.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
You got this.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
So what you're engaged in, Chuck, is called private speech.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Oh you're so stupid.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
That's still private good job. As long as we can
hear you, and you're talking to yourself.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yes, I get it now, sure saying it out loud,
which means it's not the inner monologue or dialogue.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
No, I'm always heard it called the inner monologue too,
or internal monologue. But Anna helped us out with this, right, yeah,
Ana g. She points out that inner monologue is a
pretty limiting term because that voice in your head, the
way that you talk to yourself, it can take all

(01:07):
sorts of different shapes rather than you having a conversation
beating yourself up quietly, those are kind of the keys
to what we would call inner speech, or the people
who research it would call it inner speech.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah, or inner voice.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
And it turns out this is kind of a tough
one in some ways, because it's like I imagine Ana
was up against it because there are many, many, many,
many facets to this and it can serve a lot
of different purposes. It's very common, but also some people
don't have it. Yeah, we can look at brain scans

(01:43):
and say like, hey, this is lighting up. But it's like,
it's also really hard to study and get a consensus
on because a lot of it is self reported as
far as when people do it, and why people do it,
and what function it could serve or doesn't serve, and
if you don't have one, what does that mean. So
there's just a lot of different avenues and it's tough

(02:04):
to kind of make this a real tidy package.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, and it's really impressive that people are figuring out
how to research this at all. It's a definitely developing field.
It's not established quite yet, so it's kind of the
wild West in a lot of ways as far as
you know psychology goes. But one of the reasons why
it's fairly new is because people forever just thought like

(02:28):
there are such things as inner voices, will never be
able to study them because they are the definition of
subjective and like you said, self reported tests are how
they had studied them before, and that's just not super reliable.
William James, the father of American psychology, he had to
quote a paraphrase, I mean basically said, like trying to

(02:48):
study something like inner speech is like turning up the
lights to get a good look at what the dark
looks like. You can't do it, was the end of
his speech.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, oh boy, that makes a lot of sense, it does.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
I've heard another one too that I love. Studying consciousness
is like trying to use a flashlight to find the shadows.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Oh, I got one too. Okay, youth is wasted on
the young.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Oh that's a good one. That's a good one too.
What was spuds? Mackenzie? Party? Animal? Two words? That's all
you need to know.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, this is just a tough one because there's so
many little nuggets to uncover. Like after I had done
all the research and I was kind of like, all right,
let's go do this, I was like, wait, wait a minute, though,
Like when my grandfather had a stroke when I was
a kid, he had a phasia, which is some stroke
patients you know, can't you know they're talking, but they're
not saying the words that you.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
Understand, right.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
It was like, I wonder what's going on in their
head and what that has to do with your inner voice.
And I saw some things that said like, nope, your
are it completely disturbs your inner voice as well, and
then another other studies it said, no, your inner speech
can be preserve herbed relative to the spoken language if
you have a phasia. So it's just it can be frustrating,
but it's also I shouldn't look at it that way

(04:07):
and just think of it as like just super fascinating
and maybe you know, we don't always have all the answers.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah, that's a great way put I think. Another way
to say it is we don't understand it, so those
listening to this episode aren't going to understand it by
the end of it either.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Well.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, and just in the case of the stroke thing
with my grandfather, I remember very specifically being a kid
and seeing the frustration and thinking as a ten year
old like he in his head, he's saying what he's
trying to say, right, Like I can tell because he's
getting really frustrated that it's coming out as something that
is unintelligible to us. But you know, all these years later,

(04:43):
I got two answers.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, there you go, full circle, I guess in that sense.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Yes, not a very satisfying one.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
But yeah, so so, like we said, inner monologue is
a little too limiting, we don't want to use that.
Inner speech is way better. And inner speech is actually
a little limiting, as we'll see too. But it turns
out there's a lot of things that our inner speech does. Besides,
like you demonstrated beating yourself up, it can be used

(05:12):
to motivate. It's a good one. You kind of did
that at first.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Right, Yeah, I think that was That was good, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Right. We use it for memorizing things, problem solving, We
used it to regulate ourselves, like, okay, Chuck, don't be
mean to yourself all down. Yeah, that kind of stuff.
But again not out loud, and then even more not
me saying it, because dude, if your voice in your
head was my voice, oh man, I would be so

(05:42):
sorry for you.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
I dream as you. Is that weird?

Speaker 2 (05:46):
That's a little weird. I'd like to hear more about
that though later on.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Now I'm just joking.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
There have been plenty of people that have studied this,
so and you know, we're going to talk about some
of these people here and there. That was a pair
of researchers in twenty eleven, Simon McCarthy Jones and Charles
Fernie Howe.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Maybe Fernie Hoe is what I saw. I heard, Yeah,
like Tally Ho exactly, but Fernie right.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
They developed to survey and where they kind of categorize
different varieties of inner speech, and their survey was called
the VISC the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire y I SQ.
And they also, along with others, have other categories and
we're kind of just gonna go through these now. But
one can be dialogic, which means you're like you're having

(06:36):
a back and forth with yourself.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
Or others.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
I asked Emily if I could talk about this because
she talks out loud, which I guess isn't quite the
same thing, but she'll I'll see her talking to herself
sometimes having a conversation with someone much more common when
she was having frustrations with her business, talking like out loud.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
To people, but it would be in her head.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
But then I would also see her talking out loud,
and I'll walk into her room and say are you
talking to and she'd tell me in but that's dialogic
because there's some someone else involved, even if that someone
else is another you.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Right, what you can't see is the giant, furry purple
monster with googly eyes and a tiki drink.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Oh man, that'd be great.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
So, yeah, dialogic seems to be fairly fairly common too. Yeah,
there's also condensed inner speech. That's it's kind of like
a different form of so this. Okay, here's one of
the things that I had trouble with, Chuck. Let me
just be forth right here these there's not any neat

(07:45):
package of this kind, this kind, and this kind, and
then there's this sub kind of this kind and this
kind and this kind. No one's put it together like that,
so it's a little confusing. So, for example, dialogic inner speech,
you'd think that the next thing would be monologic or
something like that. That's not here. Instead, we're talking about
condensed inner speech, which is using like abbreviations or like

(08:07):
just words rather than full sentences. And that this is
a way that you speak to yourself in a very
private manner that you would probably never use to speak
out loud. It's just the kind of shorthand that you
use for yourself doesn't fit this list at all, and
yet here we are.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
And as example for that is, you know you're leaving
the house and you know phone, keys, wallet in your head,
that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Right, But at the same time, you could be having
a conversation with somebody about your own case, wallet, so
it would be dialogic condensed inner speech drives me nuts.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah, I see your point other people as another one.
That's when your voice, not when you're speaking to someone else,
but when it takes on the voice of someone else.
It could be Abraham Lincoln, it could be Josh Clark.
And that's when you're imagining a conversation with someone else,

(09:00):
where your own inner voice sounds like someone else. Is
different than like Emily having a conversation with another person.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Right for sure, Like you're the bystander. Basically there's two
people talking. There's a did you see that Guardian article
about the that included the woman whose inner voice was
a like a stereotypical Italian couple fighting arguing, so interesting
and that's how she works stuff out. Like the wife
would be like, no, she needs to quit her job

(09:27):
and follow her dreams, and the husband would be like no,
she's got a good job. She needs to keep her
feet on the ground, and like eventually one would win
the argument and then that's what she would do. That's
what that lady's inner voice is.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
Like, Yeah, it's very fascinating. One can be motivational or
a value to either you know, am I doing a
good job here?

Speaker 3 (09:49):
Or do a good job?

Speaker 1 (09:51):
They found that, you know, with like sports performance and
any kind of like public speaking or any kind of
performative thing. You know, that inner voice pumping you up
can lead to real results, usually good.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, and I saw that that was kind of expanded
or changed. You're kind of cutt into sub categories later
on or at some point. There's evaluative critical, which is
basically like you know, did I do a good job
or why didn't you get one hundred percent? That kind
of thing. Yeah, there's also positive regulatory, which kind of

(10:23):
ties into what you were just saying, Like if you
imagine yourself, you know, doing really well practicing shooting baskets,
there's some part of you that could be like keep
up the hard work and you'll be in the MBA
in no time. Where you did a great job, like
those would fall under positive regulatory.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
When I play basketball, all I hear in my head
is what I hear on the court, which is swish.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
Oh nice, I was gonna say. I was waiting for
you to say brick, because that's what I hear.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Ruby expressed interest in playing basketball the other day, and
I had a hard time containing myself. I was like,
you know, that's the only sport I was actually pretty
good at. Like I can actually teach you something here.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
That's awesome, man.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
But I didn't want to say it too positively because
then she'd be like, yeah, maybe not.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
Very smart boy. You know what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (11:12):
Don't to I'm working on it.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Another is prompted no, no, no, I'm sorry expanded speech, which
is like if you have to have a tough conversation
with someone and you're literally kind of just rehearsing that
in your head as one or both. That is like
when you're speaking not in any kind of abbreviate, abbreviated way.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, it's the opposite of condensed speech, like you're thinking
in or hearing in your inner voice the exact words,
with the phonetics and the grammar and everything that you
would say out.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
Loud, right, Which that got me on a side track
of like, Oh, that's like, why do people when you
hear your voice played on a recording?

Speaker 3 (11:53):
Why does that sound different? It's just has anything to
do with that.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
And I just had to park that because that gets
into a whole other thing, which should probably.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
Be a shorty, the efference copy.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
No, no, no, like when I listen to a podcast
of us, like, why does your voice never match when
you hear it out loud as it does in your
own brain?

Speaker 2 (12:12):
I think your efference copy probably no.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
It has to do with like the way your skull reverberates. Oh,
really actual physical stuff. But I think that could be
a shorty.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Reverberating Skull is a great album name.

Speaker 3 (12:24):
It is, and we'll get to efference copy later on it.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
I clearly can't wait.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
Yeah, it's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
There's now we reach a point of the list where
coherence starts to emerge. We've got like basically like a
one and then the opposite. I don't know why I
just put it so confusingly, So let's just start. There's
elicited or prompted, which is inner speech that's basically triggered
by some external factor. Someone comes along and says, here's

(12:50):
some pictures of different stuff, pick out the ones who's
named rhyme. So you've got to write a boot and
then I don't know, a foot or something like that.
Like you would pick out the boot and the foot,
and depending on how liberally they were with their their judgments,
they would say, yes, that rhymes.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah, but it's a prompt from an outside source, right,
whereas the next one, which logically follows thankfully pristine or spontaneous.
That was Russell hurl Bert, kind of a mouthful researcher
that coined this one. That is that's just unprompted, spontaneous,
and it's a part of what makes us us.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yes, Like that is your genuine true inner voice. Sometimes
it just comes out of nowhere, sometimes when you just
are talking to yourself and don't even realize you're talking
to yourself in your head. Like that's what Herbert Herlbert
calls pristine. And there's this really great Aon article about
your inner voice that was written by Phil Jacole j A. E.

(13:51):
K L. And Phil points out, I'm hopefully hoping I can.
We're on first name basis, me and Phil. But he
points out that this is leading psychologists to be like, oh,
my god, oh my god. If we can study pristine
inner voices, like that's essentially like the external, the exterior

(14:12):
of the unconscious, and we would be tapping into people's
unconscious and other people are like, I think Fernio is like, whoa, whoa.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here, Let's just kind
of take this one step at a time. Old Ferniho,
that's what he's known nas. They call him the breaks.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
That's right and well, except when he gets excited about
something then he yells out Fernie hoo. Maybe before we break,
we should talk about these other four because that visc
is still they've been revising it over the years and
it's still in use for some researchers. But in twenty
fifteen there was another researcher name what a great name,

(14:49):
mal Gorzada a Polchaska wasl wasil wasel. Maybe they were like,
all right, let's categorize it by emotional types, and these
are the faithful friend, which has a nice ring to it.
That's like your personal strength, positive feelings about yourself.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
You're a neighborer.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
The ambivalent parent, which is awful otherwise known as gen
X parent, associated with strength and love and caring criticism.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
So wait a minute, is it the parent of a
gen xer or a gen x er as a parent.
I'm confused.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
I would say the parent. I mean, weren't most of
our parents fairly ambivalent about us?

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah? I would think so. Sure, It's like, oh, this.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
Is weird because associated with strength, love and caring criticism, right,
that's not ambivalent.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
So here is another problem with this field. People are
naming stuff just way off.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Yeah, wily way off.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And it's hard to
remember and understand this stuff if the pieces don't fit
together because they're dripping, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
That's gross. Yeah, but it's true. I know. What about
the others emotionally ticking proud rival?

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Okay, And then there's one that was initially called calm optivist,
but Pulchasca Waizl did a follow up study testing to
see if her initial results were confirmed, and faithful friend,
ambivalent parent, and proud rival were all there again in
the second one, but optimist didn't show up, so she
ended up replacing that with something called helpless child, which

(16:23):
apparently is probably the worst of the worst.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
All right, that's a lot.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
It is, It was a lot. Do you understand this anymore?
Sort of okay, good, well, we're making headway, Chuck.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
All right, well we'll take a break and see if
we can rain this puppy in right after this.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Uh okay, Chuck. So, one of the things we're talking
about with inner speech is it's easy to kind of
confuse it with like say, private speech, where you're actually
talking out loud yourself somebody could hear it. But one
of the big differences with inner speech and verbal speech
is that it's just faster. I guess allegedly for some people.

(17:24):
It's not for me. Mine goes very slow and actually
slows me down. It's like it goes slow. Yeah, the
part of me that has to process the words slows
down the speed that I could conceivably go at.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
Okay, it's just.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, it's it's like old erniho. It just kind of
puts the brake on everything. But normally, if you compare
the two, it should be much faster, just because a
lot of times you're using condensed speech, which you know
again is you're just using shorthand that you can understand.
I think that's where I get tripped up. I don't
really do that. And then like physical physiologically, it's just

(18:01):
you can think a lot faster than you can speak
because you're not moving your mouth, You're not like taking
a breath or anything like that. It's just supposedly faster.
Is yours faster?

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Yeah? For sure.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
There was one person, a researcher who actually endeavored to
find out how fast that can get. This is in
nineteen ninety and they found that some participants in the
study could think more than four thousand words a minute.
And you know, just for context, the world record for
fastest out loud talker as a Canadian guy who went
to six hundred and fifty five words per minute.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
So this is wow.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
Basically you can think up to six times faster than
the fastest talker on the planet.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah, that's at least twice as much.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah, I actually did the math. It's roughly six.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Was that the guy from the uh dunkin Donuts commercials
or the FedEx commercials in.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
They at now?

Speaker 1 (18:53):
It's unfortunately just some I mean, hey, I love this guy.
It's been a knock him down. His name is Sean Shannon.
He's a Canadian guy who who did the to be
or not to be soliloqually in twenty three point eight seconds.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Wow, well it goes sean.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
You can't understand anything he's saying, but he can't have
judges you know that are like, yeah, he's still saying
those words.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
So I guess then we reach another question, how does
inner speech develop? Which apparently when they started figuring this
out thanks to a guy named Lev by Gotsky who
will meet in a second, it completely changed our understanding
of children, because up to this point it was like,
do kids learn first and then or does their brain

(19:36):
develop and then they learn first? Or do they learn
first by did they develop their brain by learning? Clearly
I did neither at some point. Right, you can kind
of get the gist of what I was saying.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah, I thought this was super interesting. Child development is
just fascinating to me, like going through it now, like
more than ever obviously, but for most kids. And by
the way, this Lev that got Ski he said we
would meet you know what, let's just spring them and
come on in love.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Hey I'm dead, yeah exactly.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
This is in the nineteen thirties, so he has left
us earthwise, but a lot of this has been born
out in modern research. But in the thirties he was
looking at like, basically, it starts out as private speech,
like kids saying things out loud to themselves. And you know,
first they start talking just to communicate like I'm hungry,

(20:29):
I need to whatever, go to sleep. Actually kids never
say that, I want to stay up right, and you know,
that's just social communication. But then as they get older,
they start sort of privately talking to themselves as an
internal motivator. And then eventually that I think around that's
between like three and four, and then around six or

(20:50):
seven is when kids take that private voice inside their
head and that's when the inner monologue kicks off more or.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Less right, and then they start to After that they
continue to develop and get good at things like condensed
speech and creating their own self shorthand and stuff like that. Yeah,
it's pretty cool. So again I said that this kind
of turned things on our head as far as understanding PJA.
He was a very famous French psychologist. He said kids

(21:19):
are dumb and then they learned, or their brain grows
and then they learn. And this showed the exact opposite
that they they developed their brain and their understanding of
the world through learning. Through this inner dialogue, and it
was by Goatsky, believe it or not, was a Soviet researcher,
so the West wasn't exposed to his ideas until like

(21:40):
the fifties, and they when they finally came out We're translated,
it was like, great, okay, now we finally understand.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Right, he's the one that coined the term InterVoice.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Right, yeah, yeah, I'm not sure what that is in Russian,
but yes, apparently it translates the inner voice.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
I think it's a property of the Soviet Union. Why
I said that as a German.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
It sounded Russian to me in my head.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
You know, we mentioned that not everyone has in her
speech or develops that it exists, like a lot of
things do on a spectrum some people. Emily is a
very very She's like, I'm constantly talking to people in
my head.

Speaker 3 (22:19):
Really, I know, I see it happening. You know.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
The other interesting thing she does I don't think I've
ever mentioned on the show. And she was like, you
can say all this, I don't really care. She spells
out when she's stressed. She'll spell out things with her
thumb in.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Cursive like on a table, like just no, just.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
Like sitting there, like we'll be watching a TV show
and although she's stressed and her thumb will be going,
and now I'll not on the not what she's doing
for years now, I'll be like, what are you writing?
And if it's a scene about like a tense standoff
in an office or something, she might spelled typewriter or
office or something just that she sees huh. It's not

(23:01):
always like I'm nervous. It's never like I'm stressed or
anything like that.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
So it's a way to alleviate her anxiety. I guess
how interesting. That's cool. I've never heard of that.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Yeah, hey man.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Emily
is one of a kind.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
We couple up with people, it's and you really dig in.
You don't have any of those barriers up. It turns
out that we're all just a little strange.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Well how is her air penmanship?

Speaker 1 (23:29):
She ge'ez great. I can read it all. I can
look at her you know, thumb and just I can
spell it right out in my.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Head very neat. Wow, can you really are you just?
Just no, no, no, no, okay.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
It looks like a wow, it looks like some's gone wild.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Right, nice, too hot for a TV thumb one.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
Anyway, But that's kind of her inner voice too, you know,
in a way, just manifesting itself physically, but it's still
you know, not out loud. But some people constantly are
doing this kind of thing, talking to themselves, others sometimes,
some never. These two researchers, Johann Nedergert and Gary Lupien,

(24:08):
if you have zero inner speech, they have termed that
an end of phasia. And they say, and this is
another kind of frustration, like between five to ten percent
of people don't have inner speech, whereas Russell Hurlbert, who
we've met, said, no, it's more like fifty to seventy percent.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Have inner speech or no, don't have inner speech.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
Right, Yeah, so that's just that's wildly different.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
It is wild. That's a great term for it again. Wild.
So now Ferni Hooe comes in and says, whoa, everybody,
I'm not really excited about this having its own term
anendophasia and means lack endo means innerphasia's speech because and
I think he makes a reasonable argument here when you

(24:54):
come up with a term, especially a Latin term, for
something the way people be or think or whatever. It
seems to suggest that this is a condition, maybe even
a disorder. And he's like, that's not necessarily true, especially
if the majority of people don't have this inner voice.
So do we really need a name for it? And

(25:15):
I think Netderguard and Lupian were like, it's a pretty
cool name, though, can we please keep it in ferni
hoo's thinking about it right now?

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Right? Well?

Speaker 1 (25:26):
That got me thinking, like, if you have no inner dialogue,
does that mean like do sociopaths have that?

Speaker 3 (25:31):
But I found no correlation there.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
It seems like sociopaths quite often have an inner dialogue
saying like do this awful thing?

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Right? Yeah? Should we?

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Who are you?

Speaker 2 (25:43):
They have other things though, Like so it's not like
if you don't have an inner voice that there's no
thought whatsoever. It can also come in different forms, I think,
is what they're finding.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, and they've also found this is Netderguard and Lepian
and it studied just last year in twenty twenty four
where they tested they wanted to know how it related
to memory, and apparently a verbal memory of groups with
very They tested people very high and very low rates
of inner speech and found that you have a very
low rate of inner speech.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
You're not going to be as good.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
At just remembering stuff like your lines in a play
or a grocery list or anything, the poor bastards.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
The thing is, though, is that seems to be at
least as far as they've discovered. Really the only big
drawbacks is you aren't You don't do well necessarily in
memory tests or something like that. But even for somebody
who isn't thinking in like inner speech, where they're talking
to themselves, there's a voice in their head talking, there's

(26:46):
other ways that you can think using what is basically
some sort of inner inner Well, inner speech is the
best way to put it, but imagine that without speech,
without language or words, there's inner seeing. Some people think
in images, right, uh, feelings like just your emotions, which

(27:07):
I'm kind of like, okay, is that does that get
you in trouble? If that's how you respond and move
and behave from the world, Because it's one of the
big things from inner speech is what we do is
we prepare ourselves and come up with a plan of action.
What are we going to do next? How are we
going to respond to this? So if you're not thinking
it over in your head, and it's your emotions that

(27:27):
that drive you. Like that just seems like it could
get scary. There's fraut huh, like it's fraud, fraud exactly. Yeah,
there's unsim unsymbolized thinking. So you've got like you're just
not you're not thinking like Okay, I need to get
in that car. You just I don't know, I don't know.

(27:51):
I can't even give you an example here. Uh. And
then the last one that they've mentioned is sensory awareness,
which is just sensing things and then I guess responding
essentially like an amoeba like that, Oh this it's this
stove is hot, so I'm going to move my hand.
But imagine nothing in between the heat, the sensation of

(28:15):
heat entering your hand and removing your hand, no thought
whatsoever between that. That's right. Apparently what sensory awareness is.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Like huh all right.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
Uh. That that study from last year where they were
talking about verbal memory made me wonder about dyslexia because
you know, my daughter has dyslexia, and and I was like,
I bet you there's a tie there, And I was
actually right on the money with this one. Supposedly, if
you have dyslexia, you have very little to know inner

(28:44):
voice really, so it was fascinating. Yeah, because a lot
of times they think in images and they think and
they call it kind of like three D thinking.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Gotcha, So it's less word based, gotcha.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
That's maybe cool. I tested myself on this a little
bit to find out what I do, Like, I typically
just think in words.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
I guess, Yeah, a lot.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Of times I talk to myself, but I think I
don't know. I think that there's a lot going on
in there that I'm not cognizant of. I'm really bad at,
like how I feel and like just understanding, you know,
what's going on in my head at any given time,
like really just introspecting, like I do it a lot,
but I'm not necessarily good at is I guess what

(29:28):
I'm trying to say.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I can be
like that too.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
See, I don't believe that one bit. I think you're
a champion at that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
So well, maybe certain kinds. You know how I get
so complicated.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, but
you're wrong about you not being good at it. So
I tested myself to see if I could think in
just images without words, because I've never really thought about that.
So some part of me told myself to think of
a watering can, okay, And I didn't hear it. Was
just like there wasn't in words. I didn't hear it.

(30:04):
No one spoke it, I didn't see it spelled out.
It was just there was some command all of a
sudden to think of a water and cant, and all
of a sudden, a water and cant came up. And
the proof that I was not thinking in words is
that I couldn't think of the word for what I
was seeing.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Oh wow, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
And then some other part of me came in and
was like, you know, I think you were actually supposed
to produce an image of a flower pot. And then
I got worried about cognitive decline. And that's no joke,
Like that was the whole process right there.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Wow, that is fascinating, And I would imagine hard to do,
kind of like a Ghostbusters, you know, don't clear your
mind right and then you get the safe up marshmallow
man like that. If anything has suggested, I will immediately
see the word if it says like don't think of
the word, I'll be I'll think of that word.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Yeah, I guess I didn't. It was more like not.
It wasn't like I was saying like, don't do this.
It was more do this or try this. So because
there wasn't like that blanket prohibition, I'm not thinking about
the word. Yeah, it was easier to do. But just
back to Ruby, So, did you ask her she has
an inter voice or if she thinks in symbols or whatever.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
No, she's at school, so it didn't come to me.
But I'll ask her later and let you know, Okay,
to let me know, text me she yeah, this says
Ruby says that her inner voice just says find Josh
kill Josh.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Burned, Josh, No, she loves you. I know. I love
her too. I think she's sweet.

Speaker 3 (31:32):
I love her too. I think that's what I thought
you were saying.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
Hey, did she know did she like Magdalena Bay?

Speaker 3 (31:39):
She did?

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Did she really? I just figured that she hadn't and
you were just not mentioning it.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
Now. No, I thought I texted you back. No, yeah, Josh,
it was very sweet.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
Got a text and he said, Hey, I got this
new artist that I've been listening to.

Speaker 3 (31:51):
I think Ruby might like it.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Well, I'm glad I was right. For some reason. Every
time I heard it, I would just be like, Ruby
would really like this. That does not happen every time
I listened to something, so I thought I should love
to say something.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Oh I could have sworn I texted you, but yeah,
we listened to it together and she dug it cool.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
Cool, so hey, big plug for Magdalena Bay. Also a
nice place to visit.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
From what I hear, she's great. Is that a place too?
Are you joking? No, I'm just kidding me, and you're
getting me all over the place today.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
Back to Russell Hurlbert, that's just so hard to It
doesn't roll off the tongue. Sorry, even in your head
it doesn't. Yeah, oh yeah in my inner voice. It's
hard to say too.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
That.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
He developed a tool called the Descriptive Experience Sampling. I
would call it the sampler, but DES that is when
he sets you down and puts I guess a device
in the room and it's like, hey, just sit there
and chill out and do whatever and think about whatever.
And anytime you hear beep, though, you got to write
down whatever is in your brain at that exact moment.

(32:55):
I guess in the idea of just sorting to try
and hit on the randomness of like what you might
be thinking at any given time and just log those
thoughts right then and then they would talk about those
and he said, maybe this could give me a good framework.
And when he got the results back, he was like, wow,
this is fascinating. How just all over the place it was.

(33:18):
It's so multilayered, it's so varied. People can be thinking
of a watering can and be saying the words flower
pot at the same time with no explanation at all. Right,
sometimes you have multiple voices all talking over each other.
And he was just like this is he just put
the device away and walk slowly out of the room.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
I think, yeah, yeah, So this is a really big
deal that he was able to come up with this,
because this is one of the reasons why people were
so I guess wary of trying to study inner voices
because they're so subjective. Hurlbert figured out a way to
like take as much subjectivity out of it as possible. Yeah,

(33:59):
you know, and I think exactly, And I think in
the more like the bigger studies that he came up with,
like you would get a beeper and like turned out
in the world for like a week or two weeks
or something, so that you would eventually get used to
the beeper being there, wouldn't just be like waiting like
I'm right to have this awesome thought like ready for.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
When the deeper goes off, you know, good way to do.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
It, Yeah, so that you would like he was genuinely
tapping into whatever random thoughts are in your head. So
he also the process also includes extensive interviews. I saw
like multiple like six seven minutes on one word, one
thought from one entry. And then they're really careful not
to lead the person and have them, you know, start

(34:43):
to implant memories accidentally that kind of stuff for revise
what they are actually thinking, but instead kind of dig
deeper and deeper and deeper into what else was there
at the time. And I think the people who are
participants studies like this are actually surprised from these interviews
because they didn't realize, like, you know, in addition to
thinking this word, wait, there was this image over here too,

(35:04):
and you know it just goes on from there.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Yeah, and he's like Rosebud's gotta be more than a wagon.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
It was a sled.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
I thought it was a wagon. Was it a sled? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (35:17):
Good lord, you're the movie guy too, aren't you. Man?
Burl Lives just roll over in his grave.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
Why did I think it was a wagon? It's a slid,
which is really just a wagon with rails.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, I guess it is. I think radio fire makes both.
So who's gonna discriminate? Not mean?

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Shall we take a break?

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (35:39):
All right, we'll take another break and we'll talk a
little bit about brain areas lighting up right after this. Okay, buddy,

(36:07):
I'm supposed to lead off this segment, but I'm going
to hand it right back to you because I know
when I say the word efference you get excited. We're
going to talk about efference copies at long last take
it away.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Oh okay, I had never heard about this before, had
you same? Okay, So apparently when we think when we're
about to speak right now, without me being cognizant of it,
there's a part of my brain that is pre arranging
and planning what I'm about to say. Right I have

(36:39):
no idea that this is going on. I think I'm
just talking at this point, but there's a part of
my brain that knows exactly what's going to happen, and
they set out, they send out what's called sorry, my
brain apologizes for that, what's called an efference copy, which
is basically a blueprint of what I'm about to say
to the rest of my brain. That includes, but what

(37:01):
movements I'm going to make with my jaw and tongue,
and a prediction of what it's going to sound like
coming out, and then also a basically a blanket statement
like what you're about to hear is coming from you,
So it keeps us from being startled. It allows us
to recognize that what we're saying is coming from us.

(37:22):
And the most amazing part about this is that when
we think to ourselves using our inner voice or inner
symbols or whatever, but definitely inner voice, I'm not sure
about symbols now that I mention it, we do the
same thing. We get basically a cruder version of the
efference copy, but it also includes orders to not move
your mouth, to not move your tongue, that there's not

(37:45):
going to be a touch sensation, but that everything else
is like the efference copy contains all the other stuff.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Yeah, fascinating, and efference copy is not a bad band name, No,
little brainy it is.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
But yeah, I could see I'm gonna go to the
old standby mathrock.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, yeah, totally okay, So as far as the old
Wonder Machine goes there obviously have done plenty of studies
where they they always like to see what's lighting up,
you know, but these are often disappointing to me when
it comes to stuff like this, because it's like I
feel like, at this point in our show after so

(38:25):
many years, even listeners will say, oh, I bet the
temporal cortex lights up.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
That's associated with.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
Memory and hearing in language, and then broke his area,
which we've talked about countless times, is it's associated with speech,
and yes, those areas light up.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, da da yes. But at the same time, there's
also different regions that light up as well that wouldn't
light up when we speak out loud. So it's clear
that there are it has its own thing, that inner
voice is different as far as the brain is concerned
from speech as well, that they bear a strong resemblance

(39:05):
to one another. And then also they found the brain
patterns for when we are spontaneously speaking to ourselves that
Christine in her talk that Herobert mentioned that that uses
or different regions of the brain light up for elicited
types where we're like using where we're we're we're rehearsing

(39:26):
what we're saying, or something like that. Man, my efference copy.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
Is is it is it working slow or fast?

Speaker 2 (39:36):
It's a little rough around the edges today.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
Okay, you might be wondering about schizophrenia. This is something
that we've we've talked about on the show before because
very sadly, many times you will see someone suffering from
schizophrenia having a conversation out loud, seemingly with someone. So
it's it's very natural to probably wonder like, oh, what's
going on there?

Speaker 3 (39:59):
You know?

Speaker 1 (39:59):
They can call those verbal hallucinations. Is that someone's inner voice,
And they have done studies and they found that there
can be an impairment of the process that creates efference
copies in those cases. I think it's another term as
corollary discharge, and if you have schizophrenia, can make it
hard for you to identify that voice as their own.

(40:21):
So yeah, kind of what it seems like is happening,
seems like that's exactly what's happening.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, that message is not included in the efference copy
then also I've failed to mention before. One of the
things that the efference copy does is say, you don't
need to pay attention to what is about to come
out of your head as much like the sound of it.
It's not coming from you, you don't have to respond
to it as you would if somebody was talking to you.

(40:46):
And that's another thing that gets lost in the efference
copy as well. They respond to the sound of the
voices in their head in a way that makes them
feel where they respond to a v as if somebody
walked up and was talking to them. The problem is
there's no one there, and they are misattributing their own

(41:08):
inner thoughts. That's kind of one of the big postulations
for schizophrenia, at least audio verbal hallucinations associated with schizophrenia,
which is that's a great example right there of why
studying inner speech is such a big deal. Like, if
we can figure this out, you could conceivably help treat

(41:29):
people that much better, you know, I mean, like being
plagued with inner voices that you think are coming from
somewhere else, especially if they're like commanding you to do things,
that's a great thing to learn how to treat you
know that's debilitating. And then also kind of related to
that is the idea that as we start to learn
more about inner speech and where it comes from, what

(41:50):
it does, and all that, that we could conceivably get
better at treating things like anxiety or OCD because those
things have clearly shown to associated with negative self talk,
that that you can increase your own anxiety and stress
by basically being mean to yourself or being just having

(42:12):
a negative outlook on life. And it's I mean, just
from my own experience, it's nuts how illuminating it can
be when you have somebody point out like do you
do you hear like how you're how you're viewing the world,
like in your own head, Like do you hear the
things you're saying to yourself? And when you become aware
of it, you can change it. And when you change
it, it can have sweeping effects on your entire life, one

(42:36):
of which is treating anxiety and even depression.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
I think, yeah, I mean, man, it seems like so
much stuff with the human condition can come down to
being in touch with yourself and really self aware. But
you know that can being too self aware it can
also be a problem. So it's just it's like living
life is tough. Yeah, well, you know what, man with

(43:00):
the OCD. You know, I'm a little bit on the
OCD spectrum. Mine doesn't manifest though in negative self talk.
But I was thinking about my inner voice, and I
do a lot of with my OCD. It's like efficiencies
I'll talk about in my head, Like when I'm doing
something like cooking. In my head, I'm literally saying, all right,

(43:22):
you're gonna grab the spoon and you're gonna take it
over here, and you're gonna grab the salt, and then
you're going to cut that thing. And I'm kind of
planning out stuff that I'm about to do. But it's
in my brain. It's all in the in the like
kind of wrapped up as an efficiency, like if I
do it in exactly just this right way, in this order,
it's it's the best way to do that.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
I do that too. I associate that with perfectionism.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
M interesting for me.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
It is at least like I have to do it
as efficiently as possible, and efficiency is a form of perfectionism,
and that if you do it all at all order,
it's lucy goosey and why even bother to get out
of bed.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Right, But I'll even do that when it's not like
a specific thing, like all right, if you're cooking something,
I sort of get that. But if I'm at my
desk sometimes and it comes and goes, I'll be like,
all right, you're gonna grab the mouse and click on
that thing, and you're going to answer that email and
then you're going to grab your pen here man, Like,
how interesting? All right, I had no idea that we
had that in common.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
Hey, look at us.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
Wow, see what happens when you talk about your inner voice? Chuck,
We're meant to be I've been asking you to do
this for decades now.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
I know it's like I don't want to look at myself.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Well, that kind of leads us to the purposes of
inner speech a little bit, right, I Mean talking about
it clearly helps connect people. But there's there's things that
we gain from talking to ourselves or just being able
to do that.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
Sure, and we've kind of touched on them here and there.

Speaker 1 (44:45):
You know, when kids are developing it, they believe that
it's a way to sort of grow and mature into
being responsible. Like you start out hearing your parents say
to go do something, go clean up your room. And
eventually the more you hear that, you start thinking I
should really go clean up my room or I'm not
sure when that's supposed to start, but yeah, at some

(45:08):
point eventually that will lead to you saying those things
to yourself like you would as a you know, responsible adult,
like I gotta clean this mess.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
Up, right.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah. And also I mean executive functioning, like making decisions,
figuring out the best solution to a problem by simulating them,
like thinking through your actions before acting, which also oftentimes
ties into emotional regulation. Yeah, all of this uses some
sort of like inner voice inner speech. Interheering is another

(45:40):
way that you can experience it. That's a that's just
that's an enormous role because that's essentially how we navigate
life as adults.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
Yeah, and you know, I already mentioned sort of the
performance aspect, like if you're if you're about to play
a game or run a or something like talking to yourself,
you got this, you're the best, you can do this.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
You're gonna run fast. You might have a routine that
you run over in your head.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
That's all your voice, Yeah, exactly, And that can be
that can really pay off obviously, much more than negative
self talk and motivation.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
You know, it's not exactly tied to what you're saying,
but what you were mentioning before, like how you were
planning out which action to do next for cooking, and
then the one boat beyond that. I realized that's why
I had to stop playing video games, because I would
walk around thinking about how to do it better next time,
and even when I wasn't playing the video game, and

(46:39):
realize like, this is not no way to spend my
mental energy. Like it's one thing to just sit down
and relax and play a video game. And if all
I if that was it for me and I could
leave it there, I would totally play video games still,
but I just couldn't leave it.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, mine comes and goes too, And I haven't thought
too much about when or why so that I think
that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Do they still call them video games? It feels really
eighties or nineties.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
Uh, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
I think it's more used as like like a verb,
like when I game gaming?

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Right, Yeah, I've heard that, but I heard that on
in a magazine.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
Yeah, but I think if you said, hey, do you
play video games? It'd be a very gen x way.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
To say that.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Okay, I'll watch wrong with that.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
If you're wondering about you know, because we've talked about
whether you dream in other languages, if you learn a
second language, is that a mark of fluency kind of
ties into inner voice? Generally speaking, you think in your
or you talk to yourself in your first language. But
if you are fluent, and you know, let's say I
was fluent in German, if only and I moved to
Germany at times.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
There or eventually I could have an inner voice.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
Is that just talking in a different way. Yeah, not
with a German accent an American.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
But yeah. So also deaf people apparently, and I would guess,
especially if you were deaf from birth, they see or
think in sign language, so they visualize the word but
through signs. That is super cool. And then other people
can actually they might envision someone like their face, so

(48:22):
they're reading their lips, but they're not hearing anything. I
just think that's just fascinating. They also don't speak at themselves.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's totally fascinating.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
There was also in that same Guardian article with the
woman who was featured with the Italian couple bickering in
her head. There was a dude and man, I can't
find his name anywhere, but he I think is the
hero of this entire story. Chuck, his name is Justin Hopkins.
I found it. He has this what he basically calls

(48:57):
an island in a sea of void, and the island
is his mind, and his mind turns on when it
needs to. So an example, because I don't fully understand
how this guy how his mind works, but the best
I can say is he realizes that he's out of milk,
so he needs to go buy milk. So he buys milk, right,

(49:21):
but imagine that being the extent of it. So he
needs to buy milk, and he goes and buys milk,
and he puts the milk back in his refrigerator, and
then he doesn't have another thought until the next thing
that comes along. He said that he can go hours
without a thought, and so he can just sit in
front of a sunset and enjoy the sunset, and the

(49:41):
most basic way that you can enjoy a sunset and
just not be thinking about all the problems he has
or what he has to do next, or how to
most sufficiently watch the sunset. And this guy is like,
I wouldn't want to necessarily live like that all the time,
because I do enjoy having like an inner life, but

(50:03):
to just be able to modulate it and do that
once in a while. I think that guy's amazing. And
apparently in the Guardian article they said that he says
he sleeps like a baby, which I can totally imagine.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
Well, interestingly, I know that I'm drifting towards sleep when
my inner voice gets really weird.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
It's like.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
I'll be thinking of things, and when I start thinking
about things and I can tell that are just absolute
weird nonsense. It's almost like pre dreaming. But the problem
is now I know that's that sleep is coming, and
I know that's what that signals. So in my brain
I will start inter talking, going all right, baby, I'm
about to fall asleep, and that takes me out of it.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
So okay, okay, I'm fascinated by this, Like, give us
an example of how your brain starts just becoming nonsensical
or speaking gibberish or whatever that you can recognize you're
starting to drift off.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
Like I'll be drifting and all of a sudden, like
I mean, I'm just making this up because I can't.
I don't get up and write it down. What I
should do is write it down, but then I've ruined
my or whatever.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Help you.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
But it's, you know, all of a sudden, if I'm
just here words or I'm saying here my voice saying
words like you know, you know, the chicken put on
a cape and played a little basketball and jumped in
a pot of chili, like complete nonsense, and I will
recognize it's happening and go all right, that means I'm
about there, and then that takes me out of it

(51:33):
and then like nab it.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
Yeah, but a lot of times you can just experience
it and not note it and just fall asleep.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
Or note it and then just not let it rouse
me too much, and it'll lead to sleep.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Gotcha, man, that's amazing. I've never heard of it. Very
pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
Oh boy.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
But every time I've said something weird about myself like
that on the air, like stepping on cracks with the
same place of my foot every time with the OCD,
I've had people write in and say I.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
Do the same thing, right, So yeah, I think that's
that's I was going to say, Like, I know, we've
been talking about ourselves a lot, but part of it
for me is like, you know, I want to hear
from people saying like.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
I yeah, that too, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
Okay, Well, oh, one other thing before we go, There
was a tweet what's become kind of a famous tweet
from a few years back, I think in twenty twenty,
where somebody just basically said some people have an inner
voice and some people don't. And it revealed this this
commonality among people if you don't really have an inner dialogue, monologue,

(52:36):
inner speech, whatever, you just assume no one else does either.
And if you do have it, you just assume everybody
has it. And it was really kind of eye opening
to people to find like that's not the case at all,
that it's basically a spectrum.

Speaker 1 (52:50):
Yeah, and I mean maybe new research will spawned because
everyone was like, oh wait a minute, people are interested in.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
This, Yeah, Fernio said Fernie, ho ooh that's right. Well
you got anything else?

Speaker 1 (53:04):
I mean, there's a bazillion other things, but we'll just
park it right here.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Okay, it has parked. And since we just parked it,
it's everyone who has been listening to the show from
the outset knows we've just unlocked listen new Now.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
That's right, I'm gonna call this Toledo and this is
from Alexander Nozar or Alex Alex says, you know, every
time Josh talks about having come from Toledo, always thinking
about Tony Pacos, which he mentioned in the Fan Theory episode.
What wasn't mentioned, however, was and Tony Paco's is what
it was a restaurant.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Right, It's a like a hot dog place, very famous
in Toledo, and then Jamie Farr made it famous on
mash That's right.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
What wasn't mentioned, however, was what makes Tony Pacos awesome.
First and foremost, that was founded by a Hungarian immigrant,
making it a significant place for Hungarian Americans, especially here
in Ohio, which has a pretty large Hungarian population in Dayton, Columbus, Toledo,
and I believe Cleveland. My family is Hungarian on both sides,
with great grandfathers coming over here in the nineteen hundreds

(54:07):
early nineteen hundreds. Tony Paco serves not just Hungarian food
like Spetzel, but they're well known for their homemade pickles
and most importantly they're hot dogs. But what makes it
truly unique as a fun place to visit is at
anytime a celebrity visits, they're asked to sign a hot
dog bun, which is then encased in plastic and hung
on the wall. It's been a while since I've been there,
but I remember Leslie Odom Junior's name, and of course

(54:30):
Jamie Farr. So I think you too should go up
there on some sort of tour and you can experience
our awesome food, but also sign a hot dog bune.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
I don't think they've let us sign a hot dog bune,
but I appreciate the thought. Kid me, didn't you get
a key to the city or something. There was a
listener years back who was trying to get us actually
the key to the city, and I don't think it
went anywhere.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Well, you should get a key to Toledo. I should
get a key to Stone Mountain, Georgia. You should sign
a hot dog bun, and I should sign a Stone Mountain.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Plus also we should have the hot dogs while they're there,
because Alex ain't lying and they're really good. And I
have to say, if you're ever in Toledo or apparently Dayton, Columbus,
Cleveland and you aren't in the mood for a hot dog,
but there's a Tony Pacos nearby, Go get the stuff
cabbage because it is top notch, Like you wouldn't think
this hot dog place. Why does it have stuff cabbage? Well,

(55:20):
because it's a Hungarian place and it is really good,
like really good. Okay, I'm just gonna say it again.
It's really good stuff cabbage.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
What's it? Stuff with love.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
Magic, I'm guessing three kinds of meat, probably it is.
It is very good. Well, thanks a lot, Alex is
always nice to hear from a fellow Ohiooo. I'm guessing yeah, yeah.
And if you want to be like Alex and right
in and tell us about something we love, like Tony
Paco's or whatever, you can send us an email to

(55:54):
Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
For more podcasts, my heeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows