Smile for the camera: take a look at your brain!

As we go through our day, we often hear an inner speech in our mind’s ear. It is a pervasive psychological phenomenon in our waking life and plays an important role in cognition. However, as a subjective experience, inner speech is difficult to study objectively. In this talk, I will share with you how modern technologies in cognitive neuroscience can help visualise your inner speech outside your mind, providing novel insights into what inner speech is, how it is generated by the brain and why we hear it.

Non-invasive imaging is the only way to look at the brain of human subjects, or animals, while they are alive. It allows to investigate the brain structure and functions in health but importantly also in diseases. This allows scientists to understand how the brain is wired, how it works, how the cells that make the brain work, how the neurons communicate, work or even die, how the blood irrigates the brain etc to investigate disease mechanisms, diagnose diseases and follow the efficacy of treatments. I will give a glimpse of what is possible nowadays with in vivo imaging.