• Question: How can we hear our conscience?

    Asked by nikki27 to Dilwar, Lou, Rachel, Simon, Susan on 18 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Simon Langley-Evans

      Simon Langley-Evans answered on 18 Nov 2013:


      Brilliant question nikki.

      Our conscience is just our thoughts inside our head. It is a label we use to label the processes we go through to make decisions about what is right and wrong. We are thinking all of the time and our brains are constantly processing information about the world around us, about experiences and all kinds of thoughts. The way we understand the world is through language and so it makes sense that our thoughts are processed as speech and that is the way we experience them. The system is so finely tuned that we even add tone and nuance to the thoughts in the same way that we do for speech.

    • Photo: Louise Brown

      Louise Brown answered on 19 Nov 2013:


      I love how we talk to ourselves in our head! I asked my friend who is bilingual (she was born in china but her parents moved here when she was young, so she can speak fluent english and chinese) what language she thinks in! She said it depends on who she has been talking to recently, so if shes at home she will think in chinese and if she is at work she will think in english! How cool is that!

    • Photo: Rachel Dakin

      Rachel Dakin answered on 19 Nov 2013:


      talking to yourself is a great way to think things through. Like Simon says our brains are set up to ‘personify’ things so we give our thoughts a voice and can change it depending on what or who we are thinking about.
      The brain is one clever piece of kit!

    • Photo: Susan Skelton

      Susan Skelton answered on 21 Nov 2013:


      This is a really fascinating question, nikki! In fact, I’ve spent the last few days thinking about it and trying to figure out how to answer!
      I think the only way I can “answer” is to ask another question: what is our conscience?

      For as long as there have been people, we have been trying to understand what is our ‘conscience’ or our ‘soul’, and I think at the moment it is more a question for philosophers! We have never been able to physically find it so it is very difficult to study and neuroscientists still don’t know a great deal about it.

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