Charles Fernyhough Ph.D.

About

Charles Fernyhough, P.h.D., is a writer and psychologist. He is a part-time Professor of Psychology at Durham University in the UK, where he conducts research in inner speech, hallucinations, and child development. He directs Hearing the Voice, an interdisciplinary project on the experience of hearing voices, based at Durham University and supported by a Collaborative Award from the Wellcome Trust.

Charles' latest book, The Voices Within, is on the topic of inner voices. His book on autobiographical memory, Pieces of Light, was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. His non-fiction book, The Baby in the Mirror (Granta, 2008) was published in the US as A Thousand Days of Wonder (Avery, 2009). He is the author of two novels: The Auctioneer (Fourth Estate, 1999) and A Box of Birds (Unbound), a literary thriller about how neuroscience changes our understanding of ourselves. His books have been translated into eleven languages.

Charles has written for the Guardian, Nature, New Scientist, TIME Ideas, Daily Beast, Observer, Literary Review, BBC Focus, Financial Times, Scotland on Sunday and Sydney Morning Herald. He has made numerous radio appearances in the UK and US.

Photo credit: Ben Gilbert/Wellcome Images

Books by Charles Fernyhough Ph.D.

Recent Posts

Telling the Real From the Unreal

As demonstrated in a recent study, a negative mood can affect your ability to distinguish between an event that really happened and one that you just imagined. This could in turn help us to understand how negative emotions can trigger voice-hearing experiences.

What Kinds of People Hear Voices?

It is often assumed that voice-hearing necessarily indicates severe mental illness. A growing body of scientific research shows that this is not the case, and that voice-hearing can be part of many ordinary people's everyday lives.

Voices in the News

Media portrayals of people who hear voices do not match up with scientific knowledge about the experience. Negative effects of stigmatization may be exacerbated as a result.

Describing Obama

It's one thing having 'mind-reading' or 'theory of mind' skills; it's another thing to be able or willing to use them in social situations. Mind-mindedness refers to an individual's willingness to deploy their mentalizing skills in interactions with others. A new study suggests that it might be a feature of close relationships rather than a general trait.

Do Deaf People Hear an Inner Voice?

People affected by hearing loss report hearing a voice in their head, just as hearing people do. The qualities of that experience are varied, just as they are for hearing people.

Where Do All the Words Come From?

Scientists are beginning to understand why our heads are full of words. Developmental psychologists have uncovered clues to the origins of inner speech and how it might come to serve various functions in thinking. Cognitive neuroscientists are investigating how inner speech might play a role in 'hearing voices' or auditory verbal hallucinations.

The Art and Science of Memory

Autobiographical memories are reconstructions of past events which have a particular phenomenology: a 'what it is like' quality. To understand them fully, therefore, we need to draw on insights from the humanities as well as the sciences.

What Determines a Baby's Attachment Security?

Mind-mindedness is a multidimensional construct representing caregivers' willingness to take the perspective of their offspring. In a longitudinal study, different profiles of mind-mindedness predicted the quality of infant–mother attachment.

Rethinking Sensitivity

Mary Ainsworth's original definition of parental sensitivity emphasized the appropriateness of a mother's responses to her baby, but some of those original nuances have been lost in more recent research. Mind-mindedness refers to parents' ability to tune in sensitively to what their babies are thinking and feeling, and it appears to be an important factor in development.

Putting Neuroscience Into the Story

What influence does neuroscience have on our understanding of our own everyday thoughts and behavior? To my mind, the best way of assessing the importance of these ideas is by putting them into fiction.