Angelica's Grotto

5 Worth Writing Up?

‘Actually,’ said Professor Slope to Nathalie Lichtheim, ‘I haven’t come across anything like this inner-voice loss before — it might even be worth writing up.’ They were having coffee in Slope’s office where Escher’s carp lurked dimly on the wall.

‘You’re telling me this poor man has completely lost his mental privacy, his Selbstgesprach?’ said Mrs Lichtheim.

‘He whispers into his hand when he wants to be private. He presented like he was about to blow all his fuses and my first thought was hypomania and the usual bipolar thing. Then I began to wonder about his frontal lobes but I doubt that there’s anything organically wrong — his general irritability makes me think that his mental drains are blocked and he’s got a lot of sewage backing up on him.’

Mrs Lichtheim shook her head and sighed a little. ‘I’m surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. Year after year we don’t say all kinds of things that could get us into trouble, we keep an internal watch on the words about to come out of our mouths: we monitor the prearticulatory speech output code during speech production by means of an internal loop to the speech comprehension system. So here’s this guy of yours who’s been not saying things for about seventy years which is quite a long time, really. He hears these unsaid things in his head but they never come out of his mouth. Finally the monitor, the voice in his head, says, “The hell with this, I quit. You want to say something, say it out loud.” You think it could be something like that?’

‘I hope he survives long enough for us to find out,’ said Slope.