The Giants Shoulder Meet The Inner Speech Expert Proving We Can Conjure Other Conscious Entities
May 11, 2026
Ben Alderson-Day, psychologist and hallucination researcher at Durham and author of Presence, studies inner speech, auditory hallucinations, and felt presences. He explores why many people lack a clear inner voice. He explains how parental voices shape inner talk, how writers and tulpamancers create autonomous minds, and what separates inner speech from hallucination.
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Brains Can Run Other Minds Offline
- The mind can model other minds offline, producing voices or characters that seem autonomous.
- Ben links this capacity across hallucinations, writers' characters, and trained tulpas, all using the brain's social modeling.
People Rarely Know Their Own Inner Speech
- Many people lack awareness of their inner speech frequency and form.
- Ben says people often only notice differences when confronted with others who don't experience dialogues or images the same way.
How Tulpamancers Conjure Other Minds
- Tulpamancers intentionally create autonomous mind-characters called tulpas via dialogue and meditation.
- Ben describes online communities training a tulpa over weeks so it begins speaking seemingly on its own.
