Is consciousness merely a ghost conjured by neurons? During the last decade or so, the idea that inner speech, or the human mind's ability to talk to itself, could fashion consciousness, has made a marked dent on psychologists' perceptions about consciousness. Support for this idea is flowing in from diverse disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, sociology.

This has led some students of the mind to abandon the reductionist, biological approach to consciousness in favour of a more complex dual model, which seeks explanations of the special human extras in unusual territories, such as inner speech, childhood socialisation and culture.

This change is reflected in memory research. Memory is now divided into two parts--the ability to recognise and associate, which is genetic, and the learnt, language-based skill we know as recollection.

But how do we use our inner voices to orchestrate the more exalted mental attributes, such as remembering, reflecting and planning? The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky pioneered the developmental approach in the 1930s, which some researchers are now rediscovering. Vygotsky observed that children between 2 and 7 go through a phase when they spend a lot of time talking aloud to themselves. On closer examination, Vygotsky discovered that the children were rehearsing the habits of planning and organising that they would later internalise as inner speech. Vygotsky tried to show how similar use of self-addressed speech underpinned the human ability to recollect.

For many psychologists, this dual approach lifts a huge weight from the shoulders of neurology. The inertia of treating the mind as a closed biological system has led many to think of self-awareness as being an inherent property of consciousness. But, say psychologists, the knack of thinking about the mind's goings-on is really a trick of memory enslaved to language.