# Causes and Contents of Inner Speech **Abstract:** ness, that initiate and control bodily movements. They are stored in and activated from motor and premotor cortex. They underlie “rote” knowledge such as one’s knowledge of familiar phone numbers or one’s times tables, and are generally thought to be quite distinct from semantic and episodic memory (see Jeannerod, 2006).) The question is an empirical one, of course. And it might turn out that whenever an episodic memory of a speech-involving event is formed, motor-schema representations form a necessary component of the memory ensemble and its subsequent retrieval. But this would be surprising. No other components of episodic memory seem to have this sort of privileged status. There remains another sense in which episodic memory for speech is active, however. This is that episodic memories can be actively sought for. One can try to remember the exact way in which a sequence of events unfolded, probing one’s memory with cues of various kinds. Of course, one often seems passive in the face of one’s memories, too. Memories can be evoked by a spoken phrase or a familiar smell, often seeming to intrude into one’s consciousness, unbidden. Indeed, many evoked memories can be unwelcome ones, which one then tries to repress. Even in such cases, however, there is arguably an underlying process of selective attention, which is best thought of as a kind of action (Carruthers, 2015a). Memories of various sorts are continually being evoked by aspects of one’s current experience without eve