EventsTalk · Members only
Not everybody has an inner voice
Dr Johanne Nedergård, Aarhus University
Do you hear yourself think?
Most people assume everyone has an inner voice. Johanne Nedergård and her colleague Gary Lupyan gave its absence a name: anendophasia, little or no experience of thinking in words you can hear.
So what changes when the voice is quiet?
What the study found
Nedergård and Lupyan asked more than a thousand people how often they think in words, then invited two smaller groups of people to take part in a study: a group of 47 people who reported typical (high) levels of inner speech and a group of 46 people who reported experiencing little or no inner speech in their everyday lives.
Everyone did four tasks: remembering lists of words, judging whether the names of two pictures rhyme, switching between adding and subtracting, and making rapid judgments about similar-looking and identical silhouettes of cats and dogs.
People with less inner speech remembered fewer words and made more mistakes on the rhymes. They weren’t slower, and they did just as well at switching between tasks. Both groups of participants were equally influenced by animal categories when telling apart cat and dog silhouettes.
Among people who said they had named things out loud (either the words to be remembered or the words that may or may not rhyme), the gap closed. Speech seems to be what helps, whether it happens in the head or out loud.
The differences were small, and inner speech was measured by asking people about it. Many in the low group still had some. These are averages across two groups, so they can’t tell you how any one person thinks. The study is published in Psychological Science (2024).
What you’ll take away
What anendophasia is, in plain words
Which everyday tasks lean on an inner voice, and which don’t
Words for how your own thinking sounds, or doesn’t
What the open questions about anendophasia are and how you can help answer them
How the hour runs
Johanne presents the study in plain words for about half an hour, then takes members’ questions live. Do you think in words, and how would you know if you didn’t?
The talk is for members. Register on this page and we’ll email you the link. Members keep the full recording, with every question, and a shorter cut goes on YouTube afterwards.
About Johanne
Dr Johanne Nedergård is a cognitive scientist and linguist at Aarhus University, where she wrote her PhD on inner speech. With Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison she named anendophasia. She studies what the inner voice does for us, and what people do without it.