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 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
Dr Johanne Nedergård and Gary Lupyan asked more than a thousand people how often they think in words, then invited people from both ends of that scale to take part. 47 people reported a lot of inner speech and 46 reported little.
Everyone did four tasks: remembering lists of words, judging whether the names of two pictures rhyme, switching between adding and subtracting, and telling whether two animal silhouettes were identical.
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 and at matching shapes.
Among people who said they had named things out loud, 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
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.