Inner speech and the architecture of social cognition: A commentary on Silvanto (2026)
Geva and LœvenbruckNovember 2026
Our summary in plain words
What This Paper Is About
This is a commentary: it reports no new study. It responds to Silvanto's argument that lifelong (congenital) aphantasia, the absence or near absence of voluntary mental imagery, is cognitive diversity, not pathology. Some researchers propose that visual imagery helps people build social and emotional understanding. The authors argue that this view overlooks inner speech, "the voice in our head".
The Argument
The main claim is that inner speech, more than visual imagery, supports social and emotional understanding.
The authors agree with Silvanto. They warn that describing people with aphantasia as using "compensatory strategies" may still treat aphantasia as a disorder.
Imagery is not one thing. It can be absent in one sense and present in another.
Inner speech ranges from condensed forms (meaning and sound structure, with no heard voice) to expanded forms (a voice you hear). Inner speech without an inner voice is called auditory verbal aphantasia.
The authors borrow a distinction between "physics" (the underlying information) and "rendering" (sensory detail). They argue the physics of inner speech may be enough for social understanding.
Where studies link aphantasia to weaker social understanding, the authors suggest this may reflect a broader reduction in inner experience, including inner speech.
What It Draws On
The paper cites research in which people with aphantasia reported reduced empathy. They also showed a weaker bodily response to emotional scenes described in words, but not to scenes presented visually. On a visual emotion recognition task, they were slower, with comparable accuracy. In children, verbal skills, not visual-spatial skills, best predicted emotion recognition. Deaf children of speaking parents showed reduced social abilities compared with deaf children of deaf parents. In a cited preprint, people with auditory verbal aphantasia judged rhymes accurately and resisted articulatory interference better than controls.
The support is limited. No sample sizes are given. Most of the language evidence comes from children, autism, and hearing or language conditions, not from people with aphantasia. The empathy findings are self-report, the rhyme study is a preprint, and several of the inner speech studies cited include one of the two authors.
What This Might Mean
If the authors are right, the social differences reported in aphantasia would not come from missing mental pictures. Lacking sensory imagery might even bring advantages in some cases. The authors write "We conclude", yet they also say further work is needed on whether differences in inner speech matter for adult social and emotional skills. They propose no specific test, so the central idea still needs direct study.
One Interesting Detail
A 2026 study cited in the paper reported that many people who self-identify as non-visual thinkers keep inner speech. Of the participants, 27.8% used an inner voice without visual imagery, and 9.1% thought in words without an inner voice.
This summary was written with AI and may contain errors. Check the original paper.
Authors
Sharon Geva
1 paper in the libraryHélène Lœvenbruck
6 papers in the library
Cite this paper
Geva, S., & Lœvenbruck, H. (2026). Inner speech and the architecture of social cognition: a commentary on silvanto (2026). Cortex, 205, 491–495. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2026.10.005
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