Things Johanne Says on Podcasts

Yes, I think so. And I think there's a super interesting overlap with an endophasia research as well. So if rumination, for example, which is a very common feature of depression and anxiety, if that's inner speech based, then you would expect that you wouldn't have so much of that if you have anedophasia. And then could that be a mental health benefit? And then the other thing that some people have reported to me is that if you do attend cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, which is all about learning to identify these statements that you're telling yourself, these catastrophizing statements, for example, identifying them and then challenging them. I'm like asking questions, is this really reasonable to think that everything will go wrong in this way? And some people have told me that if you have anedophasia, that is really hard to do because you might have negative thoughts, but they're not so tangible. It just feels like a vast sea of negative thought instead of this specific statement that I can grasp onto and then challenge.

…Yes. And there's this, I used to also think that inner speech was or internal linguistic activity or whatever was completely fundamental to the way that humans think. That there's a lot of the thinking that we do that we could not do without language. And I'm not so sure about that anymore. Because of all these, ever since our original article came out where we coined this term anandophasia, I've received so many emails from people who have this experience themselves and they're all saying like thoughts do not need words. I don't understand why it seems so inefficient to think in the restricted medium of language. So happy I'm not doing that. And that's like that's really fascinating to me that we have we're yeah we are so diverse in the way that we think and still we achieve performance or we we go about our daily lives in ways that you would never be able to tell who has inner speech and who doesn't from the outside.