“I used to also think that inner speech … 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. … 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.”
Giants Shoulder · October 2026
The neuroscientist coined a term (anendophasia) for having no inner speech. She says people without an inner voice solve many of the same cognitive tasks just as well. From the outside, you couldn't tell who has inner speech and who doesn't.
Transcript
No Inner don't think we can conclude that. I think we have to be tailored to the individual. So some people might benefit from that and other people might not. Yeah.
…to me. How do you probe these really deep questions about consciousness through these people that experience the world in a really different, interesting way? Have No thought about this? What do you think we learn about consciousness through studying people that don't have any inner speech?
…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.
Yes. We have to
do these really controlled behavioral experiments to see any differences.
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