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JN Johanne Nedergaard On Giants Shoulder

“Some people have told me that if you have anendophasia, 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.”

Giants Shoulder · October 2026

“Some people have told me that if you have anendophasia, 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.” — Johanne Nedergaard, Giants Shoulder

She is discussing open questions about inner speech and mental health. Cognitive behavioral therapy asks people to identify and challenge the statements they tell themselves. She relays that people with no inner voice have told her this is hard for them.

Transcript

Giants Shoulder Around 57:18 into the episode
Johanne Nedergaard

Yeah.

Evan McGloughlin

Do you think these are really still very open questions?

Johanne Nedergaard

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.

Evan McGloughlin

Interesting. Nothing is as straightforward as it seems, right? When it comes to these, like with aphantasia, there was a strong idea that these people might be immune to PTSD, right? Because if a large part of PTSD is these images that are coming into mind that they can't control, then someone…

Johanne Nedergaard

the work hasn't been done interesting there's so there's only a handful of studies on people without inner speech

Evan McGloughlin

would would you predict that they would have maybe slightly more positive mental health but again the effect size is probably not as large as you might assume is that would that kind of be the um the intuition

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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