Nedergaard and her colleague Prof Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the US, decided to explore the potential effects of lacking inner speech, recruiting people who scored low on a questionnaire with statements such as “I think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.”
By coining the term ‘anendophasia’ – from the Greek an (lack), endo (inner) and phasia (speech) – Nedergaard and Lupyan hope to create a similar keyword that will help to catalyse research into those lacking inner speech.