Can You Think Without Words?

Can you actually think without words? Most of us hear a voice in our head all day, but some people never do, and they still get through life just fine. We follow a psychologist who has been beeping people since the 1970s, a brain scientist who lost her inner voice to a stroke, a man who reached 27 without a single word, and a group of deaf kids in Nicaragua who invented a language from scratch. Along the way we find the one kind of thought that really seems to need words. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0:00 Did I lock the door? 0:30 The beeper experiment 1:00 What's really in your head? 1:28 Benito and the bricks 1:44 Unsymbolized thinking 2:05 Anendophasia: no inner voice 2:47 Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke 3:45 Rosemary Varley: the lion and the math 4:32 Global aphasia and the language network 5:27 Ildefonso, a man without words 6:23 Mario and the bullfight 7:07 Nicaragua invents a language 7:27 The train test 8:00 So, can you think without words? 8:23 How well do you know your own head? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Kyle Plant (@KylePlantEmoji), viral post on inner monologues, Twitter/X, January 27, 2020. Heavey, C. L., & Hurlburt, R. T. (2008). The phenomena of inner experience. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(3), 798–810. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2007.12.006 Hurlburt, R. T., & Akhter, S. A. (2008). Unsymbolized thinking. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(4), 1364–1374. Hurlburt, R. T., Heavey, C. L., & Kelsey, J. M. (2013). Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1477–1494. Alderson-Day, B., & Fernyhough, C. (2014). More than one voice: Investigating the phenomenological properties of inner speech requires a variety of methods. Consciousness and Cognition, 24, 113–114. Nedergaard, J. S. K., & Lupyan, G. (2024). Not everybody has an inner voice: Behavioral consequences of anendophasia. Psychological Science, 35(7), 780–797. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797624124