Johanne S. K. Nedergaard
Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Johanne S. K. Nedergaard is a cognitive scientist and psycholinguist at the University of Copenhagen whose research examines individual variation in phenomenal inner experience, verbal scaffolding, and executive control.
In the 2024 Psychological Science paper Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia (35(7):780-797), Nedergaard and Gary Lupyan introduced the term anendophasia to denote the absence of subjective inner speech. Comparing adults at the low and high extremes of self-reported inner speech across four behavioral experiments, they demonstrated that adults with anendophasia show measurable deficits in verbal working memory (serial recall of orthographically similar words) and visual rhyme judgments of pictures, yet perform equivalently to high-inner-speech adults on task-switching and categorical perceptual discrimination when allowed to vocalize externally or use non-verbal strategies.
For theories of emerging consciousness, Nedergaard’s findings refute the assumption that human conscious thought requires a continuous natural-language monologue. Inner speech functions as an optional cognitive loop that aids phonological working memory rather than a necessary condition for phenomenal awareness or executive agency.
Known for. Coining anendophasia (with Gary Lupyan) and measuring the behavioral consequences of lacking an inner voice
Coverage on this site
- Anendophasia and Memory Reconsolidation in Nedergaard, Lupyan and Nader's Cognitive Studies November 2026
Related researchers
- Gary LupyanDepartment of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-MadisonLabel-feedback hypothesis, language-augmented cognition, coining anendophasia with Johanne Nedergaard (2024)
- Karim NaderDepartment of Psychology, McGill UniversityDiscovery of memory reconsolidation in the amygdala (Nature 2000 with Glenn Schafe and Joseph LeDoux), labile trace updating upon conscious recall
- Hedayat AbedijooACE Conscious Studio / IndependentACE.await (2026), the ACE decision framework (Agency, Connection, Exchange)
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Blaise Agüera y ArcasGoogle VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology & SocietyComputational functionalism, active inference, on-device neural computing, What Is Intelligence? (2025), and Who Are We Now? (2023)
- Igor AleksanderImperial College LondonAxiomatic Consciousness Theory, neural state machines, The World in My Mind, pioneering neural network engineering
- Micah AllenCenter of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University and University of CambridgeInteroceptive predictive processing, Embodied Dynamic Causal Modelling, visceral modulation of perceptual awareness and metacognition
Johanne S. K. Nedergaard is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.