Russell T. Hurlburt

Nedergaard and Lupyan (2024) presented four studies aimed at validating anendophasia (i.e., experiencing no inner speech). ¹ However, Lind (2025) held that no one, including Nedergaard and Lupyan, has demonstrated that anendophasia exists. In both articles, the authors support their positions using the findings of descriptive experience sampling. Here, I show that descriptive experience sampling is a fidelity-aspiring method; I highlight the distinction between fidelity and validity (an important distinction for psychological science in general and for anendophasia in particular). Anendophasia is an experiential phenomenon, not a construct, and therefore requires incorporating fidelity-based investigations. Nedergaard and Lupyan treated anendophasia as a construct (providing validity-based investigations), but drew phenomenon-based conclusions. I distinguish between completely and mostly anendophasic individuals, noting that, in practice, that distinction might be impossible to make. I suggest that anendophasic (or at least mostly anendophasic) individuals do in fact exist (probably frequently) and are worthy of fidelity-based (as well as validational) investigations.

Inner experience is widely accepted by psychologists and lay people as being straightforwardly observable: Inner speech, visual images, feelings, and so on are understood to be directly apprehendable “before the footlights of consciousness.” Many psychologists hold that such characteristics of inner experience play substantial theoretical roles and have applied significance across a wide range of cognitive, affective, performance, and clinical situations. If so, the frequency of occurrence of these characteristics is of fundamental importance. Such frequencies are usually estimated by questionnaires or by questionnaire-based experience sampling. However, there are reasons to wonder about the accuracy of such questionnaire-based estimates. We present three studies that compared, head-to-head, questionnaire-based experiential frequencies with frequencies discovered using descriptive experience sampling (DES), a method for random sampling in the natural environment that aspires to apprehend inner experience with as high fidelity as the state of the art allows. Together, they suggest that estimates of inner-experience frequency produced by questionnaires and DES are irreconcilably discrepant: Questionnaire-based methods produced dramatically higher (from 2 to 4 times as high) frequencies than did DES. These results suggest caution when interpreting questionnaire-based experiential results and the importance of additional high-fidelity studies of inner experience.

Descriptive experience sampling has suggested that there are five frequently occurring phenomena of inner experience: inner speaking, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness. Descriptive experience sampling is a labor- and skill-intensive procedure, so it would be desirable to estimate the frequency of these phenomena by questionnaire. However, appropriate questionnaires either do not exist or have substantial limitations. We therefore created the Nevada Inner Experience Questionnaire (NIEQ), with five subscales estimating the frequency of each of the frequent phenomena, and examine here its psychometric adequacy. Exploratory factor analysis produced four of the expected factors (inner speaking, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings) but did not produce a sensory awareness factor. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the five-factor model. The correlation between an existing self-talk questionnaire (Brinthaupt’s Self-Talk Scale) and the NIEQ inner speaking subscale provides one piece of concurrent validation.

Research into resting-state cognition has often struggled with the challenge of assessing inner experience in the resting state. We employed Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), a method aimed at generating detailed and high-fidelity descriptions of experience, to investigate how experience in the resting state can vary between internal, external, and multiple simultaneous streams. Using a large body of experiential and brain activation data acquired from five DES participants, independent raters classified sampled moments of experience according to whether they were internally directed, externally directed, or contained elements of both at the same time. In line with existing models, comparison of internal with external experience samples identified a network of regions associated with the default mode network. Regions of interest resulting from the whole-brain contrasts successfully predicted independent raters’ forced-choice categorizations of samples for which experience had a simultaneous internal and external focus. The present study is distinctive in tying neural activations in the resting state to detailed descriptions of specific phenomenology, and in demonstrating how the DES method enables a particularly nuanced analysis of moments of experience, especially their ability simultaneously to incorporate both an internal and an external focus. The study represents an integration of rich phenomenology and characterizations of brain activity, tracing interpretive paths from phenomenology to neural activation and vice versa.

Inner speaking is a directly apprehended phenomenon, not an inference or metaphorical claim about a psychological process. Investigations of inner speaking require a method that carefully explores phenomena as they actually occur. Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) is an attempt at such a method, and is described in this chapter, including an annotated case study of its results. DES investigations suggest that many claims about inner speech are hugely mistaken, leading to the conclusion that powerful presuppositions about inner speech can lead investigations astray; the chapter discusses the recognition and the bracketing of presuppositions. It suggests skepticism about claims based on Vygotskian or other theory, on introspection, on experimental manipulations, or on questionnaires unless the method used provides a principled rationale for the bracketing of presuppositions. The chapter describes aspects of inner speaking not frequently recognized as occurring: partially or completely unworded inner speaking, multiple simultaneous inner speaking, meaningless inner speaking.

Although self-talk has been shown to be an effective performance enhancement tool, accessing athletes’ ongoing inner experiences, including self-talk, has proven difficult. This study investigated the feasibility and desirability of using Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) to sample athletes’ inner experiences during competition, thus avoiding potential distortions that arise from retrospective reports and questionnaires. Golfers (N = 10) were trained as DES participants in their natural environments; then their experiences were sampled during a golf tournament. More self-talk occurred during tournament play than in natural environments. Self-talk was a frequent but not ubiquitous component of experience during tournament play, inner-speaking self-talk was six times as frequent as speaking aloud self-talk, and effortful System 2 self-talk was rare. The results of this research demonstrate that DES can be feasibly implemented in sport settings and may be a useful approach for researchers exploring athletes’ inner experiences.

Response: Commentary: Can Inner Experience Be Apprehended in High Fidelity? Examining Brain Activation and Experience from Multiple Perspectives

After using descriptive experience sampling to study randomly selected moments of inner experience, we make observations about feelings, including blended and multiple feelings. We observe that inner experience usually does not contain feelings. Sometimes, however, feelings are directly present. When feelings are present, most commonly they are unitary. Sometimes people experience separate emotions as a single experience, which we call a blended feeling. Occasionally people have multiple distinct feelings present simultaneously. These distinct multiple feelings can be of opposite valence, with one pleasant and the other unpleasant. We provide examples that inform theories of emotions and discuss the important role observational methodology plays in the effort to understand inner experience including feelings.