I mean, I could have saved the researchers a lot of time. As a kid I didn’t understand why people talked about thought as being inner speech, because I didn’t talk in my head, I just *thought*. It’s only when I was much older that I developed that inner monologue. These days I have developed a technique for helping me sleep where I consciously suspend my inner speech. Anyone can do this quite easily. It just takes some practice to sustain. It’s obvious when doing this that you continue to have thoughts. You just don’t allow your inner thought transcriber to verbalize them.