Aphantasia, Meet Anauralia

Just a couple of weeks ago, I referenced what I called my aphantasiac monologue, an attempt to describe how i only can conceive of sounds, much as I only can conceive of pictures. Basically the idea that in addition to not having a mind’s eye so, too, do I lack a mind’s ear.

Turns out there’s a name for this, according to Ajdina Halilovic writing for Nautilus.

Anthony Lambert, a professor of psychology at the University of Auckland, got curious about people who lack the ability to conjure sound in their minds a few years ago. “It began with a teaching exercise,” he says. Lambert held a seminar on aphantasia—a term coined in 2015 by a British neurologist named Adam Zeman to describe an inability to call up visual images in the mind. (Current estimates suggest that roughly 1 out of 25 people are aphantasics.) In the course of the class discussion, it dawned on Lambert that the ability to imagine sounds, a familiar part of everyday life, is often overlooked in the field. “It deserves study,” he thought. “And if we are to study it, we probably need a name for it.”

In a 2021 study with Rish Hinwar, then a graduate student at University of Auckland, Lambert officially introduced the term “anauralia”—the auditory analogue to aphantasia.

As I noted before, I find it somewhat more difficult to explain or describe my anauraliac brain that I do my aphantasiac one. There are words in my head when I think or read, and I certainly can recall the sound of a train, or a scream, or a laugh—in some cases with specific distinctions between the kind of train, or the volume of a scream, or the purveyor of a laugh.

Nonetheless, I am not “hearing” these things in my head any more than I am “seeing” a red Apple if I try to imagine one. They are conceptions. They are images and sounds translated somehow into thoughts without being internal replays of the actual experiences themselves.

Like I said, it’s hard to explain.

I think one of the reasons it’s tougher describing anauralia is precisely because I do have an internal monologue—itself something many people say they don’t have. I’d be really interested to know whether or not people without an internal monologue also describe themselves as anauraliac, and also whether or not people who describe themselves as anauraliac think it’s absurd to claim being anauraliac while also claiming to have an internal monologue.