Anauralia: The Silent Mind and Its Association With Aphantasia
Reviewed by: Luca Tommasi, University of Studies G. D'Annunzio Chieti and Pescara, Italy; María José Pérez-Fabello, University of Vigo, Spain
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Auditory and visual imagery were studied in a sample of 128 participants, including 34 self-reported aphantasics. Auditory imagery (Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale-Vividness, BAIS-V) and visual imagery (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire-Modified, VVIQ-M) were strongly associated, Spearman's rho = 0.83: Most self-reported aphantasics also reported weak or entirely absent auditory imagery; and participants lacking auditory imagery tended to be aphantasic. Similarly, vivid visual imagery tended to co-occur with vivid auditory imagery. Nevertheless, the aphantasic group included one individual with typical auditory imagery; and the group lacking auditory imagery (N = 29) included one individual with typical visual imagery. Hence, weak visual and auditory imagery can dissociate, albeit with low apparent incidence. Auditory representations and auditory imagery are thought to play a key role in a wide range of psychological domains, including working memory and memory rehearsal, prospective cognition, thinking, reading, planning, problem-solving, self-regulation, and music. Therefore, self-reports describing an absence of auditory imagery raise a host of important questions concerning the role of phenomenal auditory imagery in these domains. Because there is currently no English word denoting an absence of auditory imagery, we propose a new term, anauralia, for referring to this, and offer suggestions for further research.
Interest in the once controversial topic of mental imagery (Pylyshyn, 2002), and its relation with other aspects of psychological functioning has revived in recent years, following a series of papers describing individuals who apparently have no experience of imagery, or more accurately no experience of visual sensory imagery (Zeman et al., 2010, 2015, 2020; Dawes et al., 2020). The term “aphantasia” was introduced by Zeman et al. (2015) to describe this lack of visual imagery. However, in addition to reporting a lack of visual imagery, some but not all aphantasic individuals also report weak or absent imagery in other sensory modalities (Dawes et al., 2020; Zeman et al., 2020). While humans are undoubtedly a highly visual species, other sensory modalities are obviously also important. In particular, auditory representations and auditory imagery, including the notion of an “inner voice” are thought to be critically important for psychological functioning across a wide range of domains (Reisberg, 1992; Hubbard, 2010; Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, 2015; Fernyhough, 2016), including: working memory and memory rehearsal (Baddeley and Logie, 1992; Baddeley and Andrade, 2000), prospective memory (Stone et al., 2001), language (Vygotsky, 1962), reading (Kurby et al., 2009; Brunye et al., 2010), planning and problem-solving (Morin et al., 2018), self-regulation (Tullett and Inzlicht, 2010), thinking (Vygotsky, 1962; Clowes, 2007; Chella and Pipitone, 2020) and music (Aleman et al., 2000). Moreover, auditory imagery in the form of inner speech is believed to play a key role in cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1962; Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, 2015). Just as the literature on mental imagery generally has been dominated by work on visual imagery (Pearson, 2019), descriptions and investigations of aphantasia have tended to focus on visual representations and visual imagery. However, both personal accounts (Faw, 2009; Kendle, 2017; Watkins, 2018) and survey studies (Dawes et al., 2020; Zeman et al., 2020) have shown that at least some aphantasics report an inner mental life that is not only “blind” (Keogh and Pearson, 2018), but also completely silent. That is, these individuals report a complete absence of auditory as well as visual imagery: “I just don't have an inner voice that speaks to me or which I can listen to talking”—Kendle (2017, p. 14); “I silently think and silently read (with no auditory ‘voice’)”—Faw (2009, p. 46); “I don't have the experience people describe of hearing a tune or a voice in their heads”—Watkins (2018, p. 44); “I now refer to my experience as “Like Helen Keller in my head. I'm blind, deaf, dumb and mute!”—Kendle (2017, p. 38). Because there is currently no English word that denotes an absence of auditory imagery, we propose a new term, anauralia, to refer to this. Since auditory representations are believed to be important for key aspects of cognitive functioning as we have noted, further investigation of auditory imagery, its absence in anauralia, and the relationship between anauralia and aphantasia appears overdue. Accordingly, in this paper, we report a preliminary investigation of auditory imagery and anauralia and their associations with visual imagery and aphantasia.
