Some people can imagine their favourite band playing right in front of them, while others can’t seem to imagine an ambulance siren or car horn. Try and imagine a small dog barking. A bright, shrill and very frequent bark. Now morph it into the bark of a big dog. Deep and loud. Can you hear it? If your response to this was: ‘What am I supposed to be hearing? I know what they sound like, but I don’t hear anything’—then you might have Anauralia. A lack of auditory imagery. Anauralia is a phenomenon that affects around 1% of our population (unpublished from data collected by the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Survey (NZAVS) in 2022), and data thus far suggests that there are no implications on people’s wider well-being and behaviour. Anauralia can be viewed as the auditory equivalent to aphantasia—the lack of an inner eye or visual imagery.

Aphantasics usually report an inability to recall images in their inner eye. Their visual imagery is reported on a spectrum between very faint and nonexistent. This leads to the question of whether aphantasia is related to a more general absence of imagery or whether there is a difference between auditory/visual/olfactory/kinetic imagery. The co-existence of anauralia and aphantasia seems to be quite high. This means that people who have aphantasia might likely also be affected by anauralia and thus, there is a high likelihood for overlap in terms of the function of imagery, disregarding the related sense. So far, anauralia has been described as the complete lack of auditory imagery [1], yet there has not been a clearer understanding of whether people with anauralia also lack inner speech. There may be a need for differentiating between people who lack imagery, people who lack inner speech, and people who lack both.

Inner speech has previously been linked to cognitive processes, including executive function, working memory and even some psychopathology [2]. Inner speech also relies on something called ‘subvocalisation’, which is measurable by putting small electrodes on the muscles around the mouth and neck [3]. The same muscles are activated at higher rates when we speak. On the other hand, auditory imagery has been found to relate to memory, creativity and helping process auditory information. Imagery has been found to be neurologically quite similar to the way we perceive sounds in real life [4]. This means that our inner ear and our inner voice create a somewhat internal and personal parallel to our outwardly expressive senses of speech and hearing.

Even though having an inner parallel to our senses in which we can manipulate information, recall and create seems to make perfect sense, not everyone experiences this internal world the same. People who experience Anauralia can still do all these things, but they somehow don’t seem to have the need to utilise their internal world to do so. As of now, it is unclear to what extent the inner ear and inner voice are linked and whether all anauralics experience the lack of both or if there is divergence in regards to either inner speech or inner ear.

This is what the Anauralia Lab at the University of Auckland is currently trying to figure out. Current studies involve figuring out whether anauralia has any effects on the way people memorise and remember information using their working memory, finding a physiological measurement for anauralia using pupillometry and creating a questionnaire (Auckland Auditory Imagery Scale (AAIS)) to identify Anauralia more clearly. Future studies also involve using electroencephalography (EEG) and other imaging methods to identify similarities and differences between anauralics and controls. If you think you may be anauralic, and/or want to know more about it, visit anauralia.com, and contact us! We would love to have you participate in our studies and chat with you!