Auditory aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily hear sounds, music, or voices in your mind, sometimes called a silent mind. Closely tied to inner speech.
Lambert and colleagues · Neuropsychologia
Researchers found that anauralia and aphantasia share a 0.8% prevalence but have distinct psychological profiles. This suggests that the absence of sensory imagery is modality-specific rather than a single, unified condition.
Suggate, Milton and Tree · Neuropsychologia
People with aphantasia were more accurate but slower than controls on multimodal mental comparison tasks. This suggests that sensory cognition can be successfully achieved through propositional rather than imagistic strategies.
Rollo and colleagues · Brain and Cognition
In 49 healthy young adults, 20 minutes of weak, randomly fluctuating electrical current over both temples lowered ratings of how easily they could change one imagined sound into another, compared with a sham session on another day. Ratings of how vivid the imagined sounds were fell by a slightly smaller amount, a trend that did not reach significance. The ratings were self-reported during stimulation, and because no other brain area was stimulated for comparison, the authors cannot rule out a general effect, for example on attention.
Nanay · Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Aphantasia is a heterogeneous condition with distinct subtypes, including variations in voluntary control and sensory modalities. Recognizing these differences is essential for developing accurate experimental methodologies and explanations.
Hayes, Miles and Evans · New Ideas in Psychology
Five people with aphantasia described leaning on facts, a soundless inner voice, and notes, photos and other people to remember. The authors suggest these strategies help but only partly offset real memory difficulties.
Zeman · Neuropsychologia
Ten years after aphantasia was named, Adam Zeman argues it likely has several subtypes and that most abilities are spared, with memory for one's own past differing most. He urges an open mind in this young field.
Zeman and colleagues · Cortex
This short definition, published in a special issue of the journal Cortex, describes aphantasia as the absence or near-absence of imagery, most often the inability to picture things while fully awake, as opposed to simply thinking about them. Aphantasia affects deliberate imagery, may affect spontaneous imagery, and often leaves imagery in dreams intact. It can be lifelong or acquired, and the note proposes labels such as visual, auditory, multisensory and global aphantasia, while recording that some researchers keep the word for vision alone.
Monzel and colleagues · Cortex
In a short reply within a debate over names, the authors argue for keeping one term, aphantasia, for absent or markedly reduced voluntary imagery in any sense, with a word added for the sense involved, such as visual or auditory aphantasia, or multisensory aphantasia when all senses are affected. They describe hyperphantasia as the opposite: imagery said to rival real perception. They note that many people with aphantasia report rare spontaneous flashes of imagery or imagery in dreams, and that lacking imagery does not mean lacking imagination.