Program: Anauralia: what's it like to have no inner monologue?

Sana Qadar: Many of us go about our lives believing that the people around us are experiencing the world more or less as we are. Seeing the same colours, feeling the same textures, processing and storing information the same way in our brains. But at some point you realise not everyone sees that green as green because some people are colourblind. Or not everyone can imagine or see images in their head because some people have aphantasia. And more to the point for today's episode, not everyone talks to themselves the same way in their heads because some people have anauralia. I'm Sana Qadar, this is All in the Mind and to explore exactly what that is, Claire Concannon is back on the show today. She's a science reporter and host of Our Changing World over on Radio New Zealand. Hi Claire.

Claire Concannon: Kia ora Sana, hello again.

Sana Qadar: Hi, and so people with anauralia, they can still think and reflect but they just do it in a more abstract way, right? Like rather than talking to themselves with like a clear inner voice.

Claire Concannon: Yeah and look the diversity of how human brains interact with the world is just astounding. When I heard about this it was one of those things where I just found myself telling all my friends about it. Like did you know, did you know that people experience the world this way?

Sang-Hyun Kim: I see the world and I think of the world kind of through closed captions, you know, these thoughts sort of pop into my mind and I can comprehend exactly what I'm feeling, what I'm seeing, what I'm experiencing but those thoughts aren't translated sort of verbally into this voice.

Claire Concannon: This is Sang-Hyun Kim.

Sang-Hyun Kim: It's a very interesting way of seeing the world, what's completely normal to me but it feels sort of so strange having heard what everyone else goes through, having these sort of conversations with yourselves or rationalising your thoughts via some kind of voice which to me is kind of freaky in a way. I've always been used to this kind of silence.

Claire Concannon: Sang-Hyun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Mathematics at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland.

Sang-Hyun Kim: So in investigating how math is taught and how it's learned at the undergraduate level.

Claire Concannon: His research sounds really interesting but it's not why I'm chatting to him today. Instead we're discussing how differently our minds work because while I often rehearse sentences in my mind, assemble bits of podcasts, get earworms stuck on repeat and replay full conversations, Sang-Hyun doesn't. Most of us can do this to a greater or lesser extent. The best estimate for the percentage of those who don't imagine sound in their minds or have no auditory imagery, as a psychologist put it, is just less than 1%. When Sang-Hyun finally realised he was in that less than 1% that don't have an inner voice, it came as a bit of a shock.

Sang-Hyun Kim: I almost broke down and had some kind of existential crisis. Thinking about what other people, how they think, whether these thoughts are running through their head all the time and you start to ponder about the possibilities about how people see the world. In a way it kind of, I don't know if it scares you, but it makes you really open your eyes to the possibilities that nothing is really normal. It was a bit of a groundbreaking moment when I really came to terms that this is a bit of a weird thing. It's a very interesting thing that I think deserves to be looked at further.

Claire Concannon: And that's precisely what Professor Tony Lambert and his team are doing.

Professor Anthony Lambert: I'm Tony Lambert. I'm a professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Auckland.

Claire Concannon: Tony got interested in this area of research through thinking about another variation of how brains work. People who don't have visual imagery.

Professor Anthony Lambert: So in the last few years, there's been a huge interest really in visual imagery and in lack of visual imagery. So there's an English psychologist, actually I think he's a neurologist, called Adam Zeman, who introduced this term aphantasia to the literature in 2015. And when Adam Zeman started to write about this, there was lots of interest from the public and from the media and lots of people saying, oh gosh, I'm like that. I don't imagine things visually either.

Claire Concannon: It's not as if he was the first to come across this. Just the first to give it a name. And to popularise the idea widely enough that people contacted him about their experiences. Here is Professor Zeman speaking to RNZ presenter Kim Hill in November 2015.

Professor Zeman: There were some rather unwieldy phrases like defective re-visualisation, which were a bit of a mouthful. So we thought it needed a simple description. And I therefore consulted a classicist friend who suggested the term aphantasia. Aphantasia was Aristotle's term for the mind's eye, the ability to visualise. And the A denotes the absence of that ability as in aphasia, when you can't speak, or amnesia, when you have difficulty with memory.

Kim Hill: Can you think of a word to describe my inability to imagine what aphantasia is like?

Professor Zeman: Well, that's quite a common response. And I think that that response is one of the reasons why the term has proved quite popular with people who recognise this experience as their own. Because if it affects about 2% of the population, which some evidence suggests might be the case, then if you have this variation in experience, you're going to spend time trying to explain it to others, to your friends and your family, and they won't get it, because it's relatively, relatively rare.

Claire Concannon: The whole interview is fascinating, actually, I recommend a listen. But back to Tony.

Professor Anthony Lambert: So we got interested in this, and it occurred to me that people had completely ignored the auditory dimension of this, because some people have said they don't imagine things visually, also don't imagine sounds. So we got interested in this, and it had been completely overlooked in a way. In fact, there wasn't even a name for the lack of auditory imagery. So in a paper we published in 2021, we introduced the term anauralia to the literature. And the idea of aunauralia is that it's the absence of being able to imagine what sounds like, you know, either music or environmental sounds like ambulance sirens or voices.

Claire Concannon: One of the first things that Tony and his colleagues did was try to figure out the relationship between aunauralia and aphantasia.

Professor Anthony Lambert: And what we found is that they are associated. So people who say that they don't experience sounds also often say that they don't experience visual images either. And at the other end of the extreme, people who say that they can imagine sounds clearly as if they're actually hearing them, also, many of those people also say they can imagine things visually very, very clearly. So they do go together reasonably strongly. However, in our most recent study, which used a very large sample, 30,000 New Zealanders, with that large sample, what we were able to do is to look for dissociations. And what we've found is that those two kind of dimensions of imagination do actually pull apart. They do dissociate quite rarely. So there are some people who say they don't imagine sounds at all, but they can imagine visual, the visual appearance of things very, very clearly. And conversely, there are people who say that they can't imagine things visually, but they can imagine sounds very, very clearly indeed.

Claire Concannon: For Sang-Hyun, he experiences both aunauralia and aphantasia. The names are quite strange and clinical sounding, as if they were some kind of disorder. But Tony says this is definitely not how we should think about them.

Professor Anthony Lambert: I think that's really just a dimension of individual difference. We all differ in so many ways in our personalities and so on. And I think this is another dimension of individual difference. And it's already very clear that not having that auditory or visual dimension to your imagination is no barrier to leading a happy and fulfilling life, to achieving very well.

Claire Concannon: Decades of psychology research have linked the mind's voice to different aspects of how we process and store information. How we construct memories of the past and look forward to the future. How we talk to ourselves in our minds to impact our own behaviour. Remember to get the milk. No more chocolate for you. What Tony and the team want to know is, do people who experience aunauralia use different strategies to do these things? They've got a number of questions that they hope to address. But the one that PhD student Zoe Schelp is focused on right now is how we strategically think about and memorise things in the present. Something psychologists call working memory.

Zoe Schelp: It's that little second when you're trying to remember a phone number, when you're starting to rehearse that in your head, for example, or a grocery list. Just the part of your memory that has flexibility and ways of either dismissing a part of information or recruiting it into your long-term storage.

Claire Concannon: To test this in the lab, Zoe has a computer program that sets up a simple memory test.

Zoe Schelp: I sit them across from me with a screen in front of them and they get a list of four words presented one at a time on the computer, a red dot which cues them to tell me that list in the exact order that they saw it. If they get it correct, the list goes up to five words. If they can't quite remember it, it goes down to three, which means that I'll, at the point of having done 16 trials, I'll get an average of how many words they can remember and then I score them based on that.

Claire Concannon: So far she's done this with 10 people who experience aunauralia , as well as age, gender and language-marked controls. I give it a go, but totally cheat. Cult, hint, rush, verb. Red dot, and the red dot means I have to repeat it back to you, but I shouldn't be saying it out loud.

Zoe Schelp: No, you shouldn't.

Claire Concannon: So yeah, in my mind, I would be, if I wasn't able to say them out loud, I would be saying them over and over in my head. That would be my strategy. So what did you find for the people who experience anauralia? What kind of strategies did they use?

Zoe Schelp: So what we found is that they're equally as likely to repeat them in their head. I'm not quite sure how that works, but we kind of had the same thing happening there, where they were able to have some sort of concept of repeating the words in their head, but they were way less likely to create a story through the words that they got. So there are a couple of words like fantasy and misery and cat. And so you would imagine a fairy that's really, really miserable petting a cat. A lot of controls would do that and would talk about how they tried to remember especially rhyming words like that, like mat, cat, cap. They'd imagine a cat on a mat with a cap on. But anauralics wouldn't do that. They wouldn't really think of that, which was quite interesting. I'm not quite sure why.

Claire Concannon: Were any of them kind of, I mean, not saying the words, but like mouthing the words?

Zoe Schelp: Yes, I kept calling out people being like, you can't actually whisper them, you know. I had one person that I didn't catch up on that used sign language to like, I guess mouth them, but with their fingers, which was a little bit like, that's quite sneaky.

Claire Concannon: I mean, is that cheating? Could other people also be using their fingers to remember things?

Zoe Schelp: I don't know. They definitely used their fingers. Anauralics did that a lot. They used their fingers to remember how many words were in the list because the word lists changed the lengths. So they tried to remember, okay, I need to remember five words. And then based on that, they'd go back. They were also very likely to create abbreviations. So if they had fantasy, atom and misery, they would try to find something from fam and then go back to their head being like, okay, what are the most common words that I like have recently seen that start with these?

Claire Concannon: So no difference between the groups in ability, some different strategies. Of course, because anauralia and aphantasia often track together in people, it will be tricky for these researchers to tease these two things apart. Zoe's hoping to recruit more participants in time. And ideally, this will include a mix of people who experienced anauralia, but not aphantasia and vice versa. How do they go about finding people? Well, remember, Tony mentioned that large survey of 30,000 New Zealanders.

Zoe Schelp: We managed to put two questions into what we call the NZAVS, the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Survey, which is a huge study that's been run across many years now with a bunch of different items that ask the person that's filling it out whether they can imagine a dog barking or a familiar voice in their head. And based on their score, if they score a one, we consider them an anauralic. If they score between three and six, we consider them to be a control. And seven, we consider them to be what's called hyper-anauralic, so have a very vivid imagery.

Claire Concannon: The same kind of scale was used for aphantasia, but with visual imagery questions. For this New Zealand Attitudes and Values Survey, people could add contact details if they were happy to be involved in follow-up research, which is how Zoe could recruit some of the people who had answered a one. Her PhD colleague, Gage Quigley-Tump, has also made use of the survey data. He wanted to investigate something for anauralia that has long been looked at for people who experience aphantasia.

Gage Quigley-Tump: Actually, dating all the way back to 1880, there's a scientist called Francis Galton who made this hypothesis that men of science at the time were all sort of aphantasia, what we would call aphantasia today, but they were completely devoid of any kind of imagery. So the theory was that abstract thought requires less visualization because it's distracting or something. So using that hypothesis through time, there's been this sort of link between weaker imagery and scientific careers. So if you have aphantasia, you are more likely to end up in a scientific career, such as computer or mathematics or the softer sciences.

Claire Concannon: Versus any other career or versus, I don't know, creative careers?

Gage Quigley-Tump: Well, the original paper found around 20% of their aphantasia participants were in scientific careers and very few of them in artistic careers. They actually found the inverse of this too. So people with hyperphantasia, about 45% of them were in creative careers to do with the arts and media and so on. And so we sort of ran with this idea and tried to replicate the study because the NZAVS collects all of this occupation data as well. So we just had the data sitting there and essentially we did replicate this effect. We found the same trend for aphantasics that they were more likely to be in, well, specifically we found more likely for them to be in computer and mathematical jobs. The soft sciences did not come out. So it turns out it was more related to computer and mathematics than anything. And then we did the same for the anauralia side of it. And there was actually nothing there. So they were not trended towards any particular career at all. So it seems as though the visual domain is sort of deciding this the most.

Claire Concannon: That's interesting because I thought didn't anauralia and aphantasia kind of track together in most people?

Gage Quigley-Tump: Yeah. So based on the data from the NZAVS, it was about a 70% overlap like completely. So if you are say a five on aphantasia, you'd be a five on anauralia. So around 70% of people would be matched to that degree, but then the remaining 30% would wildly vary. So, and there were some cases of the extreme on either end. So someone who is aphantasic, but hyper-auralic, so extremely vivid sounds, but no visuals at all.

Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar, and today we're bringing you a special feature from Radio New Zealand. So we've heard that anauralia and aphantasia do go hand in hand for a lot of people, but for others, they don't overlap at all. To learn more, researcher Gage Quigley-Tump is trying to find a physical sign of anauralia. Here's reporter Claire Concannon again.

Claire Concannon: Gage took inspiration for his anauralia test from a previous study on music and audio imagery.

Gage Quigley-Tump: People would listen to music while their pupils were measured through a pupillometry camera. So the diameter of their pupil, how it expands and contracts in response to a stimuli. They would listen to music and then there would be a segment in the song where it would go silent and they were told that they were supposed to imagine as though the song never stops. They fill in the gap with their imagination, so kind of musical imagery. And they're actually able to measure the distinct pattern of the pupil when you're imagining and listening. And they pretty much found that these were a similar pattern when you're hearing the song itself and when you're imagining it. So there is sort of a specific pattern of pupil response for things like rhythm and pitch and all that kind of stuff. And it's sort of like an encoding. It's like a physiological encoding of the sound through your pupils. And of course, starting off with that, the theory was essentially just that like anauralic people should not be able to do this task at all. When it comes to imagining the sound, their brain's not going to think they're actually listening to it. So they're not going to get the same pupil response.

Claire Concannon: So that's the idea of how this test might work. To give me a run through, we rope in a volunteer. Okay, Zoe, you've become the willing participant. Can you describe what the setup is?

Zoe Schelp: Yeah, so the setup is basically this contraption that I don't know if you've ever gone to the optometrist that they put you in. The thing where you have your chin stuck to a pad and your forehead against a piece of metal to kind of secure your face. And then there's a camera in front of you and the screen. So that gauge can see the eye movements.

Claire Concannon: And so on the monitor in front of you is something tracking Zoe's eye movement and also the pupil.

Gage Quigley-Tump: Yeah, you can see it's very zoomed in on her eye and it's filled in this area of her pupil. So those are like the pixels contained in there. And it just sort of measures these in real time. As you can see, we're seeing a bit of pupil dilation at the moment.

Claire Concannon: Oh, yeah.

Gage Quigley-Tump: Quite a bit. Yeah. And so it just sort of measures that and then it produces a obscenely large data file with measurements of the pupil every 20 milliseconds from a 30 minute experiment. That's actually quite a lot of data.

Claire Concannon: Because it's such a huge amount of data to analyse, Gage is still in the early stages. He's focused on reproducing what the previous study showed before he goes on to test his hypothesis. We do a short run through so I can get an idea of how it works.

Gage Quigley-Tump: So at this stage, they're just asked to look at the dot on the screen to get a baseline measurement of their pupils and we're looking for the sort of difference from baseline. So now the music will play.

Claire Concannon: Now, unfortunately, due to copyright, I got to cut that out. But instead, we can do the experiment with something else. And now we play it again, but with a gap where you have to keep playing the song in your mind. You're not allowed to hum or tap or anything like that. Just use your mind. So that clip and gap were shorter than the actual experiment, but you get the idea. And if you can hear the sound in your head, your brain will be lighting up in different areas and your pupils will be keeping time by dilating to the pitch and rhythm. Were you able to keep up?

Zoe Schelp: I was fully hoping that I would line it up perfectly, but I was dragging behind and I was a little bit surprised when I came in back. I was like, dang it!

Claire Concannon: Actually, though he probably would have done better with Beethoven than Bieber, because what I just played is a recording of the student orchestra that Zoe plays in. She's a violinist. And Gage is a guitarist. They both told me they reckon they sit around a six on the rating scale and they use audio imagery a lot when they're learning different melodies. But for the anauralics who come in to take this test -

Gage Quigley-Tump: It was interesting when we had some participants in and, you know, I would ask them, OK, for this part, you're going to have to imagine the song. And they just have no idea what I'm talking about. They're just like, I don't know. I don't actually hear anything in my head. So I can't. How would I do this? And then we always get the questions like, can you actually do this? Like people that like they're more surprised that everyone else is not like them.

Claire Concannon: Being able to hear sounds in their minds themselves, but working with people who can't, Zoe, Gage and Tony have a lot of discussions around the questions they're asking and whether they're the right ones.

Zoe Schelp: How do we classify whether someone's an anauralic if they kind of have an inner voice, but no inner ear, if they can't imagine other world sounds, but they still kind of talk to themselves? Do we classify them as an anauralic or something in between? Because there are people who have absolutely nothing and don't even talk to themselves in their head. So do we need to make a differentiation between that? How do we control, for example, for aphantasia or do we want to take that into account and so on? I mean, I usually just listen because they have a lot of interesting things to say. And then also when I talk about my own experience, they can argue that and they can kind of say, but my experience is like this and this is why it's different in a way. So it's quite fascinating to hear everyone's stories and just listen to them.

Claire Concannon: It's very early days in the team's investigations into anauralia and right now they have more questions than answers. Over the next few years, they aim to expand the current studies and start investigating those questions around storing and retrieving past memories and imagining futures. They'll also bring in advanced imaging techniques to look at what's happening in people's brains. Here's Professor Tony Lambert again.

Professor Anthony Lambert: If we can find these different strategies and in a way that people think about the present, the future and the past, is that accompanied by some different patterns of brain activity? So we do have plans to do that as well. So what we'll be doing is asking people to imagine different kinds of sounds while we're monitoring their brain activity using a technique called high-density electroencephalography. Then we're also going to use another technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging. So we'll be asking people with different experiences of auditory imagery to imagine different sounds and then we'll look at what patterns of activity we can see. So what's typically seen when you ask people to imagine sounds is that the areas of the brain that light up when they're actually listening to a sound, those same areas light up. And if you're rehearsing something in your mind, you're saying a phone number or something over and over to yourself, you see activity in similar brain areas to the ones that would become active if you were actually saying those words. So there's a lot of kind of commonality between imagining things and hearing things and doing things. So one of our big questions, and this will be something we'll probably tackle in the last year of the project, is to see whether or not we see the same kinds of patterns in people who say they just don't imagine sounds or whether or not they're completely different.

Claire Concannon: Sang-Hyun Kim has actually taken part in the study. He stayed in the same halls as Zoe and learned about her research through chatting to her. He found the pupil dilation music test quite a strange experience.

Sang-Hyun Kim: The song would play and would stop for about 10 seconds. As the track kept going, the volume was turned down and I realised in that moment how much I rely on singing the song or humming a tune or even just tapping to sort of keep this feel going. But I'm not allowed to do that as part of this experiment and it is quite tricky for me to actually to be a part of this melody. And being a musician it really makes you a little more cognisant about how we think, about how we interact with music, about how we are a part of the music. And I think it was a very interesting experience, I will say.

Claire Concannon: That's right, Sang-Hyun too is a musician and has played with Zoe in the student orchestra.

Sang-Hyun Kim: I play the trumpet. I did my undergraduate studies in classical performance on the trumpet.

Claire Concannon: From that initial existential crisis, I asked Sang-Hyun how he feels about his experience of anauralia now and how he thinks it impacts his teaching and research.

Sang-Hyun Kim: I'm more happy about it. I guess I'm just glad to know that it's a thing, that I know that I'm not alone in this at least. I know as a teacher you become really aware of that there are students that may need particular explanations, different ways of showing these ideas, often through gestures or through pictures. It's particularly, I don't want to say dangerous, but particularly of concern in math where it's such an abstract subject within itself that I know mathematicians that can just see these things in their head and don't even need to draw many of these very complex ideas. And for myself, I know I was never that student. So I know I like to make use of visuals, make use of colours, lots of different ways to show these kinds of ideas. And so I would like to think that it does make me a better teacher, or at least a more informed teacher, and something that I hope will play a part and will benefit my own research. I think we should embrace this kind of neurodiverse world that we live in, right? I think it's amazing.

Claire Concannon: Thanks to Zoe's Schelp, Gage Quigley-Temp and Professor Tony Lambert from the Department of Psychology at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. And to Sang-Hyun Kim, who's doing his PhD in the Department of Mathematics. Thanks also to the Auckland University Student Chamber Orchestra for allowing the use of their recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Ko Claire Concannon ahau te kaihautū o tēnei hōtaka, i āwhina mai a Liz Garton, rāua ko Ellen Rykers. Sound engineering was by Phil Benge and Tim Watkin is executive producer of podcasts and series at RNZ. I produced this one with help from Justin and Ellen. Sound engineering was by Phil Benj and Tim Wachan is Executive Producer of podcasting series at RNZ.

Sana Qadar: That's it for All in the Mind this week. A big thank you to Our Changing World for this episode. And thank you, Claire, for being here for the last two weeks.

Claire Concannon: Oh, thanks, Sana. It's been fun.

Sana Qadar: Our Changing World is produced and presented by Clare Concannon and Ellen Rykers for Radio New Zealand. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.