The strange science of the silent mind

Take this test.

Do you know the Phil Collins song ‘In the Air Tonight’? 

Can you hear it in your head as you read the title? 

And now, can you hear the legendary drum fill… 

Did you hear it? 

DOOM-doom DOOM-doom DOOM-doom duh-DUH 

Maybe it was super clear, like you were in the room with Phil. Maybe it's just hovering on the edge of your consciousness. 

Or maybe you can't hear anything at all. Nil. Zip. You have no idea what I'm talking about.  

That silent mind has a name: anauralia.

“Anauralia is a complete absence of auditory imagery,” says Professor Tony Lambert from the School of Psychology at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. 

“It’s the complete absence of the ability to imagine your favourite tune, the sound of your best friend’s voice, or the sound of the lawnmower outside.”

Lambert coined the term in 2021 and has since become one of the world’s leading researchers into how our minds create – or don’t create – inner sound.

“I have quite a strong voice in my own head,” he says. “If I’m preparing a lecture or thinking about going to meet with somebody, there are little conversations going on in my head beforehand, rehearsing what I’m going to say.”

Lambert's curiosity began when a few participants in earlier visual imagery studies mentioned they couldn’t hear internal sounds.

“We realised there was no real language for that experience. So we started asking people directly.”

Measuring silence

The test is simple. “We ask people to imagine an ambulance siren, the voice of a loved one, or a familiar piece of music,” Lambert says. “Then we ask how vivid that is in their mind’s ear.”

Participants rate their experience on a scale from one to seven. 

“Seven means it’s as clear as actually hearing it. But if you are in the anauralic category, it’s the other end of the scale – one or zero. Nothing.”

With help from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS), Lambert was able to include anauralia questions in a national survey of more than 32,000 people. Around a quarter described their inner hearing as super vivid – what Lambert calls “hyperauralic.” 

At the other end, just under one percent scored zero. “That’s roughly one in every hundred New Zealanders,” Lambert says. “That’s a lot of quiet minds.”

One of them is PhD candidate Sang Hyun Kim, a mathematician and accomplished brass player. "My world had always been so silent in my mind,” he says.

When a friend mentioned having an ‘inner voice,’ Kim was baffled. “That just made no sense to me because my world had always been silent.” A later chat with University of Auckland researcher Zoe Schelp confirmed it: he had anauralia.

The realisation solved a long-standing puzzle from his music training. “My teacher would always tell me: ‘Hear the music before you play it.’ I just thought that meant puff up your chest and take a deep breath. But a lot of musicians really do hear the sound they want to produce.”

He cannot. “So instead of hearing it in my mind, I like to sing out loud, because that’s how I identify pitch and character.”

Kim insists the condition doesn’t hold him back. “I don’t see this as defining who I am or making me feel any different. I can appreciate the silence that I have in my mind.”

The silence even helps him meditate. “I find it easy to just zone out,” he says. “Although I do wish sometimes I’d be able to carry a mantra or some kind of chant in my head.”

Can you see a pink elephant?

Anauralia often goes hand in hand with aphantasia – the absence of a 'mind’s eye.'

Think of a pink elephant. Some people can see it vividly in colour; others see only darkness.

When he started his research, Lambert expected that if someone lacked visual imagery, they might compensate with sharper auditory imagery. “It turned out we were completely wrong,” he admits. “Most people who have one also have the other. It’s not a trade off.”

Occupational therapist Jessie Donaldson also found out she had anauralia from hearing about research. “I know what a dog sounds like barking, but I can’t hear it,” she says. “I have memories of dogs barking, but they’re quiet memories.”

She also has aphantasia and says the comparison with how her husband sees the world is amazing. Take a memory of an afternoon at the beach. 

“He can almost taste the salt and smell the sea when he remembers things. For me, it’s kind of like a grayscale photo.”

That worries her husband, sometimes, she says. It shouldn’t.

“He’s very sad that if he dies first, I will just forget him immediately,” she says. “Which is ridiculous. I have a very good memory. Just because I can’t picture his face on demand doesn’t mean I’ll forget him.”

What the brain shows

The science backs that up. Lambert’s colleague Zoe Schelp has been using MRI and EEG to look at what happens inside silent and non-silent minds, when people are doing various tasks. 

“I asked participants to listen to a sound, imagine saying a sentence, think it in their head, and imagine environmental noises,” she says.

Her early data suggests the brain activation patterns are surprisingly similar. “We see activation in a lot of the same areas as people who experience typical imagery,” Schelp says. “The brain’s hardware is running, the mouse is working, but the screen’s blank.”

That could explain why people with anauralia can still describe sounds and play music, even if they cannot ‘hear’ them internally.

Lambert says psychology has long aimed to find universal rules. “There’s always been a tension between discovering principles that apply to everybody and recognising individual variation,” he says. “The importance of this work is bringing to people’s attention another dimension of neurodiversity – one that’s been somewhat hidden.”

The findings have implications in several fields. Music teachers could avoid telling anauralic students to “hear it first.” Therapists could adapt mindfulness training that relies on visualisation; the sort of exercise where someone is encouraged to think about a leaf falling from a tree, place their thoughts on the leaf and let float down a river is impossible for someone with aphantasia. 

That's something Jessie Donaldson and other aphantasics would find impossible – their brains aren't wired like that.

“We’re recognising that people work in different ways, people think in different ways, Tony Lambert says. It’s not about deficit. It’s about difference.”