#Anauralia

[flaskoflethe]

Something I've been pedantic about clarifying (correcting, it's a bad habit I'm really working to break t_t) when I see it casually is people saying aphantasia is the complete absence of a mind's eye or mental voice. Technically the term just means lack of the mind's eye; more specifically it's a scale ranging from the full and total ability to imagine perfect lifelike visuals purely mentally at one extreme, and the absolute inability to visualize absent external physical stimulus (total aphantasia - that's what I have!). I'd been bothered for a while, though, by my lack of information of the mental voice side of things.

Apparently the term for it is anauralia! Still reading into it, as it isn't something that's been an issue I've had experience with, but from what I've learned so far it's quite similar to aphantasia - it's also a spectrum, with similar ranges of presentation and so on. As with aphantasia there are many larger questions or insights into cognition and neurology about the role of internality and imagination still being formed, although there's a lot less data on anauralia. It looks like it only started showing up in formal research in the last few years, partially as a result of research into aphantasia!

[aphantasia-and-anauralia]

Something to know, appearently a term for lack auditory vividness/existence (inability/highly limited or dulled ability to "hear" things in one's head, like being unable to hear your internal monologue if you have one) is being proposed/has been coined.

"anauralia"

Here's a link to somewhere it has been used

I have seen more examples of it being used, but didn't want to have a lot of links in this post so picked the one that seemed most, trustworthy perhaps?

[aphantasia-culture]

Hey there! As someone who has Aphantasia (And I have Anauralia, and just, lack of any ability to experience any sensory things in my own mind) do you also feel your mind could be described as a void of sorts? Since in books and shows I have read characters describe their minds as places they could manipulate, or from a friend who is part of a system a place they could move around in, so I thought of how I think of my own mind and ended up drawing comparisons to a void?

Oh absolutely. It's part of the reason for The Void Theme Park on main

We aren't sure if we have an inner monologs, but we do hear things in our head so while we don't share the same experience, we are happy to have a new word to specify certain experiences within the aphantasia umbrella

Thank you so much for contributing to the collection of knowledge here! It is why we created this blog 😊

[britneyshakespeare]

just saw a video recommended to me about "the kinks as a reactionary band" that was over 2 hours and i never saw the channel before in my life. was quite sure it wasn't worth a time investment if it had such an attention-grabbing title that didn't really say anything so i went to the channel by itself. lots of worrying titles/thumbnails. then i went to their link twitter account just to make sure they were a racist and i didn't even scroll down that far to see that they said people with anauralia/aphantasia (no internal monologue/pictures in your head) deserve to be enslaved.

[mindblowingscience]

Only in recent years have scientists found that not everyone has the sense of an inner voice – and a new study sheds some light on how living without an internal monologue affects how language is processed in the brain. This latest study, from researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, also proposes a new name for the condition of not having any inner speech: anendophasia. This is similar to (if not the same as) anauralia, a term researchers coined in 2021 for people who don't have an inner voice, nor can they imagine sounds, like a musical tune or siren.

Continue Reading.

[iriascend]

I think I found new insight into purity culture. Hear me out.

I've recently stumbled upon TikTok videos from Christian Francis, a fiction author that shared his experience as a person with both aphantasia (no visual imagination, i.e. no mind's eye) and anauralia (no verbal imagination, i.e. no inner monologue). It was exciting to see, because I never saw anyone else that has both like I do! For him, thoughts were 'subconscious' and silent, and like for me - happened entirely 'under the hood' and only the end result of a thought process was expressed outwardly. Feeling a sense of connection, I went through his videos. Some were Q&A answering basic questions like "how do you write fiction, then?" and "do you dream???".

But the more videos I watched, the more of them were just replies and reactions to frankly... bonkers sentiments left by commenters. People would say he's lying, not believing that this set of conditions is even possible, or even accuse of being a psychopath that's just farming responses for views, clout or as source for dialogue in his books (?). Folks would say that doesn't have a soul and even get angry at him like it personally offended them that some stranger on the internet doesn't use words or images in his mind.

What caught my attention most, though, are the people who said it's impossible to have neither words nor images nor anything else in your mind, because he's speaking - people who said that an inner monologue of some kind is needed for expressing yourself, for thinking at all. Someone even referenced the famous quote from Descartes - "I think, therefore I am" - implying that Christian is an NPC, because he doesn't think.

As Christian noticed, these people seemed to be conflating an inner voice with the act of thinking, and were under the impression that that voice in their heads was their thoughts, as opposed to just a way to express them.

This reminded me of how often people mischaracterize intrusive thoughts. Internet tends to romanticize them as quirky desires, like the urge to dye your hair neon green at 4am in the morning, and then gets offended and horrified when people admit that their actual, clinical intrusive thoughts are more akin to "stab your neighbour's toddler with a knife 32 times". People online tend to be all "positive and accepting of psychiatric disorders" and say it's okay to have delusions/intrusive thoughts until people start actually having violent delusions and unsightly intrusive thoughts, because then that's "wrong" and "evil" and "crazy" to think those things.

And those two approaches melded in my mind to create a theory - people think that, contrary to what psychiatry says about it, your thoughts are you. With a worldview like that it means that whatever appears in your mind, whatever's part of your stream of consciousness and inner monologue - is you, is your thoughts and opinions, even if it appears against your will/without your input, even if you're horrified about it. With a worldview like that, perceiving violent or immoral things means having violent or immoral thoughts which makes you a violent and immoral person.

And that would explain a bit about purity culture's approach towards erotic or problematic fiction, wouldn't it? If you read a book that depicts violence and have an inner voice, you narrate it in your inner voice as you read it. The violence becomes part of your thoughts, part of you. If you believe that your inner monologue IS you, then reading 'problematic fiction' makes you a bad person, because it mixes in 'problematic' things into your inner monologue. Watching porn becomes functionally the same thing as sleeping around, because it has the same effect on your "soul" - it makes you have sex thoughts.

All because they took "I think therefore I am" a little too literally.

[iwonderwh0]

Crew member who is among those leading the android hunt (at least initially). Really team-oriented and uncomfortably affectionate, really dependant on what others think of him and easily influenced. Really loves animals and in some ways sympathies with them more than with humans (as they're more innocent in comparison), gets red in the face easily, sensitive to both positive and negative influence, his mood can switch on diametrically opposite really swiftly. As much as he's ready to be self-sacrificial and "for the greater good" kind of guy he'll dehumanise and turn cruel to those who don't match his values or criteria of "humanity". Over the course of the "hunt" becomes emotionally-unstable to the point of having a mental breakdown after learning that he has anauralia, suspecting Himself to be an android based on that result and attempting self-harming as a consequence. He's really paranoid about spying devices and his data collection (potentially this leads him to be the initiator of the whole "we must find who's an android and get rid if it") so he doesn't use mind-reading interfaces that are fairly common overall, but when he's connected to one external common one (whether it is a deliberate test or actually much more likely just necessity of using newer external suits with those interfaces or something) it turns out that he can't use them, physically, as there's no inner voice for the sensors to pick up on.

[the-sour-patch-crew]

Now, that does sound more like Anauralia.

https://www.anauralia.com/anauralia

I keep seeing the same sentiment of how people experience their headmates speaking not in words, but in thoughts. In tulpamancy this is known as tulpish, and is generally seen as an intermediary step before a tulpa learns to speak.

But as far as I'm aware, this is the ONLY term for this experience, and I've mentioned it so many times for so many non-tulpa systems (both endogenic and traumagenic) for them to respond like "so it's not just us??" that it's a shame that tulpish is only really used in the tulpamancy community.

I feel like maybe a separate term may be warranted, one that's more universal to all system types than the idea of tulpish and it's connections to tulpamancy, because of how common this sentiment seems to be.

If you have any ideas, feel free to suggest and talk about it. I genuinely want a more universal term for everyone to use! I personally like how the word tulpish makes it sound like its own separate language or dialect, and one that is just as valid as speaking in words. I would like to capture that.

[yardsards]

apparently there's a lesser-known auditory equivalent to aphantasia called anauralia

[aphantasia-and-anauralia]

Music & It's Importance To Me

This is potentially more personal to me than the other posts, however, I have anauralia, the absence of being able to hear things in my mind, and it has made white noise, background noise, music, potentially so much more important to me than it otherwise would be.

I hate the silence of my own mind often but I can ignore that silence when I have music playing in the background, water falling in the background, just some noise, any noise that doesn't distract me fully or give me the start to a sensory overload. Maybe part of this is that I have ADHD and so need a bit more simulation, but I hate complete silence. It's distracting and just, horrible for me. Imagine it if you can, those of you reading this that don't have anauralia, no sound from an internal monologue, no sound that you can hear outside of you, no sound inside your mind.

Music isn't important to me because of the story it tells and what it might have symbolism of, it's important to me because it helps me deal with the lack of inner voice, it helps me deal with the void.

As much as in real life, and maybe in future posts, I might joke about my mind being a void, it also has it's drawbacks.

[flaskoflethe]

well that explains it! Literally some of the same researchers working with aphantasia did the initial research for anauralia and even cooked the term in 2021? I hadn't seen discussion of hyperauralia, which is now going to be the focus of what I read into...

Something I've been pedantic about clarifying (correcting, it's a bad habit I'm really working to break t_t) when I see it casually is people saying aphantasia is the complete absence of a mind's eye or mental voice. Technically the term just means lack of the mind's eye; more specifically it's a scale ranging from the full and total ability to imagine perfect lifelike visuals purely mentally at one extreme, and the absolute inability to visualize absent external physical stimulus (total aphantasia - that's what I have!). I'd been bothered for a while, though, by my lack of information of the mental voice side of things.

Apparently the term for it is anauralia! Still reading into it, as it isn't something that's been an issue I've had experience with, but from what I've learned so far it's quite similar to aphantasia - it's also a spectrum, with similar ranges of presentation and so on. As with aphantasia there are many larger questions or insights into cognition and neurology about the role of internality and imagination still being formed, although there's a lot less data on anauralia. It looks like it only started showing up in formal research in the last few years, partially as a result of research into aphantasia!

[aphantasia-and-anauralia]

Writing & Descriptions

Painting a picture with words, something to make the scene something people without aphantasia can see in their heads, something people without anauralia can hear, is something I struggle with when I am writing.

Hearing a character's lines in a story, seeing if it sounds right in their voice as I write, is not something I can do. I can't see the picture I try to paint with words, even as others can, so I struggle to paint the picture and make it something others would like to see and read.

After all, how easy is it to paint a picture if you can't see it? What purpose does it serve to you then? How do you gain motivation to paint it? How can you know if something sounds right if you can't hear it?

[aphantasia-and-anauralia]

The Void

How do you see your own mind? I've heard people describe a headspace/inner world, someplace they can see and move through. I've seen in shows and writing people's minds described as a building, a forest, something physical you could walk through and have a mental self explore. Something you could wrap a wall around or organize your thoughts in.

Something that I didn't have, something that before learning of aphantasia I thought didn't actually exist.

So when I think of my mind now, with no ability to make something like that, I think of a void. Something that, whenever I close my eyes and think, is empty. Not of thought or concepts, but of noise and visuals. I still think, but when I am thinking I only see and hear what I can physically see and hear. Close my eyes in a quiet place, and there is nothing. Or, not quite nothing, I can still feel what is around me and smell things around me, perhaps taste what is in my mouth, but there is no sights and no sounds. Not even any from my own mind.

Nothing of sight and sound but quiet darkness, and my silent, unseen, thoughts. Thoughts that are words, but not ones that are written or even audio. They are somewhat similar to audio, but not quite there, they aren't words I hear in my head but simply words that are, there.

[iwonderwh0]

"The most likely android" character not only actively uses intrusive interfaces, he has a few implants for integrating himself with devices that he intentionally added to himself. Rarely seen with any kind of physical devices for that reason + wears glasses that provide him with visual interface in front of his eyes. They look like they're glowing slightly when seen in a dark room or at a specific angle. As a consequence of using mind-logger and similar interfaces for a really long time he's extremely aware of his every thought and if logged as text it'd have quite strict structure that is really different from really chaotic log of anyone who never (actively) used this kind of tech. When within the context of experiment he showed his logger in real time, it made everyone (even those previously sceptical of his androidness) instantly go "no way this is a human, no human thinks like this". This is unless they reach to test the guy with anauralia tho.