Following up on my 4/11 posting “Variability in our mental lives”, about (a)phantasia and (an)auralia, having to do with, respectively, visual and auditory mental experience and their lack: having, or not having, a mind’s eye or a mind’s voice. Almost immediately, it becomes clear that there’s an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes.
The complete absence of these phenomena is relatively rare (probably in no more that 4% of the population); but in a large population, 4% is a huge absolute number, so I would expect some of my readers to report being aphantastic or anauralic. Almost immediately, Heidi Harley (Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona) wrote:
— HH: I’m completely anauralic and somewhat aphantasic. I learned about other internal experiences when Tom Bever [Regent’s Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience at the University of Arizona] asked a group Whose voice do you hear when you read? and people were like My own, except I hear my mother’s when I read a letter from her; I hear her voice and I was utterly mystified. What are you all talking about, I wanted to know. Running in silent mode here.
HH suggested that that she was generally anauralic, but there are many different contexts for internal voices, so that someone might have different voices for different purposes — might hear one voice in silent reading and a different voice from their internal adviser.
— AZ>HH: They’re different for me; the adviser is an alter ego with my voice, and my fairly frequent “talking to myself” is in fact just letting my adviser talk out loud.
And it would be possible for someone to have one of these voices but not the other.
— AZ> HH: Similarly, if you hallucinate voices, they’re probably different from these others.
This line of thought made me wonder about my man Jacques Transue’s hallucinated voices. I will now digress on this topic
JHT’s auditory and visual hallucinations. Auditory hallucinations — “hearing voices” — are a common occurrence in schizophrenias and would be worth studying in relation to other mental voices. J’s condition was not a form of schizophrenia, but a consequence of very high radiation of his brain (intended to be therapeutic), technically (from his brief medical history):
peri-ictal schizophreniform-like psychosis, characterized by auditory hallucinations (at first set off by noises in the background, like a passing airplane, reinterpreted as voices; later spontaneous, but still involving voices), vivid and elaborate by 1996
in combination with:
delusions; and visual hallucinations beginning in 1998 (apparently largely a result of scotomas, which he coped with by wallpapering or filling in with entire scenes)
The visual hallucinations he took at face value, though he was sometimes puzzled that other people seemed not to see some of the things he saw and sometimes surprised at what he saw. The auditory hallucinations were sometimes merely surprising, but he became truly frantic when nasty voices popped up, threatening the people he loved. There was never any visual evidence of the things he heard, but then he never looked for the sources of these voices; instead, he went to try to protect those he thought were being threatened. I have never worked out where he thought the voices were coming from; did he have ordinary internal voices before those triggered by the radiation appeared?
JHT’s mental life, headaches. The possibility that he didn’t is suggested by another deficiency: his lacking a specific kind of pain, namely a headache. Until he developed excruciating headaches from a huge brain tumor (a medulloblastoma), he had never had a headache, of any kind (not even an ice cream headache), in his life and was baffled by the way people talked about their headaches, which he assumed must have had some external cause, like a blow on the head.) Compare HH’s bafflement at people’s reports that they hear a voice when they read a letter from someone.
One more set of puzzles. It now appears that people’s abilities are different in different contexts. And it’s not clear how many different functions are served by images and by voices in the mind and so can vary independently.
Then there’s at least one place where mental images and voices routinely come together in packages: in dreams. The literature on dreams that’s easy to find all seems to assume that dreams are, in effect, mental movies with sound (except for the congenitally blind and the congenitally deaf), but sketchy in both modes. Even for aphantastics and anauralics? I just don’t know, but it seems unlikely.
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