Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on
an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes
focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind, and on anauralia, its lack (in a small percentage of people), in various contexts:
in silent reading, in the voice of an internal adviser, in recollected speech or music, in auditory hallucinations, in speech or other sounds in dreams
I had my University of Arizona colleague Heidi Harley as an exemplary anauralic (while recognizing that each person has their own profile of mental-percept abilities); what she can tell us is important, beause it appeared then, and still does, that there’s not much research on mental sound (or mental imagery), in perceptually deficient subjects (anauralics, aphantastics) or even in perceiving (“normal”) subjects (auralics, phantastics), though it looks like there’s an enormous amount of variability.
Now: two further contexts to consider.
An easy case: earworms. Well, it looks like it ought to be easy, but then you never know.
A definition from NOAD:
noun earworm: 1 a catchy song or tune that runs continually through a person’s mind. …
If you don’t have sounds (speech or music) in the mind — if you’re straightforwardly anauralic — then the notion of an earworm should be baffling to you (the way the notion of a voice in silent reading was to HH). But is that so?
A conplex case: “predictive listening”. Or whatever you call this phenomenon; there’s probably some literature about it, but I’m utterly ignorant of it, and don’t know how to search for it. So I’m putting it forward as a question: how does this stuff work? In particular, how does it work for anauralics?
In any case, it’s a combination of memory and mental action: knowing — and so anticipating — what’s coming next in, say, a Haydn symphony or a Mozart opera? how does the the next movement of a symphony or concerto or oratorio begin? how does the next composition in a set begin (in recordings of, say, the Chopin preludes)? what’s coming next in a piece of poetry or a famous speech (I come to bury Caesar, …)?
I was led to these questions by the recent experience, two mornings in a row, of coming to my Apple Music player at the beginning of the day and getting something from a Haydn symphony. Now there are 104 numbered symphonies and I have multiple performances of many of them, so it takes several nights to run through the whole set; but many of them are old favorites, and on these days I broke in on two of them. Heard a few bars, and then knew, to my great delight, exactly what was coming next, and could hum along with the recording: predictive listening. Haydn set me up to view the day ahead with joy.
Then I wondered whether an anauralic could do any part of this.
And still more complex. And, widening the scope of my curiosity, I wondered how the memory for events works for anauralics and aphantastics; like dreams, events have both a sound and an image component. So that memory for events involves not only memory, but also the mental faculties of auralia and phantasia.
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