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.