Anauralia: what's it like to have no inner monologue?

All In The Mind

ABC listen

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How clear is your inner voice? Do you internally narrate your life? And do you get songs stuck in your head?

Almost all of us can imagine sounds in our minds. But a small part of the population don't have internal auditory imagery — a phenomenon called anauralia.

Today, we explore the experience of anauralia, in an episode from Radio New Zealand's Our Changing World.

Our Changing World is produced and presented by Claire Concannon and Ellen Rykers for RNZ.

The original version of this episode was first broadcast on RNZ as The puzzle of the silent mind.

Special thanks to Auckland University Student Chamber Orchestra, for allowing use of their recording of Beethoven's 5th symphony.

Transcript

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0:00.0	ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:08.1	Many of us go about our lives, believing that the people around us are experiencing
0:12.7	the world more or less as we are, seeing the same colors, feeling the same textures,
0:18.1	processing and storing information the same way in our brains.
0:22.3	But at some point, you realize not everyone sees that green as green, because some people
0:28.6	are colorblind, or not everyone can imagine or see images in their head because some people
0:34.9	have aphantasia. And more to the point for today's episode, not everyone
0:40.7	talks to themselves the same way in their heads, because some people have anorelia.
0:47.3	I'm Sana Khadar. This is all in the mind. And to explore exactly what that is, Claire Concanon is back
0:53.2	on the show today.
0:58.8	She's a science reporter and host of Our Changing World over on Radio New Zealand.
0:59.5	Hi, Claire.
1:00.1	Hi. Hi.
1:00.1	Hi.
1:01.1	Hi.
1:02.1	And so people with Anorelia, they can still think and reflect, but they just do it in a more
1:08.1	abstract way, right?
1:09.8	Like rather than talking to themselves with like a clear inner voice.
1:13.6	Yeah, and look, the diversity of how human brains interact with the world is just astounding.
1:19.6	When I heard about this, it was one of those things where I just found myself telling all my friends about it.
1:25.6	Like, did you know, did you know that people
1:29.5	experience the world this way? I see the world and I think of the world kind of through
	...

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