The voice in your head can help you recall and process words. But what if you don’t have one?

Can you imagine hearing yourself talk? A voice in your head – maybe reciting a shopping list or a phone number? What would life be like if you couldn’t?

Some people, myself included, cannot imagine visual experiences. We can’t close our eyes and conjure up the experience of looking at a loved one’s face or imagine the arrangement of our living room – to consider whether a new piece of furniture could fit in it. It is called “afantasia”, from the Greek term where “a” means without and “fantasy” refers to an image. Colloquially, people like me are often referred to as “blind minded”.

While most attention has been given to the inability to imagine visual sensations, aphantasics may lack other imagined experiences. We may not be able to experience imagined tastes or smells. Some people can’t imagine hearing themselves speak.

A recent study has advanced our understanding of people who can’t imagine hearing their own inner monologue. Importantly, the authors identified some tasks that these people are most likely to find challenging.

What the study found

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States recruited 93 volunteers. They included 46 adults who reported low levels of inner speech and 47 who reported high levels.

Both groups were given challenging tasks: to judge whether the names of the objects they saw would rhyme and to recall the words. The group without an internal monologue fared worse. But the differences disappeared when everyone could say the words out loud.

Importantly, people who reported less inner speech did not perform worse on all tasks. They were able to recall a similar number of words when the words looked different from each other. This negates any suggestion that afants (people with aphantasia) simply didn’t try or were less capable.

Welcome confirmation

The study provides some welcome evidence of the lived experiences of some afants, who are still often told that their experiences are not different, but rather unable to describe their imagined experiences. Some people experience anxiety when they realize that other people can imagine experiences that they cannot. These feelings can be exacerbated when others claim that they are merely confused or inarticulate.

In my own research on aphantasia, I often polled crowds of people about their ability to imagine experiences.

Questions about the ability to imagine visual or auditory sensations tend to be enthusiastically supported by the vast majority, but questions about imagined experiences of taste or smell seem to cause more confusion. Some people are adamant that they can, including a colleague who says he can imagine how the combinations of ingredients will taste when cooked together. But other answers suggest that subtypes of aphantasia may turn out to be more common than we realize.

The authors of a recent study suggest that the inability to imagine hearing speech should be referred to as “anendophasia,” meaning no inner speech. Other authors have suggested anauralia (meaning without auditory imagery). Still other researchers have referred to all types of imagined sensations as different types of “images.”

It is important to have consistent names. It can help scientists “talk” to each other and compare results. If different authors use different names, important evidence may be missing.

We have more than 5 senses

Debate continues about how many senses humans have, but some scientists make a reasonable case for a number greater than 20.

In addition to the five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, lesser-known senses include thermoception (our sense of heat) and proprioception (awareness of the positions of our body parts). Thanks to proprioception, most of us can close our eyes and touch the tip of our index finger to our nose. Thanks to our vestibular sense, we usually have a good idea of ​​which way is up and can keep our balance.

It may be tempting to give a new name to each inability to have a given type of imagined sensation. But that could lead to confusion. Another approach would be to adapt phrases that are already widely used. We are commonly referred to as “affants” by people who are unable to imagine sensations. This can be modified with a prefix such as “audio aphant”. Time will tell what approach most researchers adopt.

Why should we continue to investigate?

Regardless of the names we use, it is important to study the different types of inability to have an imagined sensation. These investigations could reveal the underlying processes in human brains that bring about the conscious experience of imagined sensation.

In time, this will not only lead to a better understanding of human diversity, but may help reveal how human brains can create any conscious perception. This question—how and where our conscious feelings arise—remains one of the great mysteries of science.