I think something's amiss here.

>I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading.

Isn't this exactly what an internal monologue is? Lack of internal monologue would be someone who thinks only abstractly or visually, without any words.

>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way.

Yes, isn't this what pretty much everyone experiences, unless they have one of these listed disorders? If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.

> Isn't this exactly what an internal monologue is? Lack of internal monologue would be someone who thinks only abstractly or visually, without any words.

I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).

> If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.

Nope. I can't picture what the characters look like. I can't get a song stuck in my head either.

You did say this, though:

>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.

This seems like how I and I assume most people experience the phenomenon of recalling or thinking about sound. It's just more or less vivid and detailed for different people.

Do you listen to music often? If so, you've never listened to a song and later had some sort of experience where something about that song stayed remnant in your mind?

If you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something? By "experiencing", I mean you aren't just like "I can't even say any part of what I'm doing is imagining the sound of an alarm", but are in some way perceiving some kind of representation of some recollection of hearing an alarm clock's alarm.

Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something? To me, humming is the process of transforming that rough, vague, general "phantasic" representation of pitch/amplitude/time into rough, vague, general vocal cord movements. I could be very wrong, but I suspect that if someone is capable of humming anything with even the tiniest minuscule of correlation with the original song, then they don't have aphantasia (with respect to sound).

My speculative, uninformed hypothesis is that actual aphantasia is very rare and that sometimes there's misunderstanding of what it means, combined with the fact that some people have less vivid imaginations and mental representations than others.

Many people may have "weak phantasia", e.g. they may not internally imagine a 1-to-1 visual representation of what they saw on a walk on the previous day, or may not recreate every texture and pitch in a song they heard, but they can imagine some rough approximation of them. I think almost no one can construct these perfect mental recreations; maybe von Neumann and a tiny number of others.

For most people, I'd guess it's probably like 0.1 - 10%. But I think 0% is rare. And during dreaming, I imagine for most people it may increase to like 10 - 40%.

The weaker it is, I think the less one may feel attached to a term like "seeing" or "hearing". But I think no one is ever actually "seeing" or "hearing". It's just a mental representation which no term can fully describe. Kind of like how you can't exactly put a scientific, objective perceptual term to the experience of feeling love. It's just an internal, subjective experience within your mind. Something a little bit more like "reading" rather than "hearing", as you say.

And for internal monologue: if I ask you to "think" the phrase "I am going to go to the store", were you able to "think it"? If so, then I think you probably have internal monologue, or at least the capacity for internal monologue. It may not manifest very often, and you may "experience" it less "potently" than some other people, but I think you have it.

The suspected misunderstanding with internal monologue is that I think some people "spend more time with" their internal monologue than others. Like, a catastrophizer might regularly think the words "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck what do I do", while for someone else their mind may be fairly "blank" most of the time, especially if they're distracted with something.

For people who experience it more frequently, some percentage of it may manifest and "bleed over" into spoken utterances, like the catastrophizer may sometimes mumble "oh fuck", perhaps without even realizing it. In my opinion, humming is often this same sort of "bleeding over" of the internal into the external, but with music instead of monologue.

Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia, but I think you likely don't have aural aphantasia or lack of internal monologue. And I think it's possible you also may not have visual aphantasia; there still might be a disconnect between what people mean by "visual imagination" and what you think they mean.

> If so, you've never listened to a song and later had some sort of experience where something about that song stayed remnant in your mind?

With listening? Never. I can remember the lyrics of songs, and I can remember (sometimes) the progression of notes, but no: nothing I would refer to as an “experience”. They might as well be written down.

> you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something?

No. I know what an alarm clock is and I know they can go “ding ding ding ding ding” - but these things are just the same words I give to you. Again: I certainly can’t experience an alarm clock in my head (or experience being in the same room as an alarm clock or anything like that)

> Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something?

If I hum and then stop, I have a sensation of the vibration and of the way my breathing changes. I can then recall (in some way) those vibrations and then reintroduce heavier breath so we hear sound again.

Is this not like how it is for you? Do you remember “the sound” of your own hum and try to reproduce it?

> Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia

If you are a researcher working in this space, you can send me an email from an edu address and I’ll connect you with the people who ran tests on me in London.

If not, could you explain why you’re giving your opinion?

>If not, could you explain why you’re giving your opinion?

I'm not a researcher or a scientist of any kind. I know very little about aphantasia, and don't experience it myself or know anyone who does (besides one podcaster I listen to). I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before. Subjective experiences are complicated. I could certainly be completely wrong both in general and in this case, though.

I based most of my reply on the fact that you said:

>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.

To me, this is the experience of aural "phantasia". This is what happens when I imagine sounds in my head. That's why I read your post with a sense of dissonance. It made me want to try to understand how you can have this kind of "humming a tune without making noise" sound in your head yet also have aural aphantasia.

Are you able to hum a song you've heard before? If so, I think that could potentially require a kind of ability to represent the song in your mind, though I could be wrong about that.

Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards? If not, what is the experience of humming like for you? If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?

The fact that you've never had anything like a song getting stuck in your head (e.g. hearing a song you like and humming or thinking about it a later time) would make me think there likely is something atypical about your experience, at the least, though.

Additionally, you said:

>I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).

This is also my own perception of what internal monologue is like for me. Although this is potentially a separate phenomenon from aphantasia, to me it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue when I thought maybe you did, which, if true, made me think there was possibly an increased chance you don't have aphantasia if you think you do.

Obviously you know your own experience better than anyone else does or could, but there's a lot of ambiguity and ineffability around the meanings of all of these terms; a little bit like (though not as extreme as) trying to describe the experience of perceiving a particular color.

I'm also doing all this in part so I can better understand the phenomenon and educate myself.

I initially was considering adding the "I think you likely don't have aural aphantasia" part but decided to leave it out, since it's extremely presumptive, but the imagining sounds/humming thing and the capability of humming something you've heard before (if I understand correctly) seemed so contradictory with what I personally understand aphantasia to be that I later went back and edited it in. If not for that part I probably wouldn't have replied and would've just silently acknowledged your aphantasia.

> Are you able to hum a song you've heard before? If so, I think that could potentially require a kind of ability to represent the song in your mind

If I pay attention I can tell that a sound is higher or lower than another. I can also count. It often requires a lot of concentration (and many repeats) to hum a song I have heard.

> Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards?

Yes. I can also tell the names of tones (as in keys on a piano) in some cases, but it requires a lot of focus to do this quickly, and the tones usually have to be pretty simplistic or extremely rhythmic.

> If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?

What do you mean? If you have ever played SIMON you have to memorise a sequence of red blue yellow and green lights. The repetition starts slowly and gets faster. Then it can become so fast it is overwhelming. Do you memorize the colours or the names of the colours? If you haven’t played it maybe you could look at a YouTube video and get the idea.

> it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue

I said I can’t hear one.

> I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before.

That’s not what I asked. I asked you why you gave your opinion, not why you have an opinion.

I have noticed people do this quite often, and I do not really know why. I wonder if you can sufficiently self-reflect to explain your thinking to me.

I think their argument may stem from the fact that they can’t remove themselves from their own frame of reference enough to understand yours. In their head, to have this abnormal diagnosis, you must either be exactly like their perspective of someone with aphantasia, or be someone who just doesn’t understand that your experience is just like theirs.

The problem with having a diagnosis like this is that a lot of people won’t understand what it’s like to not have the characteristics we take for granted to the point that it seems unreal. To avoid accepting that the scale of people who have experiences that they’ll never be able to understand is bigger than they imagine (and avoid cognitive dissonance), they must invalidate your experience.