Anauralia
The absence of voluntary auditory imagery — the inability to mentally hear sounds, voices, or music. The auditory counterpart to aphantasia.
Most people, asked to imagine the sound of a familiar song or the voice of someone they know, can generate something internally that resembles hearing. People with anauralia cannot. The mind is silent: no replayed melody, no internal echo of a remembered conversation, no sound at all when reading text on the page.
The term was formally proposed by Hinwar and Lambert in a 2021 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, which also documented the strong overlap with aphantasia. Many people who lack visual imagery also lack auditory imagery, but the two are dissociable: a person can have rich visual imagery and a silent mind, or the reverse.
Like aphantasia, anauralia is not a disorder, has no clinical pathway, and does not require treatment. It is a description of where someone sits on a spectrum of internal sensory experience. Common practical signatures include: meditation apps that use auditory cues feel inert; the experience of reading is purely propositional, with no internal narrator; phone calls feel different from in-person conversation in ways that are hard to articulate.