Hyperauralia

14 Jan, 2026

My spouse has total aphantasia: they can't visualize, audiate, or otherwise imagine anything by internally simulating sensory input. Scientists have only really known it's a thing for around a decade. Aphantasics tend to assume the "mind's eye" is even more metaphorical than how most of us mean it.

I knew this. I knew that folks with aphantasia usually didn't realize their experience was uncommon until the topic came up explicitly. They think it's normal; after all, theirs is the only head they've ever lived in! It's fascinating to me how much human diversity we've failed to notice for so long. Yet, I was still caught off guard when I heard someone describe auditory hyperphantasia — extra vivid mental sound — because that's what I used to think was normal.

In November, a psychologist in my family sent me a New Yorker article about aphantasia. (Great read, I highly recommend.) What most caught my eye was a paragraph near the end, a report from a woman with auditory hyperphantasia:

I can—and do—listen to entire classical works in my head. The longest continuous one was the entire Verdi requiem, listened to internally on a long-haul flight. The imagery is very detailed. I can summon up a work and identify the instruments playing in an orchestral texture, or the registration being used in a particular organ piece. I can’t turn it off though. It’s in the background as I write (Schumann, third symphony, last movement). Sometimes a short passage will repeat endlessly, typically when I am stressed. And if I wake at night, it is usually with a short sequence of harmonies repeating themselves.

Is that... do other people not do that? I asked around, and no, my friends imagine sound in significantly lower fidelity than I do. I have no idea quite how unusual my experience is, but clearly it's less usual than I thought. Aphantasia of the ear is also known as anauralia, so the snappy name for my condition is hyperauralia. To christen this blog, I'd like to share some of my hyperauralic experiences.

Constant Noise

I almost always have sound playing in my head. Occasionally it's an inner monologue; more often, it's background music¹. When I listen to real, external music, the inner track is (usually) happy to align itself. This happens more cleanly the more familiar the song is, but with focus I can dial into an unfamiliar song without projecting an audiated layer beneath it.

Less fun, I can get sound bytes stuck in my head like most people can get songs stuck. If I have an argument, or just imagine one vividly enough, or if I hear a distressing noise, that might be the thing that plays back in my head. If I'm too anxious to sleep, the thing keeping me up tends to manifest as an incessant auditory rumination.

The other downside of background music is that I don't always dial into what I'm hearing. Particularly if I'm stressed or mentally fatigued, my internal record player gets skippier than peanut butter. I'll rubber band back to the same few parts of a song even if my physical ears hear something completely different, and even if the external music is comforting or familiar. The conflict is like hearing different songs in each ear. When I'm already tired, that clash is incredibly grating to the point of overstimulation. Before I notice, I sometimes accidentally talk extra loud over the music to drown it out and resolve the dissonance. I've even been frustrated by hearing the chorus of a song whose verse alone is looping.

Imagination Better than Memory

Along with the two-sounds-at-once thing, I sometimes find my memory clashes with reality. As a kid, I fell asleep listening to The Beatles almost every night. I consolidated clear, canonical memories of most of their songs before I had musical training. As a result, my memories are imperfect.

But I don't imagine the songs vaguely. They're vivid even when they're wrong. My brain confabulates the necessary detail. Just as you can't make a vague sound with a guitar, I cannot simulate a song below a certain threshold of fidelity.

The funny consequence is that I'll sometimes listen to an old favorite and feel for all the world that the recording is wrong. As I listen, even just in the background, my internal tape syncs up with the recording. Suddenly, I'll be jarred by a difference. It's as though I were singing the ABC's in a choir but the guy next to me started to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Close, but glaringly different. Incidentally, this type of mismatch is one reason I find the "Mandela effect" totally uncompelling. I know better than to trust my memory.

As a Musician

I have always been innately drawn to making music, more so than my already-musical immediate family. Unsurprising given how sticky my brain is for sounds. Doubtless most musicians are good audiators by training; I'd bet many are hyperauralically predisposed as well. But strangely, I don't think hyperauralia made me a much better musician, at least at first.

As a kid, I would sing a song out of tune and only know the difference if I listened very closely to myself. My sense of pitch wasn't awful, but definitely not exceptional. In fact, I'm pretty sure my singing suffered from imagining the intended sound "louder" than the one I was actually producing. Over years of practice, I got better at hearing myself just as any musician would.

There are other aspects of musicianship where my imagination helps. I'm a pretty intuitive melody writer. I'm good at copying a blues guitarist's articulation because I know what I'm aiming for. I unintentionally taught myself to audiate most written jazz progressions, in chords up to 9^ths, without any formal training in jazz (or other genres that use extensions).

One particularly strange experience I'd like to share: last month I imagined a chord that doesn't exist. I don't think I can imagine a color that doesn't exist, but I can mentally superimpose some colors as though each eye were looking at a different one. This was a similar feeling. I was writing out a variation on the chords for Paper Moon, and there was a part I couldn't get to sound right. In my head, I heard the transition from chord x to chord y, and then from y to z, but the 'y' wasn't the same. Somehow, I was hearing the motion between the chords very clearly while abstracting the chords themselves so as to make an impossible progression. Honestly, it was kind of a bummer.

As a Music Instructor

I taught guitar lessons for a couple years. I sometimes felt psychic. A tiny difference in sound gave me a clear sense of my student's thought process. I might say, "You almost hesitated at bar 9. You're still definitely feeling it as 5 plus 3, not 4 plus 4." Almost hesitated? What could I possibly be hearing to suggest that? Something real, apparently.

At first I doubted most of my reads as too good to be true, but after the first few months I learned to trust it. It's like gaydar or other thin-slicing: not perfect, but more accurate than it has any right to be. What's going on here, I suspect, is that I catalog tone with higher fidelity than most. Just as I can reproduce a very subtle sense memory, I can recognize a subtle variation and match it against a subconscious database.

Neurodivergence

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia of all stripes can rightly be considered a part of neurodiversity. Perhaps unsurprising, then, that a 2021 study found that "aphantasics reported more autistic traits than controls."²

I have to wonder if hyperphantasia is correlated with anything interesting. In particular, the other hyperauralic I've met recently has ADHD — as do I. Does decreased executive function dial up involuntary imagination? Does constant noise reduce the ability to direct my focus? Something else? And, of course, it could be a coincidence. Subjectively, my ADHD and hyperauralia both feel so fundamental to my cognitive experience that they're hard to separate. And now that I know my mind's ear is atypical, it's quickly become a salient part of my identity.

Footnotes

#mind #music