Professor Tony Lambert Photo: Dean Carruthers
It's a sound most of us take for granted, that no one else can hear: the inner workings of the mind.
Our ability to imagine sound is the subject of its own conference at Auckland University in April.
The Mind's Ear and Inner Voice 2025 is the brainchild of the university's psychology professor, Tony Lambert.
Without it, a stone-deaf Beethoven would not have been able to compose all those late masterpieces. However, it turns out not everyone has that 'inner voice'.
At the end of his life, all the music was coming from the inside. Photo: Katzaroff, Public Domain
Talking to RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump, Professor Lambert said some people can not imagine sound - a condition called 'anauralia' - but that doesn't mean they're not musical.
He told Crump of cases of musicians who could imagine music, but that music was 'felt' rather than 'heard'.
It turns out, it's not all in the mind. Or at least if it is, there are more bits of the mind to imagination than we first thought.
Lambert says the ability to scan a brain as someone hears a sound, and then scan the brain when someone imagines a sound was opening up new areas of research.
Among other things, the three-day conference will look at how our inner voice leads to 'earworms' (tunes we can't stop our minds from playing over and over), the role it plays in creativity, and if understanding more about anauralia might lead us to understand meditation better - our attempts to quieten the mind.
Information about registering for the conference here.
