At the University of Auckland last month, experts in psychology and cognitive neuroscience met to explore a phenomenon called anauralia. The conference organiser, Professor Tony Lambert, has defined a person with anauralia as one who lacks the auditory equivalent of a mind’s eye, and is unable to conjure up or hear sounds in the mind’s inner ear. What does a silent mind tell experts about auditory cognition and the way the brain perceives sound?
Invited to speak on a conference panel, I did the best I could. Poet Serie Barford and I participated almost, you could say, as exhibits. Barford outlined the Pasifika concept of vā; I discussed composing dialogue and prose. Lambert and his impressive PhD students then launched into arcane exchanges with the audience about neuroimaging techniques and scans and flow.
Musicologist Nancy November added a brilliantly interesting angle to the panel when she described the ways Beethoven used his mind’s inner ear to compose music after he’d become deaf.
The notion of anauralia had interested me immediately, because I’d always wondered about my own perceptual difficulty, which is visual. I have a functional mind’s eye, except in relation to faces. I have improved my recognition of faces but I can’t visualise them, which shows how complex perception can be.
On the panel, I described writing my first short-story collection. Opportunity is 19 different first-person narratives, the varied voices of a community. Composing these stories, I conjured up each voice in my mind’s inner ear. It was a subtle and tricky task. Using narrative voice, I aimed to evoke not only tone, mannerisms, affectations and personality, but also blind spots, delusions, prejudices, things the characters were missing and didn’t understand. A few readers didn’t grasp the structure of naive irony and took me to task for my characters’ opinions. But I was merely the neutral over-narrator conveying it all.
As I discussed this, I realised the 19 characters have never fully appeared to me visually. They are imagined in my mind’s inner ear but they are faceless.
My creative output is therefore – I stolidly noted – pretty much just the sum of what I can and can’t do. I can intensely observe behaviour, conjure up and recognise voices, imagine them and mimic them. I can visualise landscapes, weather, sky, light. I need to hear descriptive prose in my mind’s ear.
An online search told me this: brain scans reveal that children recognise and distinguish their own mother’s voice. Brain regions that are engaged by the voices of children’s own mothers include those that process information about the self and those that perceive faces. Children whose brains showed a stronger degree of connection between those regions when hearing their mother’s voice also had the strongest communication ability.
It’s a demonstration of “nature via nurture”, where interaction post-birth develops the brain. The idea that the brain is shaped only by genes, that it will develop in a set way no matter what formative information it receives, isn’t persuasive.
For the lay person, it’s a glimpse into life’s mysteries. Looking at the anauralia material, I wondered: could my difficulty with faces be related to my lifelong hypersensitivity to my mother’s voice? This left me with the opposite of anauralia. Her voice made me so aware of tonal shifts, so tortured by timbre, so attuned to nuance and ambiguity – to what lay beneath – I was primed to write Opportunity.
There was everything in that formative maternal tone, from hair-raising melodrama to antagonism to beaming proselytism. It was a world of data: surface and subtext, layers of hidden meaning. I was never going to end up writing chick lit, not with that degree of complexity in mind.
