The Mind's Ear and Inner Voice 2025

The Mind’s Ear and Inner Voice 2025 is a unique transdisciplinary conference focused on the experience of imagining sounds and the role this plays in our inner lives. Most people can imagine hearing sounds that are not physically present, such as a favourite piece of music, the voice of a loved one, or other sounds such as an ambulance siren in their mind’s ear. We can also imagine making sounds, especially speech with the  inner voice in our head.  

These familiar dimensions of everyday experience are a source of fascination for scientists who seek to understand their psychological significance and their basis in processes and structures of the brain. At the same time, they are important for the creative arts and often play a key role in the work of writers, musicians, poets and other artists. Moreover, recent research has highlighted the existence of dramatic variation between people (including scientists and artists!) in their experiences of auditory imagery and an inner voice.

The aim of The Mind’s Ear and the Inner Voice 2025 is to forge new insights and improved understanding of auditory imagery and its role in thinking, memory and creativity by providing a forum for transdisciplinary exchange of ideas, theories and research findings. We invite submissions to The Mind’s Ear and Inner Voice 2025 from scientists, philosophers, scholars in the humanities and from artists, especially musicians, poets and writers who share a fascination with the question of how we experience the sounds in our head.

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