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i see words in my head too, if i think of the word and want to see it. i think it's kind of impossible not to see it in some weird way. i mean it's like thinking about a person, you see their face on some level.
I *hear* words in my head as I read or write them - which sometimes leads to me writing, say, "right" istead of "write" , or "you're" insted of "your" , if I'm not firing on all cylinders. I 'm not conscious of visualising them, but I suppose I must, to a degree, or else I wouldn't remember how to spell them, would I? (but, like i said, my visual memory is crap, so it mystifies me that I manage to do that at all).
Just to complicate matters, I have Auditory Processing Disorder, so if somebody says an unfamilar word (or a familiar word, but with insufficient contextual information to distuinguish it from similar-sounding words) I've no idea how to hear it in my head, or repeat it back, or spell it phonetically, until I actually see it written down.
So, I have a better memory for aural input, but a much better comprehension of written input. I need both. (So, when I read a text, i'm always reading it aloud to myself in my head, and it amazed me to find that some people don't)
I certainly hear words in my mind and often use the wrong homonym.
I have at least three different levels of "looking at things." I can look for specific details, like phone numbers, sometimes and it becomes permanent as stone in my mind or I can look in a way that allows me to delete or not respond to an annoyance. Coping with an annoyance "looking" never seems to enter my memory. I can also do a near perfect deep registering scan of things I need to remember and I even refer back to them in the future and "re-read" details from picture memory that I may have forgotten. I have had to prove that one a number of times and been told it is a "gift." I used to think that everyone did this. Someone says "I can't remember. Let me think." But what are they thinking of? I know I am re-scanning my pictures for details I need, but others seem to not understand this, except that it works for me.
I also have some kinda cute sensory crossovers, involving aural and visual mixing. I perceive and store memories of sound pictures from where I've been and I find it hard to explain this to people. I do know that this ability has aided me in my pursuits of acoustical engineering phenomena.
It seems to take some effort to see clearly, without aural mixing of stimuli, once I become fatigued. It sounds psychedelic, but it's just me and my shit.
Interesting.
I can easily understand that concept of scanning your pictures for details you need. I'm sure I do the same, if I'm trying to recover some visual information...just not very effectively. My mental pictures turn out to contain far too many ambiguitiies and blank areas. And they're pretty disorganised. So when I say "let me think" I'm metally leafing though a scrapbook, desperately hoping that the requisite "picture" is stored in there somewhere.At least I
know my limitations, though. You know the phenomenomenom of "reconstructive memory"? where people fill in the blanks and ambiguities retrospectively, in the light of new information. (That's why you shouldn't ask witnesses "leading questions"). I think I'm much less prone to doing that than most people are.
But why the heck do we tend to think of memory as either visual or auditory in nature? My memories actually consist of a jumble of all kinds of sensory impressions, along with associated flashbacks to my internal thoughts and feelings of the time. The latter create the strongests, clearest, most reliable impressions, and I'm not sure that's so unusual, it's just harder to describe, and not the kind of information that's normally required.
It would be great to have an eidetic memory like yours. I used to have a similar thing for the spoken word. I seemed to automatically tape-record anything said in my hearing, even when my attention was elsewhere. It came in handy when people asked , suspiciously "What did I just say?" . All I had to do was re-wind the tape a little way, then repeat the spiel word-for-word
. My ex-husband says he knew damned well that I wasn't listening to him, much of the time, but he never could prove it!
Anyway, internal my tape-recorder broke down , years ago, and now I have to rely on the normal sort of vague memory *sigh*. Unless I make a special effort to memorise something word-for-word, I usually recall the
meaning that I think the speaker intended to convey, rather than their exact words , as heard(sometyhing I've often noticed other people doing). That's slightly worrying. So now, I try to keep a sharp look-out for unitentional double-entendres and such, in case i memorise my own misconceptions by mistake.
