Does sound take form inside your mind?

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Do people here see sounds (including music) take on a form? I don't mean seeing it in the real world like a hallucination, but actually being 'force-fed' imagery when you hear sounds.

A couple examples : If I hear whistling I instantly see a white outline of the sound and how I imagine it might travel and move as the tone, pitch and volume change. This applies to pretty much all sounds I hear. Sometimes it can be very distracting but I believe I can mostly block it out if I'm focused on something else. Music can be very interesting in this circumstance, especially when it comes to hearing different instruments in play. Something else too which I notice a lot is that before I physically speak I almost always have to see the words before I say them. Or when I hear someones speech I'm seeing the words instantly a long with them inside my head. Some of the time its just the word but other times its a word accompanied with relevant images and memories and it tends to 'flick' through them like it were someone using an image search engine. It's not only limited to pictures, I can play movies inside my head and move around in full 3 dimensions. I don't think I'm on the same level as Temple Grandin (because she has an insanely good visual memory) but I only recently found out that not everyone thinks like this and when I describe it to others they seem to find it very odd. I honestly assumed *everyone* can see imagery (and animations/worlds) in their head but it's now occurred to me that I probably think in pictures far more than the average person and find it odd that some people cannot do it at all.



I believe this may not be a form of synesthesia, but just another aspect of the visual thinking style found in many Autistic individuals.

^^^Xile, you are tremendously gifted! I am betting you have artistic talent. I am the opposite of you in that I have to strain to be able to visualize even the most basic thing, it is real work and doesn't come naturally to me at all.

I sometimes see colours when I listen to music, but more often I associate colours with numbers. Even numbers tend to be cool colours while odd ones tend to be warm ones.

This happens to me, too. It's synesthesia. Whenever I hear music, I get this image of my mind with all of the instruments being colored streams of notes that flow by, and I associate each letter and number with a color. Even the word "Green" makes me think of indigo because the first letter "G" appears that way in my mind.

speaking of letters=numbers, do yours correspond with this chart?-
1=red 2=orange 3=yellow 4=green 5=blue 6=indigo 7=violet 8=rose 9=gold?

I don't tend to associate colors with numbers or words (often) but I associate colors and backgrounds heavily with days of the week. Months have colors too, like September is always red and October is white and November is blue and December is yellow. January goes red again and so on.....


I read something interesting last night....I was doing some searching on visual snow syndrome (which I have) and in the article it says :

"Recent research has confirmed a brain hypermetabolism in persons with visual snow, located principally in the right lingual gyrus.[2] Before this, no other cause for visual snow had been identified. Insofar as sufferers of visual snow had undergone ophthalmic, neurological and psychiatric examinations, no systematic problems besides the visual snow were found. The recent research that indicates this disorder occurs in the brain has important ramifications for the possibility of potential treatment. However, standard treatment protocols have yet to be established."

So we know that VS is caused by dysfunction in the lingual gyrus....now here's the really interesting part, I did some further reading and found that specific part of the brain is actually responsible a lot for how we see words and letters. So now I'm wondering if my ability to always see words and letters vividly in my head could be at least in part, caused by hyper-metabolism in a specific region of my visual cortex....That honestly blew my mind reading that last night.

Thoughts anyone?

I can draw very intricate and detailed things and I've had teachers and family members say I'm a very good drawer because I can draw in such immense detail but I believe that my artistic ability is held back a lot by dyspraxia and hypotonia....which is really upsetting. I'm hoping there's a way I could get some treatment for my dyspraxia and hypotonia but no such luck....I've thought about maybe trying to draw on a note pad or something or maybe using a computer program but I find even using a mouse to draw can be really quite painful.

Usually mental images are what take form in my mind.... sounds? Not so much.