Originally posted by strifer
ok, so I've thinking about sound, the mind, and dreams....

when you imagine a sound in your head, what is it exactly that you are imagining? Sound waves vibrate the different parts in your ear and those vibrations are converted to singals that get sent to your brain that somehow become your perception of sound. What exactly is that perception in your brain??? When I imagine ppl talking, or some strange musical timbre, I think, what is this sound, is it possible to extract it from my brain and represent it has a soundwave in kind of a reverse proccess?

So this also leads to the questions, when we dream with sound, what are we actually hearing??

This also applies to other sensations such as sight, smell, taste and touch....(the last three are more difficult to imagine imo, and maybe aren't as interesting to explore as the imagination of the sensations of sound and visuals)
Perhaps the best analogy would be to compare the sensory process to analogue to digital conversion of video or audio signals to a memory medium, and then back again, with digital to analogue conversion of memory data to analogue information which is transduced into perceptable signal.

The analogy falls apart, however, when we consider that human memory playback can at times be so very imprecise. I've heard it said that under hypnotism memory can be made to perform more reliably, but this was years ago before the Psychological Practice of Recovered Memory was horribly discredited. A form of hypnoticism was used on adults, with a strong implied suggestion that 'repressed' memories of abuse would be uncovered. For several years the Psychologists and the Lawyers teamed together to prosecute and imprison an incredible number of aging parents and childcare workers. As the 'recovered memories' came to be ever more bazaar it finally occurred to somebody within the System that there was no actual proof of any of this -- the recovered memories had included props and furniture, costumes and utensiles. It seems that all of the legal searches were finding none of these things. And the accusations were so entirely weird. Clubs and Societies for such interests, though easy enough to imagine while under some groggy trace, did not exist at all in the Real World. It seems that the Suggestion to have a Memory would somehow trigger the imagination to create false memories. Audio and visual playback system may be subject to distortions and other impairments, but so far they have been unable to make anything up. Indeed, this is just how stupid the Scientific Community is, that they could not imagine how the imagination works and so they assumed that there could not possibly be such a thing as a 'false' memory, because they would be at a loss to explain it. They were not intelligent enough to know that one can assert the existence of certain possibilities with which one suspects one has been acquainted, without first requiring one's self to be able to completely explain and diagram the mechanical dynamics involved. I think most of the innocent parents and childcare workers are now out of prison, but it is only a shame that their release was not to make room for the Scientists who caused them to be there.