very strange question

[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)

[sh2dak]

Im so glad you brought this up, ive been thinking about this since FUCKING FOREVER!! When you remember an image in ur mind, you see that image and aren't seeing with your eyes at that point. I wonder how this is happening, how do we see this image and how does it take over our genuin eye sight.

[wombing]

all sensory imput is ultimately translated into electrical current in the brain. i'm fairly certain our mind retains memories of images, sounds, etc as a 'electrical imprint', or particular arrangement of neurons, which it can recreate at a later time. not 100% sure though. i'd love to know more about this too...

[Patrick]

Well asher, I think you're right. The brain processes all outside information and creates links in the brain so you can understand the sounds/sights. So for hearing and seeing things that don't really exist, the brain just creates links that simulate sounds etc.

[Merlock]

Two simple words: conceptual thought. Unfortuantely I don't have the time to type more than this at the moment and explaining conceptual thought takes a while so I'll leave anyone that doesn't know of this concept to search on the phrase among my posts on this forum, I've mentioned it quite often.

[Serkat]

I don't really understand how this question deserves the right to exist. Obviously if your brain is able to create a perception of something based on input, it must be able to do this with a self-feeding mechanism as well as without input. Seeing and imagining determine each other. It's not that one of them could exist without the other. As for the other parts, I agree with what has been said. Light -> Eye -> Brain -> Perception -> Memory ( Memory -> combined/altered <- Memory )^n -> Internal Perception -> simulating External Perception -> dream

[strifer]

Originally posted by Korittke I don't really understand how this question deserves the right to exist. Obviously if your brain is able to create a perception of something based on input, it must be able to do this with a self-feeding mechanism as well as without input. Seeing and imagining determine each other. It's not that one of them could exist without the other. As for the other parts, I agree with what has been said. Light -> Eye -> Brain -> Perception -> Memory ( Memory -> combined/altered <- Memory )^n -> Internal Perception -> simulating External Perception -> dream Ok, that's great, but not what I was wondering about . I understand this process, yes, but there are many things that elude us as to how these sensations are transformed into our perception of them. I know your brain can create perceptions without any input of them; that relates specifically to what I'm wondering: can we extract this internal perception? that's why I wonder what it exactly is....especially with sound, is it possible to take our perception of a sound that we imagined and convert to vibrations that can be sent through a speaker of sorts? It sounds almost ridiculous, but it's because as far as this internal perception goes, I have no idea what we're dealing with. (I've taken more physics classes than biology, so I don't know much about the human brain as I do about the phenomena of sound) So baiscally I was throwing out a kind of strange question to see if anyone knew more about this side of science. Usually my posts are kinda confusing, it's my problem with communicating my thoughts

[Serkat]

OK sorry for misunderstanding that. Well, first off you can draw a line between brain actvity, the state of being conscious and the phenomenon which one perceives as their own psyche. The latter of those is basically a simulation of the processes relating to conscioussness in the brain. In short (altough this isn't right and can't be proven to be right, but it works very well as a model) your psychical perception is an equivalent rendering of conscious thoughts and states of perception in the brain. Everything else is the unconscious mind, making your heart beat etc. I also don't know that much about the human brain but the sensual information in your brain does not represent the external source in any way. It's a bunch of neurons in specific patterns, organizing and representing information. In theory it would be possible to tranfer one's perception of sight and sound onto a TV with boxes, but not anytime soon. Any type of phenomenon within a human brain is the same, it's information represented by certain patterns organized in specific ways. There's no difference between the perception of sound and the process of thought or a feeling like love. Internal perception can be seen as real perception at a lower intensity. Most people who experiment with halluscinations (take WILDing for example) may experience different levels of realism, from remembrance to something that sounds like reality. This is all represented by certain patterns in the brain. I can't say any more than that, besides it's a little more complex than what I just said but it still all boils down to neuronal activity, neurotransmitters and all that stuff.

[Neruo]

*SOUNDS* --------> Inside of ear----------> Brain -------> Hey I am hearing sounds ^__^ .................................................. ..............^ .................................................. ..............l .................................................. ...........Thoughts In this beautifull drawing you can you your mind just creates the same shit like actually hearing it does. You can allmost 'really' hear something. Like in dreams. But it just your mind stimulating the same part of your brain that your scences normally do. or something or like thoughts of sound are in your thinking, and partially in your sound-process-thingy I think

[strifer]

Originally posted by Korittke OK sorry for misunderstanding that. Well, first off you can draw a line between brain actvity, the state of being conscious and the phenomenon which one perceives as their own psyche. The latter of those is basically a simulation of the processes relating to conscioussness in the brain. In short (altough this isn't right and can't be proven to be right, but it works very well as a model) your psychical perception is an equivalent rendering of conscious thoughts and states of perception in the brain. Everything else is the unconscious mind, making your heart beat etc. I also don't know that much about the human brain but the sensual information in your brain does not represent the external source in any way. It's a bunch of neurons in specific patterns, organizing and representing information. In theory it would be possible to tranfer one's perception of sight and sound onto a TV with boxes, but not anytime soon. Any type of phenomenon within a human brain is the same, it's information represented by certain patterns organized in specific ways. There's no difference between the perception of sound and the process of thought or a feeling like love. Internal perception can be seen as real perception at a lower intensity. Most people who experiment with halluscinations (take WILDing for example) may experience different levels of realism, from remembrance to something that sounds like reality. This is all represented by certain patterns in the brain. I can't say any more than that, besides it's a little more complex than what I just said but it still all boils down to neuronal activity, neurotransmitters and all that stuff. Interesting stuff indeed. 8) And what's this about conceptual thought???

[Merlock]

Conceptual thought - the deepest level of thought, on which the subconscious works. Not through images or words, through concepts. Thus, it applies to this topic in general.

[mongreloctopus]

If you guys are interested in this kind of stuff, I recommend checking out some books by Daniel C. Dennett. He is a leading cognitive scientist/philsopher(is it science or philosophy? Who knows!) and professor at Tufts University..The Mind's I is really entertaining and Consciousness Explained goes into exactly what you guys were talking about. The idea of being able to "visualize" something or "hear" something in your head fits into a theory of consciousness called the "Cartesian Theater" that Dennett believes is a poor way to describe consciousness. He is a smart guy and brings up a lot of very interesting things to think about. I highly recommend it.

[DvDGuY]

Have you guys ever heard of Audio hallucination? this is the same reaction as to vizual hallucination. thats what causes you to have a song stuck in your head liek a broken radio. And this is becoming more common with the ipod generation. by the way this is what causes people to hear voices in their heads. dont forget that our hearing is very acute. specially in the mid range tone...so if you liek to hear to bar and tones, please i advice you to stop. because that will kill your mid hearing and in teh end make you go deaf. but anyways our hearing doesnt really trun off when you close your eyes it is still goign to continue. so when you hear noises at nite which are amplified by silence your brain, you have audio hallucination. look it up on the web you'll find a lot of info. i didnt wanna post anythign here cause i dont wanan plug any sites but just search audio hallucinations

[Leo Volont]

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.