You'll probably get a chuckle out of the first five-or-so paragraphs of:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
The referenced paper can be found here: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
The referenced paper can be found here: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
Now I feel handicapped, although I suppose that maybe if I could conjure up these mental images, I wouldn't be so good at symbolic processing. I guess this is why I have always preferred text to diagrams and such...
By the way, what I can do is hear music in my mind - and yes, this comes with pitch, volume, timbre, polyphony and everything. In fact if I'm at a place with a constant background noise - as in a plane, or near an air conditioning machine - I sometimes think I'm actually hearing it in reality (although I have learned that I'm not). I wonder if other people also experience this.
I remember when I was a kid I told my older brother I could play music in my head just like if I had pressed play in a tape deck. He was really puzzled.
I still can do it and it is definitely accurate. I lack perfect pitch recognition but for some reason when I play music in my head it's played in its original pitch. I use this to my advantage to replace perfect pitch: I just play a song with a known pitch in my head and use that imagined pitch as a relative. This works wonders for interval identification too (e.g. the first two notes in The Simpsons are a tritone apart).