Mind's Eye (etc?)

I never knew this could an aptitude that you could 'lose' or even not have.my mind's eye is OK I guess. When it happens randomly it's usually when a hear a song I listened to a lot while doing something. When I hear the song, I ''see'' what I was doing (usually video games from when I was younger)

You mentionning mental images while reading reminds me something I found quite interesting a 3-4 years ago.Ever read the book ''perfume'' ? I had to read it when I was in secondary 5 (11th grade a think) . It's the story of this guy who has this incredible sense of smell, and in fact the whole novel is based around that idea. The narrator describes everything through the sense of smell, and so if the main character enters a room, it won't say ''the walls were white'' but it will instead say ''the walls had the odor of rotten cheese in them''.Now, a year after me and all my friends had read the book, they made a movie out of it. What was interesting was that every friend that saw the movie said that it was almost exactly how they had envisioned it. Myself included.In other words, this very peculiar manner of describing things in the book had projected the very same images in our minds. Which is radically different from the usual, where everybody reads a book, imagines it totally differently, goes to see the movie and find it to not be like they imagined it.Although I have never found an answer of why this is the case.

I consider it a must-read for anybody who is interested by litterature.But I don't really get what you are trying to say. And this is why I find the situation very interesting. Books that describe places with visual references, in other words with the primary sense we use to examine our surroundings, rarely gives two person the same mental images. Yet this book, when describing the places (and the characters, etc.) with the sense of smell, our sense that is almost never our primary one for describing our surroundings, produces the same mental images for almost everybody.

Hey, I never pretended to know 'why' this phenomenon happened. It was only an observation I had made it the time.Your explanation seems perfectly reasonable.