Internal playback

[AFTT47]

One time, I got that weird song, "The Lions Sleep Tonight" playing in my head and there wasn't a stop button. A pair of coworkers (who I mistakenly informed of my plight) heard the song on the radio during that time and they called me so I could hear it through the phone. Such assholes. What are the odds of such an obscure song being played during my time of suffering?

Recently, it was the music from a game on the Amiga: Test Drive II from Accolade. Me and my Air Force buddies in Korea sometimes spent entire weekends from morning until night playing that game in 1989. I recently found the tune on Youtube and spent too much time listening to it with predictable results.

[Angrboda]

Some time ago, I saw that someone had made a contraption that captures images from the retina... it seems that whatever image you imagine sends the corresponding signal to the retina and that can be imaged from the outside.

Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, an image on the retina of the eye. A belief that the eye "recorded" the last image seen before death was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was a frequent plot device in fiction of the time, to the extent that police photographed the victims' eyes in several real-life murder investigations, in case the theory was true. Although repeatedly debunked as a forensic method, there is a scientific basis behind the idea.


Scientific basis

Much of the scientific work on optography was performed by the German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne. Inspired by Franz Christian Boll's discovery of rhodopsin (or "visual purple")—a photosensitive pigment present in the rods of the retina—Kühne discovered that, under ideal circumstances, the rhodopsin could be "fixed" like a photographic negative.

Kühne experimented on numerous animals to refine the process and determine the chemicals used to fix the image on the retina. His most successful optogram was obtained from an albino rabbit, with its head fastened to face a barred window. The rabbit's head was covered for several minutes to allow rhodopsin to accumulate on the retina. It was then uncovered for three minutes to expose it to the light, then decapitated and its eyeball sliced from top to bottom. The rear half of the eye was placed in an alum solution to enable fixation of the bleached rhodopsin, which resulted in a distinct image of the barred windows.

Wikipedia | Optography

[Alex K]

@Jørmungandr

The first time I became aware of that belief was in the movie Wild Wild West. But there's a huge difference between that and projecting thoughts onto it.

[pocaracas]

One time, I got that weird song, "The Lions Sleep Tonight" playing in my head and there wasn't a stop button. A pair of coworkers (who I mistakenly informed of my plight) heard the song on the radio during that time and they called me so I could hear it through the phone. Such assholes. What are the odds of such an obscure song being played during my time of suffering?

Recently, it was the music from a game on the Amiga: Test Drive II from Accolade. Me and my Air Force buddies in Korea sometimes spent entire weekends from morning until night playing that game in 1989. I recently found the tune on Youtube and spent too much time listening to it with predictable results.

Best Driving Game Ever!!
Actually, the one I played was Test Drive III - the passion.
I wish they'd remake that game with decent graphics... Just to drive around the countryside and enjoy the scenery.
No races, no grand theft... just you, the road, other drivers and the cops.

[Angrboda]

I can hear things pretty clearly "inside" but I'm not much on the visual images. They're blurry and disconnected.

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@Jørmungandr

The first time I became aware of that belief was in the movie Wild Wild West. But there's a huge difference between that and projecting thoughts onto it.

I know, but he could simply be misremembering the details.

[Alex K]

Can you control what you hear?

[robvalue]

Thanks for sharing your experiences everyone, it's really interesting

I too get it where a song plays in my head and I can't stop it. It's really annoying. Sometimes it has even stopped me getting to sleep.

I wonder if those more artistically minded have better visuals? Do we have anyone who is really good at drawing freehand? I am absolutely useless. Say I try and imagine what something looks like and draw it, it comes out pathetically simple and just all wrong. I can do regular shaped things fine, but finer detail escapes me totally.

The visuals do tend to be really small too, like its a tiny portable!

[Angrboda]

Can you control what you hear?

I can initiate and stop it, but it's not 'creative' as it were.  I'm not a creative person.  I think I mainly replay things I've heard.  Though if I misremember something, I can hear the misremembered version.   The main content of my thought is just words.

[Alex K]

I'm not very good at drawing...

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Haha, yes, and Freeman's voice is such a striking one.

[Exian]

I draw a bit. It used to be an obsession of mine, but music was a bigger, longer lasting obsession. I think anyone can learn to draw as its basically just building a repertoire of pen, pencil, or brush techniques to suggest shape, depth, and texture. It does help to think in 3 dimensions, but I found that music helped me more when visualizing space.