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It's a question of whether you're "seeing" a helicopter, or just a semi-conceptual representation of one.

E.g., I can hear music pretty much perfectly in my head. I can stop it, rewind it, separate the parts... and I can transcribe it into my music software, with pretty reasonable accuracy. That's the aural equivalent of drawing an accurate helicopter from memory.

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> I can hear music pretty much perfectly in my head. I can stop it, rewind it, separate the parts... and I can transcribe it into my music software

do you see the notes of the music in your head, as music plays? so it’s like memorizing lines from a story or play?

No, nothing visual about it. I can just hear it internally, and command the playback (start over, ever). It's not 100% perfect recall, though, I should note. Parts will be blurry, especially if it's only a song I ever heard a couple of times years ago. But the key thing is that I'm not hearing a conceptualized representation of the music, but the original audio (though somewhat compressed). So it's not that I'm just hearing/remembering a chord progression -- I can recall the original sound source, effortlessly.

I don't think this is super rare, btw.

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