Okay, here's an experiment less subject to philosophical interpretation: Picture Jack Sparrow (assuming you feel like you have a good memory of pirates of the

Okay, here's an experiment less subject to philosophical interpretation: Picture Jack Sparrow (assuming you feel like you have a good memory of pirates of the carribean). In particular, picture his sparrow tatoo. Write down what color it is. Then look online at an image of it [0]. Is the color the one you wrote down that you pictured? Repeat this again for any image you feel like you remember. If your mind were simply making you think that you were picturing things correctly, what you write down should rarely match reality. On the other hand, if you are actually storing visual information, your memory should pretty regularly be correct. Not everyone actually does store data visually, it really could go either way. With regards to your comment, the instruction was to picture a pirate, not a pirate's shirt. If you look at a photograph of someone, do you become instantly aware of all information contained within it with perfect detail? If so you must be great at where's waldo. For the rest of us, we perceive a gross overview at first and to identify any details we must focus in. But the fact that we don't know where waldo is before we look for him does not mean our brains are retroactively placing him into the picture. [0] http://www.jacksparrowcostuming.com/tatoo.htm http://www.jacksparrowcostuming.com/tatoo.htm