Well to extend the analogy, I close my eyes when I'm listening to music. Even more so when I'm playing an instrument. And when I'm reading I can't be listening

Well to extend the analogy, I close my eyes when I'm listening to music. Even more so when I'm playing an instrument. And when I'm reading I can't be listening to music, at least not actively and nothing too interesting. I think we move back and forth to improve our understanding. The other day I read an article about Handel's messiah. I then went and listened to it. I recently found a family of tilings of the sphere by drawing pictures. To convince myself that the tilings really exist and I wasn't just tricking myself, I calculated the angles at the vertices (I used a computer for this). That in turn told me something about the relative size of the tiles. And so it goes.