I visit a chatroom on Internet Relay Chat from time to time. This room is populated by about 40 seperate entities at any given time, from all over. There is a large Australian population, a British population, a Canadian population, an American population, and every so often some weirdo from some other country like Texas or Germany will pop in.
I say entities because they are not all humans. There are two (I think two) script-run bots there, as well. Only one of them serves any real purpose, to op certain people. To op someone is to give them special powers over everyone else, and, yes, they get their special powers from a wonky script. This script sometimes losses its ability to do this, and the entire room is thrown into chaos until the administrator or one of the snoozing, lurker, always-on ops chooses to restore order.
Some of the denizens of this chatroom provide a picture of themselves. When they do this, everybody either says "you look exactly like I thought you did," or, conversly, "you don't look at all like I imagined you." Or, if the person is female, "you're hot."
On a tangeant about this whole if-you're-female-you-become-immensly-popular thing... I ended up avoiding this chatroom for a while because it just got so ridiculous. If there was more than one girl in there, they would all start talking in euphemisms that would make a weaker man puke. The trick, as one guy says, is to just ignore them 65% of the time, when they're acting like they're in third grade.
While at Barnes and Nobel I saw a book on this. Yes, it's true. Girls are very popular on Internet chats because they are girls. Go figure.
I imagined one guy as a short and stocky, squinting, short haired dude, when: a) he's tall, b) he's thin, c) he's round faced, and d) he has very long, red hair. Imagine all the different versions of this guy were floating around in peoples' heads until he showed us a picture of himself.
One thing that's weird about this whole mind's-eye thing is that I never imagine someone's face. I can imagine their hair color, their clothing, their bedroom, anything, but not their face. If I do stick a face on there, I'm always wrong.
Which makes me wonder why I say, "you don't look like anything I imagined." It's because I never imagined you.
I'm afraid of showing these people my face. I don't think I ever will conquer this primal fear.