When reading a paragraph of a book or a newspaper, one can extract the meaning of the content by forming a mental picture of the collection of words and searching long-term memory for a previously recorded mental image to which it is related. Connecting the old with the new brings the new into an established reference frame. The meaning or an understanding of the new is established by exploring the memory and finding a connected image that had been previously studied and recorded. If there are no search hit results, then the new image is recorded and becomes part of the memory’s database. Creating mental images from reading text or from listening to music is an important element of meaning abstraction. It is a form of data compression. It is elemental to recognition of complex scenes or sounds. Feature extraction is the key.