As I'm taking music more seriously, I'm encountering a lot more practice instruction that recommends mental practice or visualization. Athletes have been doing this forever too. Essentially, imagining yourself doing something correctly or adjusting to a mistake can help you to perform that thing.

In my experience, my issue is not with being able to conjure the mental image + sounds, but holding on to it long enough; which, I suspect is just a matter of my degraded attention.

Anyways, this is fascinating stuff. One of the proponents of visualization/mental practice is Molly Gebrian, a brilliant violist, who, by her own admission, can't "visualize" sounds, but relies on conceptual evocations of the act. (https://www.mollygebrian.com/music-and-the-brain)