Thoughts Have You
Do you ever think about thinking? You, yes you. I am talking to you. I am asking a question directly to your inner mind. How do you think? Do you think in images or in words? Do you play music and what does your brain do when that is happening? Do you ever consider what this thought in your mind actually is? According to neuroscientists, it is electricity jumping around on a three-dimensional matrix made of pink jelly. But let's not go there. Let's start somewhere simple, like dreaming. Ah, no...
New research using fMRI imaging suggests there are extremes on a spectrum of indeterminate scope; we mostly bang around between verbal, thoughts that exist as actual formed words, and visual, or images as a fluid landscape of remembered sights. To make this as concrete as possible, I'll use myself rather than reference the library of books that theorize about consciousness. Let's see how much of this resonates with your reality. I discovered in high school that if I want to remember something, like for an exam, I write it down. Once usually was enough, usually. But, was I imprinting the fact as a string of words that I could read on the page or was the act of the writing depositing the fact into a hopper of shapes with ideas attached? Words or patterns of marks. Is one more readily accessed? These are two different hoppers in the memory warehouse.
Let's diverge. Also in high school, I wrote a paper on bats. Some are completely blind. Many use sonar and FM (frequency modulation) to hunt for bugs to eat and live their entire lives "seeing" the world with sound. Some can hunt in a downpour. Sonar is echolocation, mapping the world based on reflected sound. They can hear from 14,000 hertz to well over 100,000 hertz while we simple primates hear from 20 to 20,000 hertz. What do their "thoughts" look like? Consider humpback whales who are able to exchange sound patterns (thoughts?) over thousands of miles of ocean with the inherent time lag of sound traveling through water and then back. Is there ANY overlap with our brains? We are all mammals. Some blind people use tapping to echolocate and have sophisticated capabilities of understanding their unseen space.
When listening to musicians improvising, it is abundantly clear that we are witnessing thought as sound. Once a certain level of mastery is attained, the instrument somewhat disappears and the mind communicates sonically. So these are obviously not words or visualizations. Or are they? Does the guitarist have a conversation with the keyboardist? Absolutely, but does the conversation involve words or brush strokes and washes of color invisibly flying through the air? Or is it purely communication made of frequencies of sound? Like a whale thought.
When I am making my art, the best times in the process are the times of unconscious or subconscious activity manifesting in a physical way. I'm often asked what this thing is really about, or what made you make these lines RIGHT HERE. Well, I'm not writing any words, usually, and there is no sound coming out of the artwork, ever, but some kind of thought is making itself known. Why I chose to do that thing in that place, I really don't know until it's over and hanging on the wall and I can start to feel how the whole relates to its parts. Yes, I know, this sounds really obtuse, but I am being honest. These thoughts aren't like those other three kinds of thoughts -- verbal, visual, sonic. Maybe they are thoughts that have something in common with the little bat's symphony...
In quantum mechanics, there is an understanding that observing the motion of a particle, changes the nature or the state of that particle. When writing about thoughts, we turn them into words and that changes the nature of the thought. I, at this very moment, have streaming through my head the desire to talk about Covid brain fog, TBI and post-concussive symptoms; or how the best art just breathes emotions; or driving while in deep thought, safely, apparently, yet having no recollection of the past five miles; or of waking from a vivid dream and being totally unable to describe or remember what was going on; or a lifetime-defining fantastical dream of a jungle with brilliant kinetic colors and rain on my face that turned out to be the skylight open and a summer night's shower... But that misty jungle of fluid color. What caused that? So, thoughts arise spontaneously? WE don't think THEM? What is the evolutionary mandate behind dreaming anyway? And how am I dreaming this stuff that has no antecedent in my world?
Ok, back to the rubric. How do you think? Some engineers can hold a 3D drawing in their head and spin it around to see the top view. I can't. I have a brother who has an accurate calendar of life's events in precise order. I don't. I have a friend who writes sitting at a piano and the words and music are a single entity, indissoluble. Yeah, no chance, ever. I love to read about consciousness, but I'm no professor. But, I can do something no one else does. I can make light move around with my pink jelly matrix and my hands. I can show you a pure vision of thinking happening in front of you. Writing words about this changes its nature. If I could, I would just send you all a piece. Even these photographs are pale shadows of the experience of strolling about in front of the multi-dimensional surface... It is holographic in a nicely organic way. Like that jungle...
P.S. Feel free to write back after you think about thinking for a bit. Are there ever voices that are not your own? And when you talk to yourself, who is talking and who is listening? And why is this occurring?
P.P.S. AND, now that we have an AI capable of writing a law school essay, what is the nature of a thought detached from a string of words assembled in a grammatically correct format? Does that AI think, or just assemble phrases? And, could that be considered actual thinking?
P.P.S.S. In a future missive, let's talk about thoughts that are purely emotion, thought as a spirit. They have no shape or color or thingness. They can only be expressed with metaphors. Stay tuned.
