Friday, March 05, 2010

Meta

I've been thinking about my thoughts.

Yeah -- try it. It makes my head spin. What are your thoughts like? Do they come in words? Sentences? Images? Emotions? Something else for which there is no word? What are they?

Aly commented the other day that she doesn't think in words, and it blew my mind. If you don't think in words, what do you think in? Images, she said, or emotions. Yeah, but...they must also come with words, right? I think in words...don't I? Do I? At this point I started trying to notice the nature of my thoughts and my head exploded. Well -- it felt like it might. The best I could do was to state that my thoughts tended to involved a word, maybe a few words, not fully-formed sentences, but...something...linguistic. I remembered noticing a few minutes before that the tiny gold threads woven into Aly's sweater sparkled pleasantly. How had I thought that? Had there been words? "Sweater"? "Gold"? "Sparkle"? "Pretty"? Or had it been just the thought? I couldn't remember.

Since then I think I've gotten slightly better at noticing my thoughts without exploding, and I have come up with the following observations:

1) This is, perhaps, obvious, but I do not articulate silently to myself everything that I must on some level think: if I open the cabinet to get my toothbrush, run it under the sink, and spread toothpaste on it, I am not narrating these evens to myself, nor do I give myself verbal commands before performing these actions. So the thought that I can represent on this blog only as "I am now going to brush my teeth so I'd better get out my toothbrush," or something like that, occurs and causes me to send signals to my muscles without any language being involved.

2) Since it is possible to have reactions (such as laughing, crying, anger) without being able to articulate what caused them, then it follows that not all emotions come with words -- if they did, then putting them into words would not be such a challenge.

3) This is (to me) more interesting than either of the first two observations, both of which I think were pretty obvious. But the fact is that the majority of time there are words -- clauses, even -- running through my head. But these words are...I'm not sure quite how to put it...they're quotes, in some way. Not just me talking to myself in that moment. Rather, they are things I have said, or heard, or a song that's in my head, or a potential version of something I may say, write, or hear later -- dialogue or narration from a story, or something I need to ask someone in the near future, or how a phone call I'm worried about might go, or an idea I had I wanted to mention to Adam, etc. What's interesting to me is that the language is situated somehow: it's not just me thinking to myself. However, it is rare that there isn't some sort of language running through my head.

4) Perhaps this is obvious too -- but when I try to think about or remember any thoughts I've had, it appears in words. Interesting that this appears to be a difference between cognition and meta-cognition.

5) I don't think I would ever use the word "images" when describing the quality of my thoughts.

Those are my observations, but it's clear from what Aly said that they are not universal. I'm so curious to hear how other people experience these things. Thoughts? ^_^;

2 Comments:

Anonymous David Black said...

I sometimes try to capture a thought or idea in my head at a moment when it is unmistakably itself but has not yet taken verbal form. I'm convinced that there are such things: idea-objects, for lack of a better term, that already absolutely represent a particular idea, but that aren't verbal yet. They're weird.

I also love the fact that you can conjure up someone's voice in your head without having the voice say anything.

As for words in relation to ideas: the main area where I've probed into this is narrative, both literary and filmic. Long story short: my position tends to be that, while perhaps not everything can be put into words, narrative per se, and almost by definition, can be.

This is a controversial position in film studies, because we like to think of the possibility of purely filmic narrative. I have yet to see a case, though, where non-parapharaseability in words and non-narrativity didn't vary together. (If I'm putting that right.)

3/06/2010 12:40 PM  
Blogger Robert said...

Thing #1: I feel like I agree with a lot of your descriptions of your own thought-patterns.

Thing #2: I often feel like the words running through my head are me speaking to someone, someone hypothetical, often an imagined argumentative adversary and sometimes just The World In General, but very frequently in that kind of dialogue form. (Though obviously a monologue in practice).

Thing #3: I feel like some people, including various of the political theorists who need to justify not including animals in the social contract or whatever, assume that consciousness is dependent on language, but I sort of feel like there's absolutely no reason to assume that, and there's some amount of empirical evidence against it like what we're talking about.

3/11/2010 9:17 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home