Thinking of Thinking
by Scott Teel

I’ve been thinking of thinking lately. Which is weird in itself, because what I’m thinking about is how the hell does thinking work?

When I think, even though I’m not hearing anything, I can “hear” words in my head, even as I write this. I just heard “even as I write this” in my head, and then thought ahead that I would write this sentence about thinking it. All in words that I can hear, but I’m not really hearing them.

The same thing goes for images. I can think about something that happened today and recall it visually, though I’m not seeing it right now. When I do, I can tell it’s not my visual area of the brain seeing it, but I can see it, in my head. But at the same time, I don’t know where it is that I’m looking at it and I can’t pin it down no matter what I try. It’s just there somewhere, but not in a location. Weirder still is that I can see in my head things that never happened, or haven’t happened yet, by imagining them. Now I’m creating the visions of Lisa Loeb beckoning for me to join her on the nude beach, and I can see it, she’s right there wagging her finger at me and licking her lips, but it never happened! Trust me, it didn’t. And never will, of course, I’m not that delusional. But I can see it, and when you stop and think about it, that’s pretty weird, putting aside the fact that it’s also pornographic.

One thing I notice about my visual thoughts is that they leap around a lot. There’s a lot of quick edits. If I recall a trip to the men’s room at work today, I’m getting up from the desk, then I’m in the bathroom, then Arthur comes in, then he leaves without washing his hands, now he is washing his hands, but he washed them before he did his business, not after, which boggles me, then I’m back at the desk, then peeing again. My brain leaps around from point to point in time, arranging them randomly at times, cutting out the boring parts, though if I choose to, I can picture myself walking down the hall to the men’s room, but it’s a tedious waste of time, like most of this paragraph. It’s like my own private movie studio in my head, except the movies have really boring plots.

They also tend to be a little blurred usually, and the scenes rapid and brief, yet cohesive to me. Lots of times (if not all the time), even if the event happened to me, I’ll recall it visually as if I’m watching it happen, and I can see myself in the images doing the things I remember; for example, using an empty tomato paste can to chop up worms with my cousin on his back stoop as a child, because we believed each piece would grow into a new worm. We had good intentions, trying to boost the worm population of Bay Shore, New York, which really may have needed more worms at the time, you can’t prove it didn’t. We got bored and left before learning that chopped up worms die and turn into little, blackened, dried out crisps. Dehydrated worm bits, the new snack sensation from Nabisco.

Anyway, as I remember this, I don’t see my cousin and the view from my head, which was what I really saw, I see both of us on the stoop as if I’m a third party watching the event. So…in a sense, not only is my mind capable of creating images it never saw, many of my actual real memories are presented to me in a way I never could have seen them.

Dreams, of course, are an offshoot of the whole thinking situation, except dreams can be much more vivid somehow, and can even seem like real events, no matter how ludicrous. There are times when I think of something and can’t tell if it really happened or if I dreamed it happened. I was angry at one of my friends for a whole day because I’d dreamed he’d done something nasty to me. And even after I realized it was a dream – here comes the stupidest part – I was still mad at him. And I’ve awakened in the night actually yelling in horror from a spider nightmare many times.

Another amazing thing is that even though I can see memories and see imagined images in my head, and they look the same up there, I can tell which ones are memories and which are fantasy. When you consider it, you can see how some people could have such vivid images in their heads, their thinking process somehow gone out of control, that they can’t tell anymore what’s real or not, hear voices, see things, talk to people who aren’t there, and generally do what we call “going crazy.” Maybe it’s just too much vivid thinking. The imagination overthrows the rational brain and starts running things the way IT wants to run things. Sometimes I wonder if my own brains aren’t on course for a coup or a regime change.

I shouldn’t think about these things, but I can’t help it. I do the same thing with electricity, which, I suppose, is what powers the brain as well. I know there are scientists who could explain to me the exact facts of it, neurons fire and the signal is translated by the cerebral cortex into a mass of colors and shapes and sounds or something, but it still doesn’t really answer the question: how? Sure, we know what happens. We know the physical event that takes place. But how does it work?

How do electrons flow along from my memory to a new clump of what is essentially carbon and water, and form an image that I can see somewhere? Or a word I can hear. Where’s the word coming from in my brain? How can cells produce and hear noise that never is really produced or heard? I have the same questions about a lot of things. This computer, for example. I push the R key, and instantly, an electric signal flows to a microchip, and that electric signal is translated as R and a new signal is sent to my screen and it somehow shows me exactly what I want. How can electricity make colors and pictures appear on my computer screen, exactly where and how I want them? It’s a burst of power, but when it hits something inanimate, like my computer parts, how does it know what to do each time? And how did we figure this stuff out? Luck? I’m like the little kid who says, “Why?” after every explanation he gets, until you finally deconstruct whatever you’re telling him to a point where you realize you really don’t know why.

And why do people look up when they’re trying to think of something? It’s like we’re trying to physically look into our brain to find it. Even if we could see our brains, it would just be a clump of wrinkly glop, you couldn’t open up a wrinkle and look around.

“Where’s that file you wanted me to see?”

“Ohhh…let me think…(eyes go up and back and forth), let’s see, I think I left that memory in the cerebral cortex…no…maybe it’s in the medula…it wouldn’t be in the hypothalamus, I know that for sure…there we go! It was in the left lobe, I was looking in the right one. The file is with Ned.” Just one of those weird things we do. You never think about something while looking a person in the eye.

I know there are answers to some of these questions, except maybe the last couple, but I can’t look them up right now. Appropriately, this has given me a huge headache.

© 2005 Scott Teel