subject: Where Do Your Thoughts Really Come From? [print this page] Where Do Your Thoughts Really Come From? Where Do Your Thoughts Really Come From?
If I close my eyes and decide to visualize a tree-lined street, it would be reasonable to expect a relatively simplistic image that provided me with just enough visual information to satisfy my requirements. Put another way, the request invites only the basic elements needed to make sense of the picture. There need be no more and no less than a diminishing path bordered by identical trees, also diminishing in size. A blue sky, fluffy clouds and a church spire would be pleasant, but unnecessary adornments to the overall image.
But what I, in fact, get is an infinitely more complex experience. Although it would be inaccurate to consider the mental image as being composed of pixels, it might be convenient in the short term to do so. I assume that the scene is made up of minute building blocks of some kind, and although these units may not all be of equal size and shape as in pixilation, nevertheless they are correctly positioned components of the whole.
Far from being minimalist, the trees vary one from the other in terms of detail. Even if they are all of a type their various trunks may be fatter or thinner and some of the branches may hang lower than others. I am also given a road that is cambered correctly and edged with a slight grassy incline on which are assorted ferns. Between the trees I see houses, perhaps. No two the same and each with a myriad of individual features that makes it a unique dwelling. The sky certainly is blue and flecked with fine clouds. Although I did not specify that it should be a nice day, something in my mental makeup has determined that it should be so, and for some inexplicable reason has decided that I also want a flock of geese.
And these features are only the beginning. Every fragment of the picture is incredibly detailed and pertinent to its surroundings. As in nature itself nothing is wrong in terms of color or size, and nothing is irrational.
This and more being the case, I am obliged to ask where all the fine minutia comes from. It is all too easy to unthinkingly assume that there is a vast library of Lego-type building blocks somewhere in the brain and that the ones immediately necessary to make up a particular scene instantly fly to their correct places on the thought's canvas. Moreover, the selection must be made simultaneously and at an unbelievable speed, since the image does not gradually take shape, but appears suddenly and fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus.
It is also assumed that this vast reservoir of elements is the result of a lifetime of seeing and unintentional recording, with every tiny dot I have ever encountered being filed away for future use. This permits me to instantly assemble and imagine places I know for sure I have never visited, Yet the picture is photographically perfect and utterly real.
But it is a picture that is far from fixed. Try as I might I cannot stop it from drifting, even metamorphosing as features change, buildings alter, and the whole thing swiftly becomes an entirely different picture owing to my inability to hold a thought. I am told that some people can fix an image in their minds and that this is the basis of good meditation, but I have never been able to achieve it, even for a few seconds. Yet with every alteration and every new scene the logic remains intact, every fragment in its correct place.
But the idea of an accumulated fund of handy pixels hits a snag when I realize that small children can visualize children who have visited few places and cannot possibly have as many thought elements as an adult. Suddenly, then, the inexhaustible library of mental building blocks ceases to be such a valid possibility.
One of the more outlandish explanations of the mind's ability to call up almost any scene instantly is that we are all somehow in constant touch with a universal pool of visual fragments. If so, why are my seemingly random images invariably rooted in the British experience?. Cars drive on the left side of the road, British architecture abounds, letterboxes are on doors and not perched on poles at the bottom of the front lawns, and no on.
Another likely or unlikely- possibility is that our library of part-pictures is a combination of personal experience and inherited memory, the latter being in the form of fragments of long-dead recall that are somehow locked in the DNA. These disassociated segments of memory from our forebears might also be the cause of those sudden and all too brief images that have been interpreted as evidence of reincarnation. But that is another matter for another day.
In the meantime, we should think more about thinking and try to analyze the scenes our minds present us with. Are these images truly random, or are there any common and recurring factors each time we call up that tranquil tree-lined avenue?
