Mentioned this before on the site but the Guardian had a piece on our ‘inside voice’ – that is what we are thinking on a moment to moment basis. Always been fascinated by thought itself – the process, what it consists of. Michael Pollan, the author of this piece which is based on a book ‘A World Appears’ notes:
I’d always assumed that my stream of consciousness consisted mainly of an interior monologue, maybe sometimes a dialogue, but was surely composed of words; I’m a writer, after all. But it turns out that a lot of my so-called thoughts – a flattering term for these gossamer traces of mental activity – are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts, with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought, belated attempts to translate these elusive wisps of meaning into something more substantial and shareable.
Agree with that, even if a lot of thought seems to be formless, chaotic, jumping from one area to another – thoughts as words, and then emotions, sounds and images too. Of course, much depends on whether you have a strong inside voice, or one at all – some people don’t. That this is completely subjective is obvious.
The way that thoughts form as words is fascinating too – in other words, try to type a sentence. For some of us, that sentence doesn’t necessarily have an ending – at least not consciously as it is written. Writing about, say, Fianna Fáil and their political troubles, there’s no precise sense of exactly where or how the sentence will end. At least not consciously. Put a different way. Typing this there’s no clear idea where the paragraph will stop, but somehowon some level all the words are corralled into something that means something. But it’s not dictation. There’s not some ‘other’ feeding me the lines. At least there doesn’t seem to be. Yet on examination where is the ‘me’ in this? If the sentence isn’t fully formed in the mind, where is it coming from? Is there an aspect of personality or aspects, working in tandem, there for thoughts to be drawn on? If someone writing doesn’t know precisely how the sentence will end but is till writing it, where is the ‘who’ in this? Perhaps there are others for whom sentences are fully formed as they set out to type (there’s another angle – touch typing is key to this).
Take a post. If one is written about polling sometimes there will be a sentence that is a hook around which the whole of the post is constructed. On other occasions there won’t be and any useful insights won’t emerge until during the process of transcribing the polling numbers as relationships or disparities are noted – or comparisons with previous polls.
Just taking that paragraph above, when starting writing the idea that it would have an example resting on polling in it wasn’t a conscious thought. It’s not that there’s no sense of the start and finish – it’s more that the process of writing, and presumably thinking, in this context is less structured – and remember this is a fairly easy-going, informal one, essentially the equivalent of shooting the breeze as it were. Part of the fun, if that’s the right word, is delving into the article in the Guardian and then seeing where that spins off to. Presumably others have a completely different process.
That said, presented with an academic or official piece – research or work related, this free-wheeling aspect vanishes out the door. Suddenly it’s work, with a capital ‘w’. In which case the process is get some ideas down on paper, add more over a period of time and somehow hack away at it until there’s shape and it is with the word count. Did a piece last year which was multiple pages long that started out as essentially jotted down notes, and just keep adding to it. The pain wasn’t as great once it had taken on some form.
I’m curious if that’s how others do that.
As the piece notes:
[William James, the American psychologist and philosopher asked] “Has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it?” I had not, but how curious. This intention is neither a word nor an image; perhaps it’s some kind of vague sensation? Thoughts precede both words and images, James argues, and there is something else – that pregnant absence – that precedes a thought. “A good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate,” he writes. Thoughts glimpsed from some height of awareness but somehow not yet formed, much less put into words or images – this is the subtle terrain James invites us to explore with him.
All of which suggests that a lot of this is going to be resistant to objective analysis.
The article notes that the author, using a beeper that randomly emits a sound at which point he has to write down his thoughts, finds that process difficult. There are layers of thought, as he describes, competing with one another – you might be hungry and thinking of food while simultaneously remembering a television show you saw and trying too to catch a train.
Remarkably, the article notes:
Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of “unsymbolised” thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images.
Maybe that last is the substrate of ‘conscious’ though. The author talks to Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a psychologist at University of British Columbia, has combined brain imaging with accounts of thought processes in order to see what is happening in the brain. Using volunteers who are trained to excise thoughts – though as the piece notes, only imperfectly:
Volunteers were instructed to meditate while inside the tube of an fMRI machine and press a button whenever a thought arose. Christoff Hadjiilieva and her colleagues noted a jump in activity within the hippocampus, a key component of the default mode network that is involved in not only memory but also learning and spatial navigation. They might have predicted this location but not the timing. To their surprise, the leap in hippocampal activity preceded the arrival of the thought in the meditator’s consciousness by nearly four seconds – an epoch in brain time, and far longer than it takes for a sensory impression to cross the threshold of our awareness.
“Something is going on prior to awareness,” Christoff Hadjiilieva said, but she’s not sure exactly what it is or why it takes so long. This finding indicates that a spontaneous thought must undergo some sort of complicated unconscious processing before finding (or forcing) its way into the stream of consciousness.
There’s an interesting political angle on this. A thought struck reading the article – why is it that such studies appear to be so infrequent. After all one might assume that understanding the bedrock of thought – which is surely the bedrock of most all else, would be a priority. But no. Hadjiilieva thinks (that word again) that it might be political – that unconsciousness, or even the process of how thoughts emerge, is of little utility because it isn’t productive in the way that reasoning or problem-solving might be. Yet, surely you can’t have one without the other?
There’s a further point that the piece raises – noting that inspiration, creative thought, whatever, often does not arrive until one moves away from a task; perhaps doing something mentally that is similar to the process of forgetting a name or a piece of information and thinking of something else in order that that particular thought can surface in the mind.
There’s more here. What comes across most clearly is how little is known about this, and yet it is central to the human experience.
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