Friday, March 13, 2009

Sick of thinking

The flu has kept me in bed for the past four days, and it's also kept me to my own thoughts. I began getting sick of my voice, not my physical one (that too), but the imaginary one I actually hear when I'm thinking. Is it possible to think without words, without language? How peaceful would that be. I think as children we probably all thought without words much of the time, or at least I'd like to imagine I did, as I was never very good at words. But I've become more and more reliant on it. Maybe the reason we're such muddled-in-the-head people is because of the way we think. Dr. Temple Grandin, who is autistic, and whom I found on Google by searching "thinking without words" has written a very interesting article. She describes the way she thinks as a series of images as in a flip book. All her thoughts are this way, some are videos and three dimensional models that she can manipulate in a very detailed and complex fashion. Images trigger other images in a succession to form a thought. When she thinks "dog" she automatically sees a bunch of pictures of every single specific dog she's ever known, not some general abstract "dog".

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