Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Do you ever? Thoughts on thoughts

Do you ever finish a sentence with yourself? I seem to always start a sentence in my head, but I never recall ever getting to the final period. I think it's because I already know exactly what I'm going to say. It makes things awfully hard when writing, because when thinking of what to say, I only draft the first half of sentences in higher order brain levels. The rest kind of gets made up on the way from brain to fingers, and usually I don't have much of a say unless I concentrate on the ending of the sentence, which sometimes takes too much energy.

You know, I think that our brains thrive on pure thought. Pure thought is so pure that it cannot be expressed, but only...thought. I think that we each have our own "format" of thought, which might be one reason why we are all unique. However, our brains have a "translator," wherein that pure thought is transcoded into various forms.
One of these forms might be language, or, more specifically, the muscle impulses sent to our lungs, vocal chords, and tongue that will produce language. The translator also receives impulses from our ears and eyes and translates that language back into pure thought. Language is the intermediary pool that human beings contribute to and pull from. I bet it is the sub-perfect level of translation (for we have all seen evidence of misunderstanding one another or not producing lucid sentences) that also gives rise to some creativity. If our translators are different and interperet things differently, a new thought might be introduced into our brains and incorporated into our thought processes even if we don't realize it.
Another form that thought can be transcoded into could be the language that we think in our head. Imagine a chord plugged in directly from the headphone out port on a computer to the line in port on that same computer. It's a loopback. That is kind of like what our thoughts can be. It's a little like saying something outloud so we can here how it sounds. Out the mouth, and straight back to our brain through our ears. Kind of like that, but all within our brain. It may help our thoughts run through the logic machine that makes up a great portion of our brain, because our brain probably evaulates all of the thoughts it gets from the translator in a different way than it evaulates thoughts spawning in our own, local, brains. Running our thoughts through the loopback may help with viewing them in different ways.
It is too bad that all of our pure thought has to be interfaced through translation mechanisms. However, it shows again the wonder and grandeur of the human race and how amazing our minds really are, to enable this sort of communication.
But how awesome would it be to be able to interface with each other so purely we exchange pure thoughts and are able to attain perfect understanding? However, I think all of our hardware is different enough to be incompatible with each other, so we must go through intermediary devices.

3 comments:

Shella said...

Wow, Sean. When I can comprehend what you're saying, it's very interesting. Pure thought is a weird thing to think about. I totally agree that it would be cool to interface directly from brain to brain. Brains are weird...but very useful.

Sean said...

Yeah - I'll agree with that last statement! For sure!

Claire said...

You should write a book about that! Brains communicating with each other directly! It could be like a 1984, The Alliance, or The Host type of story. I would totally read it. Your thought processes are some of my favorite to hear about. Always interesting.