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My Own Little World
Jun. 4th, 2003 04:49 amI've been thinking about how my brain processes, prompted by a discussion on writing and where things come from while writing. Some see scenes clearly in their minds, others "hear" words/dialog. So that set me to wondering which sense most colors my mental life.
Hearing? No. I usually have music or something on while I'm doing something else. Sounds become background noise, though they can be recorded quite well by my brain. Sight? Maybe. However, I'm coming to realize how terrible I am at visualizing. Smell? Definitely not. This is probably my most disregarded sense, considering that my nose is bascially useless for a few months out of the year due to allergies. Taste? Eh. Not really. Texture is as big a factor as taste to me in matters of food. Touch? Perhaps some version of it, more of feel in a wide sense of the word than tactile sensation. A mental groping in the dark.
My mind is full of abstracts and mere snatches of the concrete. Whatever I dream up, as realistic as I can make it, it will never be as vividly complete as reality in its physical aspects. Bits of images might be vivid; if I imagine purple shoelaces on a black boot, the shoelaces will be stunningly brilliant against the darkness of the boot, but then everything around that bit of a picture will be indistinct. In the mental world, I can focus only on one part of an image at a time. Stepping back to look at the larger picture, things get a bit different.
I guess intuition/instinct plays a rather large role in my thinking. That's the best way to describe the non-verbal, non-visual place I sometimes get into. That place is also the site of the best, most satisfying thinking that I do. It's also where I have to grope in the dark, work non-linearly, then watch as pieces fall together.
In writing structured pieces, I seem to work best skipping around from place to place. Going straight through from beginning to end is comfortable only for rambly, meditative pieces (like journal entries). Writing is just a way of recording my attempts at understanding things, or presenting things I've thought about so that maybe someone else will come to understand the same thing. Even fiction is like that. Any original fiction I write comes from my own experience, things I've gone through myself, only tweaked a bit to distance it from myself.
Hearing? No. I usually have music or something on while I'm doing something else. Sounds become background noise, though they can be recorded quite well by my brain. Sight? Maybe. However, I'm coming to realize how terrible I am at visualizing. Smell? Definitely not. This is probably my most disregarded sense, considering that my nose is bascially useless for a few months out of the year due to allergies. Taste? Eh. Not really. Texture is as big a factor as taste to me in matters of food. Touch? Perhaps some version of it, more of feel in a wide sense of the word than tactile sensation. A mental groping in the dark.
My mind is full of abstracts and mere snatches of the concrete. Whatever I dream up, as realistic as I can make it, it will never be as vividly complete as reality in its physical aspects. Bits of images might be vivid; if I imagine purple shoelaces on a black boot, the shoelaces will be stunningly brilliant against the darkness of the boot, but then everything around that bit of a picture will be indistinct. In the mental world, I can focus only on one part of an image at a time. Stepping back to look at the larger picture, things get a bit different.
I guess intuition/instinct plays a rather large role in my thinking. That's the best way to describe the non-verbal, non-visual place I sometimes get into. That place is also the site of the best, most satisfying thinking that I do. It's also where I have to grope in the dark, work non-linearly, then watch as pieces fall together.
In writing structured pieces, I seem to work best skipping around from place to place. Going straight through from beginning to end is comfortable only for rambly, meditative pieces (like journal entries). Writing is just a way of recording my attempts at understanding things, or presenting things I've thought about so that maybe someone else will come to understand the same thing. Even fiction is like that. Any original fiction I write comes from my own experience, things I've gone through myself, only tweaked a bit to distance it from myself.
