Chasing thoughts

I really like to think. I like the process. It is fun to try out abstract concepts in the mind, finding curves and connections around and between words or ideas, and structuring complex issues into simplified models of reality. 

I remember this started early. As a child, not wanting to fall asleep in the evening, I often found myself backtracking my associative thoughts, sometimes as far back as fifteen minutes. I would go back in my mind to all the things I had been thinking of, in reverse order. I would re-think every individual thought and what triggered the connection between every two consecutive thoughts, until I ended up at a beginning where I could no longer find what started it. 

Mostly, the backtracking would take longer than the original thought process had. I still try it sometimes and find it a great brain exercise, although as a perpetually tired parent, I am greatly out of shape at the moment. 

Next to thinking, I enjoy writing a lot. Writing seems to be a catalyst for my thinking, much more so than speaking is. Speaking seems to be the manifestation of thoughts that have previously existed in my mind. Writing seems to create new thoughts and concepts that previously did not exist. I don’t know why this is, but speaking and the thinking that is part of it seem to be one and the same activity. During writing however, I experience two distinct processes in my mind. 

The first of those is the creative process. The task where your mind thinks up ideas, concepts and words. The second process is the actual writing-it-down. It is the task in which the words are appearing on the screen, form sentences and ultimately form the story you want to tell and write down to keep and for others to see. 

While writing, these two processes to me have clear different shapes and form. This is most obvious in the speed of those processes. Let me illustrate by an example which, in real life, often lasts no longer than minutes. 

Say you are inspired. Your writing is going well and seems to flow by itself. In such a state I often experience that I am thinking a little ahead of what I’m actually writing. Words and shapes of sentences, a bit ahead of what I’ve typed so far, form themselves in my head. This would not have to be a problem, but I can feel the story I want to write getting shape in my mind at a speed  which is exceeding the speed of my ability to write. The story on the screen is desperately trying to keep up with the creative process in my mind. And the mind is struggling: on the one hand it is coming up with these great ideas to put into words, and on the other hand I can feel it trying to store those ideas in some sort of structure and dependencies only to be able to retrieve those future parts of the story later. You have the feeling that if you stop and focus on just writing, you’ll never know the end of this part of the story and moreover, it feels as if you’ll lose some great ideas. And just as you think the two processes will be forever disconnected, you can feel the creative process slow down. The mind notices the gap, seems content, stops creating and lets its other process, the typing, finish its job. And while I finish typing, I am now aware that there’s only one activity in the mind: gathering the ideas from the created structure and putting them into words on the screen. 

I do assume I am not alone in experiencing this and seeing the two processes chase each other in real time, is a remarkable experience. I am glad I do not live in an age where all I would have as support of writing is a pen and paper. Think of the speed of those tools… On the other hand, will we ever see a time where the actual thought process is brought into a form for others to see, without the clumsy interface that is a keyboard? One can only imagine what would come out of our minds then.  

Comments

[jooxt]

Once I had the same flow going on. The thinking ahead of what you're actually writing... But not with words, with numbers. Complex mathematical experiments to be precise. I liked that, I should pick it up again. Hopefully my brain is still flexible enough.

[Arthur]

All it takes is practice, Jooxt!