Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 16

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 16 - Compressing Time with Imagery

I cannot prove that there are specifically n-number of primary feeder streams to the larger flow of consciousness. Many streams seem to co-occur as parts of systems that themselves merge in daily life in the way natural streams merge hierarchically into ever larger ones on their way to becoming a river.

Consider the emotional stream, for example. Many theorists of consciousness have linked emotions to states of the body: the warm glow of love, the anxious stress-steroid feeling of fear. And when you have an emotional stream flowing, often the inner voice chimes in with appropriate descriptions or even advice. So the emotional stream might be either inexorably joined with or at least capable of being woven into a braided union of body sensations and inner voice.

Next consider the physical streams of senses that flow in through various orifices (or the entire skin in the case of touch) and one’s sense of body orientation in space called proprioception. These all merge into the overall presence felt as the physical “now.” How this happens—how we are unitary despite all our different parts—is referred to by cognitive scientists as the binding problem.

I spent much of the day packing to leave tomorrow on a road trip to meet a colleague who is also a good friend. We planned an overnight, working camping trip at a state park in eastern Arizona that has a long lake (formed by a dam, of course). We’ll be able to inhale wide spaces in a mystical spot along the Little Colorado River, which, though surprisingly “little,” nourished a valley that supported Native Americans for thousands of years.

One of my last minute pieces of business was to send an email to New York to the woman who runs the labs for my university course on the biosphere, which each year draws one hundred and sixty students. I needed some videos ordered for the upcoming fall semester, which I use for “organism moments” during the lectures, so I had to send her a final list and also ask if she would do me a favor and contact another woman at the media center of the NYU library, to request that the media center also order all the same films, after first checking that the library does not already own them. This double order will allow students to go to the library and see the entire films should they want to.

A preparatory inner scenario about all these operations ran in my head a few times while I did other tasks, before actually writing and sending the email. Here is what I noted about the combination of verbal and visual inner streams during that.

Images were key. I saw the desk at the media center, the paperwork that would get filled out, the two women on the phone, and more. The whole rehearsal contained brief but fairly specific images. I even watched myself writing the email in these mental rehearsals. The overall scenario ran all the way through in perhaps twenty seconds, with six to ten individual snapshot scenes. Each lasted a couple seconds and then jumped to the next. This allowed me to not only “test-see” my writing of the email, but at the same time, as part of the rehearsal, it put me into the scenes from the point of view as if I were actually in New York, face to face with the lab lady, hearing my voice as if I were speaking.

The words and images worked together, coinciding to compress into those few seconds the multiple scenes that would take me many minutes to compose as explanation in an email and a much longer time were I to transmit the instructions in real conversations. The flash-mode of these imagined scenes allowed me to speed up the rehearsed reality, jumping across space and time. Such fast forwarding in plans makes sense when we think something through about the future or review the past. We would not want our thoughts to be limited in their paces to the molasses-like flow of actual reality.

So at times, at least for me, we think in jump cuts, similar to the way television commercials are structured. In fact, maybe that is why commercials work—because they are fitted to the way we think. They pack in so much during seconds, and that is what I experienced in my flashes of imagery.

One more point. There was not much action within individual scenes. They were closer to still photographs, overlaid with rapid-fire key phrases of words, phrases I would later write in the email. Well, perhaps there was a little motion within the images. It was difficult to tell. These fast forwarded rehearsals, a combination of verbal and visual streams, rolled by so fast that it was difficult to store them in memory to be able to think about this very human kind of thinking.

© 2024 Tyler Volk

Coming Up Next: Day 17 - Experiencing a Tree at Lyman Lake

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