Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 21

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

by Tyler Volk

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

Day 21 - A Memory Excavated at Dittert Site

Had a fitful night in the tent lit by the late-rising moon, was tired from the driving and hiking all day before, and frustrated because I had failed in locating the Dittert ruins. In morning’s wee hours, I mentally retraced all my steps yesterday among the arroyo-cut slopes and cliffs and compared those steps to the crude sketch on the map from the ranger station, all with my eyes closed. Then somewhere from that sometimes trusty unconscious bakery an idea arose, a fleeting image of a possibility on another map I had might have glanced at earlier yesterday in one of my many guide books: Could there have been a second dirt road further to the southeast, also off the clay farm road that I used to get to my current dead end?

In the early morning brightness I got up and paged through the books and other maps. Ah, it was not in a book, but one loose map did show a second road. I packed quickly, hopped in the car and drove off. Two miles back on the clay road another rough dirt road did go off to the east, as hoped. I took it and after weaving up and down ruts and often scraping bottom, eventually came to a fence line, and parked again.

Well, what I thought would be simple proved to be another ordeal. In fact, after more than an hour wandering around in the rising heat, trying to correlate a rough sketch on a brochure from the ranger station to the reality of rough terrain, I became reconciled to the fact that I was lost, would never find the site, and had better look at the situation humorously and with a Buddhist sense of non-detachment. Then I saw a pile of rubble that was clearly more than geological and then spied a tiny warning sign from the New Mexico archeological agency. Ancient civilization! Where there’s one tiny “suburb” there might be another, and sure enough, there was another, and soon I found the faintest trace of a road, probably once used by ranchers or by the archeologists who had dug this area decades ago. A bit more walking took me to the Dittert ruins. The cosmic moral lesson was to pack a compass next time.

Once had stood there a proud pueblo of about thirty rectangular rooms on two levels, space enough for fifty or more people. The site is still held sacred by the contemporary Acoma Pueblo. What drove these people to live so densely, rather than in the two or three room outlier “suburbs” I had passed to get to this main event? The pueblo had collapsed over time, and was now filled in with its own rubble and wind-blown sediment. Therefore my exploration mostly took place on what had been the original second story, except for the noteworthy large round kiva, at the original ground level, about twenty feet in diameter, reduced to a low circle of fitted stones on the ground. In use, the kiva would have been tall and roofed. In fact the clans would have entered by descending a vertical ladder through a hole in the roof, which also served to vent fumes from the internal fire pit. In my imagination, ceremonies ran late into the night, as shamans sang to circles of dancing citizens who pulsed themselves into mythic ecstasies.

From the kiva I caught a glint of distant sunlight. Was that my car? Yes—down slope and a mere mile in the distance. I smiled. There’d be no trouble returning.

On the way back, which meant traversing several deep arroyos, I turned around a number of times to see how the mound of ruins looked as it shrunk into the distance. Halfway back I recalled that the pretty ranger had informed me that the ruins could be seen with binoculars from the parking at the boundary fence. Now my mind tells me! Eventually I reached the car and pulled out binoculars. It was true. Dittert site looked like a distant heap of stone, but I certainly would have started for it as a first guess, had I remembered her information and scanned for it.

Why hadn’t I remembered? How do items just slip in and out of consciousness without my control? Psychology experiments have shown that we can’t remember new information as well when we have a lot of cognitive loading. The day before, in the ranger station I had loaded my mind with new facts of all kinds, with various flyers and papers, with a glance through the book of photos, with listening to verbal guidance about driving and terrain—so it stands to reason that not everything made it equally into the easily accessible part of the bin of retrievable memories. However, it has also been shown by experiments that when emotion accompanies the arrival of a new fact, memory impressions are carved more deeply in the neuron networks. This should have been my case because I was so pumped to see the Dittert site and she had provided a vital point of information about the value of binoculars.

It seemed that the emotion of surprise from the way the site remained visible in the distance when I periodically turned around as I hiked back to my car had jogged my memory. “I” as consciousness had nothing to do with it. I had not said, “Hmm, let me try and retrieve a memory about some information at the ranger station.” I didn’t even know I had the memory, so how could I have tried to recall it? The border between the unconscious and conscious is mysterious. Saying it’s merely not well understood is like saying Mount Everest is rather tall. The crossing of the border just happened, all by itself.

Sometimes one can have a memory of having a memory, without being able to recall it, as in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. But that was not the case here. So how did the unconscious bakery pop out the muffin of memory? In addition to the emotion of surprise, it is probable that my mind was comparing as I walked back the pattern of the Dittert ruins in the distance and the pattern implied by my memory of the ranger’s original advice that I could see the site with binoculars from the fence line at the parking area. The muffin came a little late to save me from lots of sweaty huffing and puffing. But the muffin did come.

What does this mean: “did come”? Was the memory first “in” the unconscious and then it “came into” consciousness? When I accessed the memory—excuse me, when the memory arose all by itself, seemingly triggered by the correspondence between outer and inner worlds—what actually went on when the pattern of the neurons associated with the memory then entered consciousness, which is itself a really huge pattern of neurons? Is the memory an active pattern in the neurons that resides in a small locale in the brain when unconscious and then grows in size as the memory becomes conscious?

Indeed, a number of prominent cognitive scientists who study consciousness think that mental contents become conscious when the pattern of neural activity of those contents reaches a critical large size within special neurons that crisscross large regions of the brain. This hypothesis known as the “global workspace” theory of consciousness is a mixture of physiological knowledge, experimental measurements of electrical signals during conscious activity, and reasoned speculation. The idea is one of the main theories of consciousness, and, in a word, we are talking here about amplification, it seems, of some sort.

Did the small pattern of the memory when it was unconscious in my neurons somehow migrate into the larger buzz of the crisscrossing web of consciousness, and then become amplified and conscious? Or is the crisscrossing web of consciousness always exploring, perhaps undulating in the brain like an actively feeding amoeba and it came across the site of that memory? Did something then “click,” and the amoeba lit up with happiness because the memory—now amplified—was just what “I” needed at that moment to make sense of the world?

Whatever the case (and both scenarios might be true as parts of a system of consciousness), after the memory became conscious, a sequence of new, conscious thoughts quickly followed. With more intense feelings of willed mental activity, I sought more details in my memory regarding the fact of the matter that the ranger had told me about using binoculars—did that actually happen? What did she say? As she initially was telling me that the site could be seen through binoculars, in her office, hadn’t I automatically imagined myself holding binoculars to my eyes, using my imagery stream of consciousness? If someone tells you that you can see something with binoculars, don’t you instantly, as a part of understanding, form an image, however faint, of the action? It seems so. All these ideas occurred as a mixture of both inner speech and inner visualization. And they all just occurred as I walked. The “I “as a conscious observer had not really done much at all, as far as I could tell, to control the flow of these follow-up cognitive activities, though as I said the feeling of willing “more” about the situation seemed to drive the impulse begin the sequence of mental events.

By afternoon I was on the real road again, a paved Route 12 toward Reserve, New Mexico, halfway to home with four hours to go. What do I think about thinking? I think that a lot of thinking is a-u-t-o-m-a-t-i-c. What about thinking about thinking? That process, as far as I can tell, almost inevitably engages the sense of self, the observing consciousness, more so than does the ordinary laying down and retrieval of memories. I felt more myself when pondering how the memory excavation worked, in other words, replaying the process of remembering the memory, than I did when just merely having the memory. In any thinking about thinking, one pays close attention to the contents of the mind, whether as inner language or imagery. With attention to thinking, events that occur only in the mind, such as memory retrieval, themselves go into memory as events to be examined either immediately following the mental events or even later, as when driving I could think about my mind’s sequences from hours before. A lot of this depends on one’s capacity to recall purely mental events, which varies with the intensity of the events. It’s often not easy to listen to or see the thoughts (rather than merely have them), and then later have thoughts about those thoughts. The effort requires that inner sense of a willful self that can examine the dynamics of the cognitive self, the stream that knows the stream.

In ordinary thinking we are usually involved in a search for patterns. Will it rain? Does she like me? How does the moon’s path follow from the law of gravity? Can I—if a squirrel—find where I stored the walnuts? Such pattern-seeking is something that we humans and many other species do as cognitive beasts. As we look for patterns we classify them according to a goal, a meaning. Similarly, thinking about thinking should then consist of seeking patterns relevant to some goal. But the patterns and goals sought involve thinking itself. A question about the development of the ability to think about thinking is: Do we set the goal early on in the process of developing skills to think about thinking? Do we articulate, “The goal of thinking about thinking is blah blah blah.”? (Fill it in.) One worthy goal might simply be to develop the ability itself more and more, without anything more specific, at least as a start. One might adopt slogans as goals, such as “creativity” or “individuality,” and root them as trees in development that can provide later us with acorns to help grow a remarkable forest of thoughts about thoughts. But another option is to just hang out in the search process, see what comes up, evaluate findings as they appear and then set the goal from the successes, however evaluated. Maybe the goal will set itself.

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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