How My Mind Works (First Essay)

For years people have been telling me, people as varied as Ivy League professors and adults who have no more than a high school education, that I am the smartest person they ever met. Perhaps you have had people tell you that, too. If so, it is sort of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you are grateful for their words, because you feel they may have hit the nail on the head but, on the other hand, you know that your smarts and knowledge are so infinitesimally small that they amount to a mere scintilla of insight/knowledge in the vast ocean of learning. The key to whatever knowledge and wisdom I bring to a situation is in how I take information, handle it, store it and retrieve it. The purpose of these three essays is to explain how my mind and memory "work" for me. I will not, in this essay, take time to go through various theories of the relationship of mind and brain or try to discuss the "hardware" of the brain; perhaps I will do that on another occasion. These three essays are strictly autobiographical...

Beginning with a Picture

I look at my mind as composed, as it were, of a series of caverns, of huge and almost unlimited scope. These caverns are of different sizes and shapes, with some of them being vast rooms of almost "airplane-hanger" proportions and others being smaller chambers that are connected to other like-sized chambers in a labyrinthine series of "inner" caves. In each one of the caverns are recesses in the walls, such as all those side chapels you see in medieval cathedrals, and in these niches are thousands upon thousands of storage spaces. The storage spaces are like those little drawers you see in older roll-top or vargueno desks of the 17th century. Thus, each of the caves has almost numberless storage units, and there are many, many caves. Each of the caves represents a certain field of inquiry or large set of experiences of life. That is, one of the caves/caverns might be "Bible" or the things that flow from Biblical knowledge. But, on the other hand, one of the caves might be a series of life experiences that all tend to "congregate together"--like parenting or my 24-year marriage (which ended in 2001) or my "childhood." It isn't clear to me how many individual caves/caverns I have (let us consider the smaller cave that is immediately linked to others to be "one" cave, for discussion purposes) in my mind. That may be the next step of my investigation. I know I have at least a dozen of these caves. Each one is almost as vast as the ocean I scan when I walk along the windswept beach in Lincoln City, Oregon.

I can say more about these caverns. They all, as it were, radiate out from a central point, which is the reality of life as I live it today. That is, I see my mind and life sort of like a "hub and spokes." The "hub" is the self as I present myself to the world each day. This is, of course, ever-changing, but not so much as you might imagine. There are great levels of continuity in life from day to day, and so the hub doesn't change a lot. It is my "location" in life at any time. Another way of looking at this hub, then, is as a sort of clearing house for information. It is the "receptionist" at a huge law firm or an institution of great complexity. The reception desk is staffed by someone who always is supposed to be attentive and cheerful--normally, as we imagine, a woman of friendly temperament who can "multi-task" easily and skillfully. Ramifying (branching) from this hub are the "spokes" of my life, which are the caves/caverns. They are connected to the hub, and the hub is constantly sending new impulses of memories, pictures, pieces of information, etc. to one or more of the caves of my mind or the spokes of the wheel.

But we can go further. We are developing really two images here and each suggests something rich. On the one hand my mind is like the "hub and spokes" of a wheel, with the present situation being the hub. On the other hand it is like a series of caves/caverns, all connected by a long hallway to the hub. With the caves/caverns image we can go further. I would say that there are corridors from each of the caves to the neighboring ones. These run perpendicular to the hallway from the hub, making the connections between the caves and the hub a sort of lattice-work or reticulated structure. This suggests that the boundaries between caverns are permeable, and that one can, as it were, traverse the various compartments of the mind very easily. There is ample lighting in every cave and corridor, yet because of the vastness of the caves some of the nooks and crannies and inner spaces are quite dark or in shadows. Along the side walls are often chairs and desks, placed strategically so that if I want to pause at one of the countless little storage boxes and take it out to study its contents, I can simply take it to a nearby desk to study.

No one ever is at these tables except me so they are always available. However, I long for a human connection that would, as it were, become my "research assistant:" i.e., someone who might spend a good deal of his/her time in my caves, taking down files, going through them, systematizing them, cleaning up the places where dirt has crept in, etc. To date I haven't put out an effective "job advertisement" for such a research position, because I really haven't thought very much about what a person like this should do or what relationship I should have with him/her. So, the desks and chairs set up throughout the various caverns are like carrels in a research library, strategically placed so that diligent bibliophiles don't have to lug the volumes back to the main "reading room" to do work.

I didn't dream up the image of the caverns; I had two classical sources help me. The next essay speaks about that.

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