I have been pondering that place I go when I think about stuff.

I’m no transcendentalist, so I am not talking about a real place. I do not literally go anywhere. Anyone observing me would just see me staring off into the middle distance with a faraway look in my eyes. In this, I look like any other human being.

Remember this when contemplating your fellow humans. No matter how they look, how they dress, what assumptions your social programming are telling you to make, or anything else. You have no idea what is actually going on in that person’s head. They could be having amazing thoughts that would astound you.

I certainly don’t look like a genius. In fact, due to my usual state of dishabile, I imagine I often look rather the opposite. I imagine I look kind of homeless, to be honest. Fat homeless, but homeless nevertheless.

Anyhow, back to the inner voice thing.

It was when I was collaborating with my classmate on our Writing for Video Games project that this subject really stuck in my mind. Repeatedly though the process, I would go to this inner state in order to come up with something or figure out a solution to a problem.

And the thing is, it’s a very hard state to describe. Despite my articulacy, when someone asks me what I am thinking about, I don’t know what to say. My thoughts are too multifaceted and complex to be rendered into a simple linear sentence.

And even if I could express it in a sentence, odds are nobody would understand it because it is so uniquely idiomatic to my way of thinking. It would be like asking a question and getting an entire library in response – and all the books are in Swahili.

Plus, well…. a lot of my thoughts are beyond most people’s ability to grasp. That’s a fact I find hard to take. I always, in quixotic fashion, feel like if I just explain it right, people will understand it and we will have connected.

It almost never works. But it is one of the things that has pushed my verbal skills into the stratosphere, so I supposed it is worth it.

As usual, my biggest problem with my advanced capacities is that I honestly don’t know how to handle them. By that, I do not mean that I am incapable of using them, but rather that I don’t know how to emotionally integrate the notion of intellectual superiority.

It’s weird. I have no problem with people thinking I am very smart or very talented or a lot of other ways of being good st stuff. But when I contemplate anything close to thinking of myself as better than another person, I get incredibly uncomfortable.

I mean, can’t we all just get along?

But I grasp that most people don’t go into this inner voice state and come back to reality with the sorts of things I can do.

So I suppose I can handle being unlike others. Just not superior.

Once more, we shall tack patiently back to the subject.

I call it a voice, but it’s not like there are words or a tune. It’s a voice only in the sense that accessing it is so much like listening for something. I go very still and there’s a sense of straining to sense something. External stimuli are muted in order to free up as much of my mind for the task at hand as possible.

If it’s merely a matter of accessing information, it lasts only a moment. Remembering does not take a lot of effort, although the older I get, the more full my memory gets. And that means finding what I am looking for takes a bit more time.

It’s like trying to find the right book in a very large library.

I used to say that the process did not involved imagery, but I was mistaken. I said that basing it purely on the preconceived notion that I was not a very visual person and therefore I did not think visually.

Never make that kind of assumption. Always observe before you conclude. Even if you are pretty sure you are right.

Images do flash through my mind while I think. But very, very briefly. It’s almost subliminal. I never really get a “look” at them. And it seems almost incidental to what is going on in my mind. Like it’s just what flashes on the screen while the supercomputer works away, no more meaningful to the process than the noise the printer makes.

Computer analogies and the human mind : together since computers.

I have never been able to call up an image of something I have seen like I was looking at a photograph. My mind just doesn’t work that way most of the time. The only time I can think of that it does work that way is that, occasionally, when I am remembering some piece of arbitrary information like a phone number, that I have seen but not used yet, I will get a brief flash of where I saw the information.

The other exception is in situations where I have an enormous number of visual samples because they are people, places, or things that I’ve seen an enormous number of times.

I can easily see everything in my childhood home, for instance, and in such detail that I can walk through that home in my mind like I am taking a virtual tour. Same with the writing department at school, and that restaurant I like, Bob’s Sandwiches.

To a lesser extent, I can still mentally survey all three schools I attended growing up, parts of my home town, and the bits of the neighborhoods I have lived in here in the GVRD.

Those are the exceptions, though. For the most part, my mind just plain doesn’t take pictures, or at least, doesn’t keep them very long.

Music, on the other hand, lasts forever, even if I only heard the chorus on a K-Tel commercial when I was six.

Funny how that works.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.