One of my forgotten notes. I found this tonight in a text file on my desktop. I don’t remember writing it, but considering it was on the desktop and the subject matter is similar to some things I’ve been thinking about lately, I supposed it was from sometime this past winter. The file turned out to be dated in November 2008.

. . .

Silence through the ought-to-do. Silence through the have-to-be. Silence can never be heard, only listened to. Silence cannot exist, is impossible, is only appreciated in the listening. Silence cannot be held in mind. Silence cannot be worded, or remembered, or kept. Silence in allowing smaller and smaller sound. What happens when we look at words. If only we might write without reading, without hearing the words as they come out of our minds. Are they there before we bring them forth? Are they there silently? The act of pressing the keys one after the other is more beautiful than the output, more beautiful than any words. The keys give off light. The words compress it. Stillness is not achieved by forgetting about movement, nor by attending to it. Stillness is not achieved. Silence is not achieved. We do not make silence by hearing it there. It is there without our hearing. We cannot hear it in any ordinary way. We cannot read the words we write. They do not have the same meaning. There is no meaning in words. What can we do with them but let them go. I use certain words out of habit. Where does the habit come from and how could I judge it? Why these certain words? Where is the image I am describing? Isn’t writing to be the description of an image? I do not think I have these words in my head. They do not exist. Sometimes they are stories but they are not what is really there. I stop and rest my finger tips on the keys which are reflecting light. I see the letters. I am using them in an action. My fingers know where they are and what can be made with them and yet my mind does not know where it is going. Can I remember the previous line? Can I remember even the present one. Can I remember the line to come?

This is the lightly-edited transcript of a conversation I had with my close friend, Mitsu Hadeishi, via IM a couple days ago, on the subject of thinking with vs. without words. It’s a topic that is very interesting to me, and we’d already spoken about it several times in the past.

. . .

Katharine: I have all this stuff in my notebook that I keep wanting to type up, but then, when I start to, I wind up going off on a tangent about something else. It’s like in the winter there’s nothing going on in my head, but in the summer there’s way too much.

Mitsu: Keep notes and use the leftovers in the winter.

Katharine: Having notes doesn’t really help.

Mitsu: Maybe it will this time.

Katharine: I forget I have them. I even forget notes that I write at the time. I’m always sure I didn’t write anything all winter, but then I’ll go back through my notebooks and realize, oh yeah, I wrote all this stuff.

Mitsu: Just change your system; you gotta be more memento.

Katharine Tillman: I’m so hypercritical of myself in the winter.

Mitsu: I think it’s more that you don’t even realize you have thoughts.

Katharine: It’s true. That’s a pretty strong argument against the idea that I normally think in words. I just can’t remember anything unless I turn it into words.

Mitsu: Yes, that’s what I realized. It’s all about memory. I figured out how to remember without words, but initially I couldn’t remember when I didn’t use words.

Katharine: How’d you figure it out? Einstein apparently had mental images that he could hold onto for a long time, until he was able to translate them into words.

Mitsu: I don’t know. I just noticed I couldn’t remember when I didn’t use words, then my brain restructured and I could, the next day. I was 15 years old, so my brain was probably more plastic.

Katharine: I’ve known this for years, that it’s easier to remember words than images. It was very apparent from some experiments we did in the lab.

Mitsu: This was literally like I had no memory of what I had just thought a few moments earlier.

Katharine: Yes, that’s how it is. It’s still like that for me. Maybe I’m too old to learn this.

Mitsu: I guess I just changed the nature of my awareness, so I could remember. I did experiments.

Katharine: What kind of experiments? I don’t even know when this happened, if I’ve always relied on words to remember. I don’t remember having so many memory issues when I was younger.

Mitsu: I did experiments with thinking without words. I just sat there and went, I’m going to think about this issue with my English teacher, without words, and then I did it. The first time I did it, I remember reaching some amazing conclusion within a few moments, but then I forgot what it was. So the next day I tried it again, and just tried harder to pay attention or something, and I did remember everything. After that, I just never used words again. In retrospect it was surprisingly easy. Give it a try.

Katharine: That’s not really a very easy recipe to follow. It’s really like I have no clue what’s happening in my mind unless I try to narrate it to myself. But if I’m in some sort of mode where I can narrate it fluidly, like when I’m writing, it’s obvious there is a lot happening in my mind, all the time.

Mitsu: Start with something simple. Try thinking about buying a bus ticket.

Katharine: When I do that, I have a sense of my body while I’m buying the ticket, and of the building I’m in, but I also keep saying “buying a bus ticket” to myself.

Mitsu: Before you say “buying a bus ticket,” you must have the idea of buying the bus ticket. That idea flashes in immediately, and the “buying a bus ticket” is like subtitles added later. I think the only thing bad about the thinking in words is that we wait for the narration to happen before going on to the next thought, because we have a limited attention span. It is difficult to hold all the thoughts in a long sequence in mind at the same time.

Katharine: I feel sure that it’s the narration I remember later, if I remember anything at all about my thoughts.

Mitsu: The advantage I have, with no words, is that a huge series of ideas can pop into my mind all at once, within fractions of a second, and I can hold them all, sort of like that user interface in Minority Report.

Katharine: I’m convinced I do that, too, but I don’t remember it. How do you remember?

Mitsu: I don’t know how I remember. I literally remember the feeling of the thought itself. It’s similar to remembering a visual scene, except the components of the visual scene are thoughts.

Katharine: I’m notoriously bad at remembering feelings too. What I can remember is words!

Mitsu: In the idea for the “apple is red” example I used in my anti-Rand post, I have: apple (image of apple with mottled surface), then I have a little animation of red -> orange also, and I have, over on the other side, something like “binary RED ORANGE ALL OR NOTHING” floating there. Crucially, the animation also has this quality of not being a solid color, but like the surface of a real apple. At the same time, there’s the idea, “definition of RED cannot be absolute, because you have to integrate over the whole surface of the apple and there are many equivalent ways of doing that.”

Katharine: Sometimes, when I am having a complex thought like that, a bizarre sentence will come to me about it. If I can hold onto the bizarre sentence long enough to write it down, I can then recover some of the other stuff too.

Mitsu: It’s not that I remember the entire thought, it’s that I remember little conceptual placeholders. So, for the that apple is red example, I remember first the question “apple is red, what’s problematic about that?” Then I remember the apple is red image with the mottled surface, the animation. Then I remember the problem of integrating over the surface of the apple, which could have many different colors on a microscopic level.

Katharine: But aren’t the placeholders words?

Mitsu: No, they’re not words. I remember little conceptual seeds, and from the seeds I extrapolate out what the idea must have been. I can lay the ideas out in thought space. One idea is over on the left, another one is up, in the middle, another one is over on the right. To write it all down takes whole paragraphs, but the initial “thought structure” is all in my head at once.

Katharine: I think that it’s more rare for me to have mental images, except in dreams. I do understand what you’re talking about when you say that the whole structure is there all at once, before you narrate it.

Mitsu: When you write fiction or nonfiction, it’s obvious your mind is holding many ideas at once. That comes out very clearly in your writing. That’s why I always ask you what are you thinking and so on. I want to know what is in that big space. But you always just say one word, or a single sentence with just one subject, verb, and object. I think, that can’t be all.

Katharine: It’s not all. I have a vast inner world, but I can have a lot of difficulty translating it into words on the fly by speaking. I can do it much more easily when I’m writing.

I had a very vivid dream a month or so ago about being offered a fancy job in a beautiful futuristically-designed office. The company’s exact purpose was unclear, but it seemed to have something to do with new media. I was lead into a secret, drab, 1970′s-looking room in the back where I found out that my job there would be to use an antiquated computer to follow current cultural trends online. I had access to huge amounts of money and resources with which I could have historical documents fabricated on the basis of current events. My task was then to auction off these false documents to the highest bidder on eBay. It was a very lucrative position, but ultimately I wound up refusing it, in tears.

One week ago, I was awake until 5:30 in the morning remembering things I hadn’t thought about in years, such as, the first boy who ever kissed me, when I was in middle school. He was a computer geek who designed his own Doom levels and loved Godzilla and was, as far as I knew, the only other person my age in my small south Georgia town who used the Internet the way I did, to communicate. Somehow, through him and his mother, a beautiful young blonde whose screen-name was Morgaine or something like that, I met one one of the first, it not the first, stranger I ever corresponded with over an extended period via email. He was 30, and I must’ve been about 13. I was already well on the road to my phase of wearing all black all the time, but he was the one taught me all about “real” gothic music, from the 80′s. Because of him, I started listening to Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and, most especially, the Sisters of Mercy. (My poor family was subjected to “The Temple of Love” and “Mother Russia” on repeat for hours.) I interviewed him about his tech job for an English class assignment once, but I don’t remember what else we talked about, except that he frequently making jokes about being sent to Alcatraz for talking to me, and it seems like we might have actually discussed the possibility of meeting. He stopped talking to me after he got married (which, after some Googling, I have determined was in 1998, when I was 16). I also recall an embarrassing incident in which my mother forced me to open my hand to reveal that I had written “fuck me and marry me young” (a Sisters of Mercy reference) on my palm in ballpoint pen.

I don’t know if I was talking about sex with a thirty-year-old man on the Internet when I was 13. I’m not sure I was even that young. Whatever happened, the thing that seems strangest to me is that I forgot about the entire interaction for years, not just the online correspondence with this man, but the relationship with the boy from my school that lead to it. In fact, by the time I kissed the second person I ever kissed, I thought that she was the first. It’s also incredibly difficult to mesh any of these memories, chronologically, with other memories I have of my online life in my early teens, such as my stint as high-priestess of an online coven that met in the IRC DALnet #teenwicca channel, and discovering confessional “girl-poet” websites on Geocities and Tripod (such as Helena‘s immortal nothingbutmeat), and beginning to create such sites of my own. All of these events must have overlapped temporally to some extent, but some of them made it into subsequent writings and stories I told about that time in my life, while others did not. It seems clear that my memory and personal history are shaped by the stories I tell about my life, rather than the other way around.

I had these things on my mind when I chatted with Lera Boroditsky a couple days later, and she pointed me in the direction of Beth Loftus‘ work on the malleability of memory and false memories. This article in Slate on Loftus, which I tweeted about a few days ago, gives a interesting overview of her life and research, and raises ethical questions about memory-tampering (a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of my favorite films). Just today, Joe LeDoux, a neuroscientist and rock star (in several respects) at NYU has been posting lots of links on Twitter to new research from his lab on memory-erasure in rats.

Perhaps the future of the past is here already.