The realization that submission, for me, is only a way to retain power, not to surrender it, as I once thought. This false surrender to someone else is a way of refusing to surrender to who I am, holding everything at such a distance, even my own thoughts and feelings. I am get so worked up in my abstractions, trying to convey my inner experience, a life of metaphysical ideas, that I neglect the simple embodied experience, where most of the truth lies, and all the portals to the infinite that cannot be found by looking. I would like to simply be in my body for a while. This may require action.

The anger of being asked to describe a physical sensation — I can only produce one or two words (warm, nice) that are obviously inadequate but safe for the reason. If I really tried to describe the sensation, the description would never cover it, would produce the wrong idea, would even replace the memory. And yet, once forced to say something, anything, it feels wonderful to have the listener agree — yes, that feeling feels something like those words for them, too.

I wish I could say more and more about such sensations: how putting my hand on your skin feels like dipping it under running water, like the surfaces are pierced with tiny holes and there is light and fluid passing through, back and forth as the surfaces sink into one another, and it seems that I am touching you from the inside and after a while there is no accounting for the direction of flow or whose skin is whose or where the warmth is coming from.

Having dreams where I am accidentally propelled much too high in the air, so high that I know I will die when I hit the ground, but after accepting certain death, the feelings of floating and lightness are incredible, and there is nothing terrifying about the view of the city below me, even as I am rapidly plummeting toward it. Somehow, after all this, I always manage to land softly, even though it is impossible.

I haven’t been writing. I’m applying to graduate school, to study something related but different from what I’ve worked on all these years, and between reading and talking to people and researching programs in psychology of language, psycholinguistics, etc, it’s consuming most of my time and energy. It’s very exciting though, because no amount of reading and talking to people and researching programs has made me any less convinced that this is really what I want to do. As someone who’s experienced numerous seeming breakthroughs about What I Want To Be When I Grow Up that only held up for a few hours or days or weeks, I find this incredibly reassuring.

A couple days ago, I was making a vague attempt to study for the GRE, and the prep book I was using included a reminder in the math section that anything raised to the power of 0 is 1 (x^0=1). Of course, this is something I learned in middle school and used in many subsequent math classes, but I realized I didn’t actually know why the answer is always 1. The GRE study book didn’t explain it, and I don’t think any of my teachers ever explained it either, which was a big problem in my entire public school math education. Math, even relatively easy math like algebra and geometry, was often presented as a set of esoteric formulas to memorize, not as a rational system we the students could actually understand. We were very rarely required to prove the formulas we learned, just to spit them back out on the exam.

So I texted Mitsu to ask why anything to the 0 is 1. And he called me back, from his car, where he was driving somewhere with Sue, and both of them tried to explain it to me.

“What’s x-squared times x-to-the-third?” Mitsu asked.

“x-to-the-fifth.” I said

“Right,” he said. And then he tried to explain why that same rule of addition of exponents meant that x-to-the-0 had to be 1, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Sue tried too, but I still wasn’t getting it, and finally Mitsu just said, “Write this down.”

So I got a pen, and he dictated the equation to me: x^(a+0)=x^a*x^0.

“Oh!” I said, looking at what I’d just written on the corner of my GRE workbook, “I get it now!”

The exact same words I hadn’t been able to understand over the phone, when written out in front of me, seemed totally clear.

“Text me if you have any more math questions,” he said.

Yesterday, I read this in an essay by George Miller, in the book Language by Ear and by Eye: The Relationships between Speech and Reading (which is actually the proceedings from a conference held in 1971):

“The written proposition is a tangible representation of an act of thought. It is a physical thing, an object, and it can be reacted to as any other object can. Thus writing made it possible to react to one’s own thoughts as if they were objects, so the act of thought became itself a subject for further thought. Thus extended abstraction became possible, and one of the brilliant abstractions recognized by the Greeks concerned the form of valid arguments. And so, out of writing, was logic born.”

Speaking of epiphanies, I feel as if I’ve had one about my career. As usual with realizations like this, while feeling like a brand new insight, my new thoughts also seem totally obvious, as if I’ve been thinking along these same lines for months if not years already. But somehow it all just seems a little more clear now than it did before, giving the subjective impression of a really big shift in understanding (Eureka! I solved my life!), when really it’s just a tiny shift that happened to cross some sort of internal threshold. Anyway, the deal is, I want to study psycholinguistics.

How perfect/obvious this field is for me, let me count the ways. I am a hopeless grammar nerd. I was the “correct usage” champ on the literary team every year in middle school. I’ve always genuinely enjoyed doing things like diagramming sentences, proofreading, etc. When I started studying Latin in 2007, it was like stumbling into some strange realm where other people actually knew what a gerund (and, even better, a gerundive!) is too, and I immediately got really into it.

Then there’s the psychology side. I’ve been doing psychological research for donkey’s years, and been fairly successful at it, but often worried that it wasn’t really the right thing for me, partly because I was concerned it was taking time away from my other interests, namely in writing, and that I wasn’t sure the general population at vision science conferences really “got me” at all. They are, with some notable exceptions, a totally different kind of nerds, the kind that doesn’t necessarily ever read fiction or particularly care about writing well. I did a lot of work on reading (some of which is now being used to market phonics, which excites me), but it was all the context of vision/perception/object recognition. Somehow it never occurred to me that the scientists who study language primarily might be a lot more concerned with… language.

Then over the summer I discovered Lera Boroditsky‘s work on language and cognition, which bowled me over, and then I actually got to speak with her, which bowled me over even more. But I still thought it was mostly just that Lera in particular was very cool (she really is!), not that there was something particularly fitting about her topic/field. But then I got back to NYU, where there are many fine people working on language and language development and psycholinguistics, people I’ve already known and liked/admired for years: Athena Vouloumanos, Alec Marantz, David Poeppel, Brian McElree, etc. And I went to Chomsky’s talk, and I emailed him about it, and I started auditing a linguistics class for the first time ever, and something clicked. I had this feeling that, at long last, a huge conglomeration of seemingly-disparate interests I have had converged, and I had found an entire tribe of great people with similar concerns, all at once.

Relatedly, I was telling Mitsu about all this, and about my email to Chomsky, which was on the issue of thinking without words and whether language is primarily for thought or for externalization/communication. I didn’t think Chomsky really understood the point I was trying to make in my email, and Mitsu reminded me of a similar story he’d told me before about having a long conversation with “a cognitive scientist” about this issue at a Kira Institute event many years ago, and finally convincing her to modify her position re: whether we primarily think in words. This time I got him to remember who the cognitive scientist in question was, and it turns out it was, of all people, Elizabeth Spelke, whose work on language development I’ve admired for many years, and who was recently interviewed as part of the WNYC Radiolab program on “A World Without Words” that I tweeted a couple weeks ago.

It’s a small, vast world we live in, and so incredibly, richly connected.

For more on psycholinguistics/neurolinguistics/MEG/language and mind, etc, see Greg Hickok and David Poeppel’s blog, Talking Brains.