I often imagine The Hub's mind as a physical space. Actually, I imagine lots of people's minds as physical spaces. Well, people that I know pretty well. For instance, when I think of my father, I always think of the mountains of his home town in the background of everything he does, as if the view from any of the windows of his mind would have them. The Hub's mind I imagine as almost devoid of color but full of fine detail...patterns made by various saw blades and mitre bits lined up in orderly rows, long calculations of fractions running in orderly collumns: the gas milage for the jeep, the crown molding project for Mrs. B., the possible configurations for the gas range for the much ballyhooed kitchen restoration project.....

I imagine that if I were to enter Friend Will's mind there would be great high ceilings and ever changing light filtering through rapidly evolving compositions as of photographs. My friend Theresa would mentally live in a meadow on the edge of a wood, populated by dogs and sheep and cows all wearing clothing designed by Theresa herself, and every outfit would reveal an otherwise unseen and unimagined personality of the wearer.....

But I've never thought about what my own mind, as a physical space would look like. I guess largely because I'm in it, and I think that all I'm really experiencing is chaos. But I know that isn't really true. It's just mostly chaos. If it were complete chaos I wouldn't be able to function.

It's not that I think only in words. In fact, sometimes I think that maybe I think in images more than some "less verbal" people I know. I remember somebody making an argument, in college, I think, that people really couldn't be thinking if they didn't have language. I thought that was just ridiculous. I think most people think in pictures, it's just that some of us have the words handy for the pictures and some of us don't.

Maybe I'm thinking about this now since I find that I am more and more plagued by difficulty in finding the right words for what I'm trying to say. Such a problem is consistent with MS, or it could be that I'm just tired. Or it could be that I've turned 40 and now ave CRS: "Can't Remember Sh**:"

I remember that I used to tell people that I felt as if I always had three trains of thought running and that I could visualize them very much like three different rail tracks. The one closest to the "front" of my mind had to do with what ever I was talking about. They were my words, ideas that I was trying to get across in the conversation or in writing, and these ran in tiny type very close togehter, many of them being abstract concepts which lacked a visual component. These were logical arguments, stories with a beginning, middle and an end, cause and effect scenarios. I try, very hard, when I talk to make some kind of sense. Rambling worries me, for all that I do it on this blog all the time.

On the second track would run the broad underpinnings for the (hopefully) smoothly running train of thought in front of it. This is the track where cars were most likely to jump the track, then jump back on, reformed, re-coupled. This is the track of the impressions I was getting in. Feedback, both verbal and non-verbal from people to whom I was speaking, observations about the environment (i.e. "it's freezing in here, I haven't heard that song on the radio in 10 years and what DID that person put in their hair?")

The third track would have nothing at all to do with what was going on. On this track ran plot lines of novels and snippets of dialog I was thinking of writing, snatches of poetry I'd almost always decide were not worth writing down, grocery lists, a running bank balance, lists of things to do, debates about what to get my mother for Christmas, whether or not to go back to school, partially written letters to the editor of the local newspaper, a sermon for a job as a clergyperson which I have not ever had nor have any desire to hold.

It was LOUD in there.

Nowadays, though, I don't think the image of the tracks is quite as accurate. It seems to me now as if my mind is more and more divided between words and images. Nowadays it seems to me that if you were to enter my mind you would enter into a great hallway with two marble stair cases going up to the left and the right. On the right side you would see, spiraling downward from some point above the stairs a slowly twirling moblius strip of words...the words I'm writing to you now, the words I'm thinking of. And on the left side you would see another similar looking ribbon of thought, but these would be the images which underpinned the words.

But now it is as if something can only be a word or an image. The abstract concepts which underpin speech (cold, happy, angry, etc) can only ride the ribbon on the right side, and thus the slow twirling as words must work their way both up and down. Meanwhile images, impressions, colors, scenes from real life, half written novels, shelves of grocery stores, pictures of potential Christmas gifts, etc. flow down the left side. Not hemmed in by such potential brakes as grammar, syntax, or even logic, the image side is free to run much faster then the verbal side, and I imagine that the times I have to close my eyes and say to the building foreman "bear with me a moment while I remember what I need to tell you" are the more and more frequent times when the images and the words are no where near being close to matching up.

Or I could be just going crazy. Wonder what that looks like?