The art of fielding two

In this case, the business of catching thoughts, rather than that of catching balls.

Now, back in August, I made the acquaintance of descriptive experience sampling, reported on at reference 1. My interest continues, with my now having clocked up more than 500 sample points since I started.

One of the things that has come up is fleeting thoughts. In the context of sampling, this means being very conscious of having had a clear verbal thought just before one becomes conscious of the bleep, but that it has gone by the time one tries to capture it in OneNote. One no longer has any idea of what it was about or where it popped up from, never mind what it was.

Something similar happened this morning, when I was lying in bed waiting for my second cup of tea (items which are counted and rationed these days. Got to watch the caffeine intake, never mind that of tannin). I had this very clear but fleeting idea, but the moment I paused, it vanished, never to be recovered. Beyond it being clear that it had been.

A bit of experience which will never be captured for the record.

In the case of sampling, there is clearly a good deal of interaction between the sampling process and what one is thinking about, as indeed noted back at reference 1. One response to which might be that what one is capturing is conscious experience, it does count, however it got there. But with the worry here being that what gets there is not typical, not representative of what happens in the unspoilt, naïve world where one does not take notes.

So does the bleep make conscious some thought which would otherwise have remained quietly unconscious? Does the process of trying to remember what the thought was, turn it into words which were not there in the first place – although, in my own case, I am fairly convinced that I do do a lot of my thinking in words. Do we have a psychic version of Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle at work here? The bind that you cannot know about something without disturbing it – a bind that the better sort of anthropologists have known about for a long time.

While in the case of lying in bed, my first thought was that one is only going to have thoughts of this sort when nothing much else is going one. These fleeting thoughts are very quiet, and will only be heard in a quiet environment, without lots of extraneous chatter. Contrariwise, when I am bleeped when I am out walking, I am quite often very confident about having had a very clear thought, perhaps, even, a very important thought, about something when the bleep breaks through, but a thought which vanishes before I am able to capture it, particularly if I delay or otherwise fumble the capture.

Which all adds up, to my mind, to one more bit of evidence for the notion that consciousness is more than a matter of on or off. There are degrees of consciousness. And as well as there being degrees of consciousness at the person level, there are degrees of consciousness at the individual thought level. Thoughts can make it all the way to up the surface of the murky pond that is our brain – or only some of the way.

From where I associate to Hurlburt’s unsymbolised thoughts, perhaps, if rather floridly, like the fat carp lazily swimming around the round pond in the privy garden at Hampton Court Palace, their backs just about breaking surface from time to time. But there is method in their madness: they always swim around the perimeter in a clockwise direction. Perhaps there is some asymmetry in their nervous systems which leaves them always wanting to turn left. A bit like us being right handed, rather than left handed.

PS: with the bit of experience which does not make it to the record, being lost in the mists of the brain. No doubt it was the result of something or other and no doubt it went on to feed into something else: there is some determinism at that level. But it is beyond the wit of man to recover it from the chaos of signals in the brain that follows. But then think of the different sort of chaos which might result from remembering everything, pointed up at reference 2. I associate here to the paper files which used to be kept by large organisations, files which ought to be a deliberately constructed story as much as a rather random assembly of documents about something, documents which by some chance or other made it to the filing clerk. Random documents are a useful check, but what we really need is a good story, made at the time, if we are to make sense of the past: storing everything is helpful, but storing stories is better. Mothers who talk plenty to their young children know all about this. See, for example, reference 3.

Incidentally, as far as I can make out from OED, store and story are different words, although story may be a relation of history.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/remainder-shelf.html.

Reference 3: Culture and Language in the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory - Robyn Fivush and Katherine Nelson – 2004.