Chapter 28 thoughts about thoughts

At every waking moment, the human brain is filled with living molecules of thought called ideas.The mind is made up of clouds of these structures.These dense clouds drift randomly from place to place, bump into each other, bounce back, and collide again, leaving random, two-step, Brownian motion-like trajectories.The thoughts are little circular structures with no feathers, just some bulges to match and lock into some other thought particle with the same receptors.For a large part of the time, this activity produced nothing.The odds of an idea meeting a matching idea so close that it resembles the docking of a spaceship are very small in the beginning.

But when the mind gets a little hot, the movement speeds up and the collisions increase.The odds have gone up. Receptors are branched and complex, and their configurations are varied and varied.For one idea to match another, it is not required that both partners have the same internal structure; only external signals are useful for rendezvous.But once any two thoughts lock into each other, they form a tiny memory.The way they move has changed.Now, instead of randomly wandering the corridors of the mind, they moved in straight lines, coming and going, looking for another pair.The rendezvous and locking continue, pairs mate with pairs, clumps form.These clumps already look like living, purposeful creatures, hunting around for new things to match them, sniffing around to see if there are matching receptors; flipping around, wanting to grab something when they see it.As the size grows, anything that seems to match even a little bit has been tried and glued on.Once there is a gap to take advantage of, plug in and hang on the surface of others.They gradually become like marine animals, covered with other creatures, and form a symbiotic relationship with them.

At this stage of its development, each association of individual thoughts, remembering and seeking at the same time, moves into its own fixed orbit, making an oblong orbit around the mind, spinning on itself as it travels.At this point, it is an idea. Sometimes a clump of particles becomes so tightly bound that it begins to attract to itself, like gravity, all the other stuff in the mind.Then the center doesn't clump together anymore, everything deflects, and the other clumps stagger forward, swinging into new orbits, circling the new dense clump, and nothing escapes this gravitational pull .At this point, it is a black hole, the mind seems to disappear without a trace, and sleep begins.

However, this is not the normal course of events.Under the right circumstances, there is harmony when all orbiting structures are in equilibrium.New ideas, formed by impulses from outside, drift through the atmosphere.They locked together, formed pairs, doubled again, and then, when things were going well, were swept onto the surface of this or that large orbiting clump.When gravity is not strong enough to cause attachment, these new thoughts may simply move into small orbits around the aggregated thoughts.This is not thinking yet, but it is the final stage of preparation for thinking. When many assemblies are flying in unison, and the isolated orbits have been arranged into shimmering branes very close to each other, the process of selection and sorting at this time is like a complicated, well-organized dance party.New ideas fling from one elliptical path to another, collide with mismatched surfaces, bounce off, and wait to be grabbed by distant clumps and put into place.

Now, the movements of all structures, large and small, are orderly and non-stop, like those "Brandenburg Concertos".Those collections began to let out wind streamers, feathers of thought.These feathers touch, bond.Sometimes, less often but sometimes, all the particles form a clump, all the clumps are interconnected, and the mind becomes a single structure, already dynamic, capable of purposeful, directional movement.At this point, the hunt begins again, for something similar, with matching receptors, looking from the outside in. Counterpoint is only one aspect of the process of union, dissociation, recall and recombination.Dancing is just one aspect of exercise.Rush forward to meet new pairs of thoughts, aggregate into new clumps, orbit, large clumps occasionally fly off track, vacate into other spaces, most importantly, particles of lonely thoughts switch from one track into the next orbit, like electrons, up or down, depending on the amount of charge around and the clumps involved.These movements seem to be performed by accident, but always follow the law-all of which have a musical spectacle.Of all human experience, it conjures up nothing but music.

So I suggested, why not reverse the process?Don't use conjectures about thinking to explain the nature of music, but do it the other way around.Starting from music, see what it can tell us about the feeling of thinking.Music is our effort to explain to ourselves how our brains work.We are put under a spell when we listen to Bach because that is listening to one's head. The Art of the Fugue is not a particular mode of thinking.It is not thinking about any one specific thing.Spelling out Bach's name on that great unfinished level at the end of the fugue was nothing more than a passing thought, something that crossed the mind.That whole joke is not about thinking about a specific matter, it's about thinking.If you want, as an experience, to hear how the whole mind works, all of a sudden, put on the "Matthew Passion", from the beginning to the end, turn up the volume, that is the sound of the entire nerve center of human beings, All of a sudden the sound came out.