Thoughts aboutThinking…

I wonder what thoughts are like when you don’t speak any language… my cat, Misty, always looks like she is plotting something, but I wonder what that is like for her… I wonder if she is visualizing what she will do using only imagery instead of language or if she does have some form of language. I usually think about what I’m going to do using words… it just seems quicker and easier than imagining a visual scenario of what I want to do. Animals seem to be able to interpret scent and sound much better than people, so they probably recall scents and sounds in much better detail than we can, so I’m sure those senses are a lot more involved in their thought processes.

Misty doesn’t talk, but she can definitely communicate with Tony and I though. For example when she started to see moving boxes appear around our apartment last year it put her in a pretty shitty mood. (Literally … Her preferred method of expressing her distaste in Tony’s and my actions is to crap on Tony’s pillow), so when she was upset about the idea of moving she found a way to let us know it. She also glares at us when we’re annoying and leads us to her food when she’s hungry… and also she mews at us all the time with the same sounding mew, but Tony and I are unfortunately too dense to figure out what she’s trying to say.

...There seem to be different layers of brain activity. What I consider to be my “thoughts” are the words I string together to form a notion of something in response to a situation or the way it makes me feel. Right now I am thinking about each word I type… and also thinking about the words I want to use to type my next thought… the part about finding words to use seems to be coming from a different part of my brain than the part about the words I’m using though… its like the non-verbal part of my brain has a notion that it is trying to convey to the verbal part of my brain so it can match a word up with it… so I guess I can come up with the same ideas with or without language… its just a lot harder to convey them in a way that I can share with other people or in a way I can remember later… I can read the words I am typing or maybe even remember the words later without rereading them or I can share my words with others to convey what I’m thinking, but the general notion that I’m conceiving of seems to be back in the way back of my brain without needing words to go with it… there had to be a notion of the concept of thought before there was an actual word for it… you can’t really make up a word for something that has never crossed your mind.

Even having the advantage of being able to use a language I sometimes get inclinations that I don’t really understand at all… like I’ll have a craving for SOMETHING? And I have no idea what exactly… like I have a general direction like sweet or savory, but there will be some specific texture or something that I want and I just do not know what I can eat to satiate that hunger. SOo annoying… also sometimes get a vague urge to DO SOMETHING… usually its like a desire to create something… so I will draw for a while and that’s ok or I’ll write and that’s ok… but it doesn’t really fulfill my creative urge, but I know I wanna do something artistic or sometimes I’ll feel like I want to do something athletic, yet nothing seems to really sound fun when you ask me about it… maybe when I feel like that it just means I’m getting a craving for something I had or did a long time ago, but I don’t remember what it was… anyway, this is starting to feel like one of the awful philosophy papers I wrote in college, so yeah I’m done now…