Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Everyday Schizophrenia: Part 1

Just as we look at the body and see a unified whole, we look at the mind and see a single consciousness. Yet just as the body dissolves under close examination, so does consciousness. We can see evidence of this both when reflecting on our own thoughts and when looking at scientific research. But first, a story.

I was sick. It was the first time I'd gotten sick since I was a child, and it was terrible. I could barely walk out of bed. I couldn't concentrate when I was reading. The only book I could handle was a children's book, The Chronicles of Narnia. It should have been embarrassing. I was 25 and all I could manage was a book written for 10-year-olds. As I read it, though, I wasn't embarrassed; I wasn't bored. I was entranced. In my sickened delirium, reading that book was like getting transported to another world. I was there, in Narnia, and when Aslan spoke, I saw every hair of his lion's face.

When I was a kid, it was always like this when I read. I was completely immersed in the book. My intellect didn't hold back from my imagination. As an adult, though, I increasingly read books for information, even when I was reading fiction. I'd key in on style and character and plot, and I didn't really see it—or if I did, it was like looking at a painting rather than walking through a wood. While sick, my intellect was dazed and it couldn't take control of the experience, and so my imagination was free to treat me to a real fantasy. This was nice, but it isn't the point of the story.

At the same time, I was writing. I'd been writing for a long time, and slowly I was losing faith in myself. My style was too academic. It read like a high-school essay or, at best, a textbook. It didn't read like fiction. It didn't have a hint of poetry. I was on verge of giving up, but then I got sick. And when I wrote when I was sick, I had the same experience as reading The Chronicles of Narnia. My intellect couldn't step in with its precise wording, and instead my imagination dominated. It not only created its own images, it guided the story and the characters. It did these things in ways that I never could have contrived, and reading back over them later, I realized this was the best writing I had every done. Even if it was incoherent at points, even if the grammar was uncharacteristically sloppy, my style had finally acquired soul.

Once I was healthy, I started writing with my intellect again. I couldn't help it. My intellect was my words. It was the part of my mind that thought in English. Naturally, it dominated my writing. I hadn't forgotten this flu experience, though, and when I really concentrated, I could still see my imagination constructing its own images and putting its own spin on the story. When I glimpsed these pictures, I could sometimes manage to transcribe them, and when they worked, they became like poetry. They fit better than anything I could have contrived. My imagination was aware of what I was writing, and it was actively making commentary. Unfortunately, I typically didn't notice at all.

Some people might think that this is something special. This is my muse, and not everyone has a muse. Talking to people, though, I don't think this is the case. We all have this, and most of us commune with it every night, just before we fall asleep. Perhaps you've noticed this recently. There's a period just as you're drifting off when you're still awake, but your imagination is taking over. It begins to reel images before your mind, not unlike a movie. It will probably even be telling a story, though sometimes the story is incoherent. The strange thing is, you have no control of it. You, the voice in your mind. You, the consciousness you identify yourself as. You are not created these images. You are not the only one in your head.

And this is the point. You are not the only one in your head. You have at least the two consciousnesses which communicate in very different languages. One is a consciousness of words. One is a consciousness of images. They are aware of each other, as evidenced by how imagination constructed images relevant to my intellect's story. This awareness is imperfect, though. It's only an awareness of activity, and it is not necessarily an awareness of existence. When a cold front comes into town, we are aware of the change of temperature, but we don't necessarily feel the breeze. We can feel ourselves shivering, but we don't know why it's happening.

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