Many years ago I got to thinking… how is it that we are capable of speaking? If you break it down logically, it shouldn’t work. When I start speaking a sentence, I don’t know what the words at the end will be. I haven’t planned the whole thing out word by word. And yet I’m able to construct it in such a way that the word choices at the beginning of the sentence work with the word choices at the end to form a coherent (usually) and grammatically correct thought.
The logic flaw isn’t obvious when you think about simple sentences, but when you have a complex sentence, one which relies on interrelating clauses, compound split infinitives, and the like, you start to encounter iffy territory. How does my brain know what form of a verb to use now, or what sort of pronoun situation to set up before it knows what’s coming?
It’s rather like managing to build a functional foundation for a building you don’t even know the size or shape of yet. To some degree the shape of the building is established by the foundation you’ve set, certainly, but to continue the analogy, somehow you’ve managed to get the proper plumbing and wiring set up in anticipation of amenities you didn’t even know would be there when you did it. You go to move the stove in, and when you set it down you find you’d somehow already put in the ventilation hood in just the right place even though you didn’t know when you built it that the room was even going to be a kitchen. Okay, I think that analogy has been taken just about as far as it can go.
And it isn’t just speaking. Obviously, similar processes such as writing can be compared, but so can things like, for example, dance. Managing to step simply in time to a beat is easy enough, but if I don’t have the moves planned out ahead of time, how am I able to do something complex that synchronizes just so with a particular part of the music? Anything improvisational, in fact, seems like it should be nearly impossible when you really start to think about it.
It was through this line of thought that I came up with my “string theory” of thought. Picture a ball of string. The ball exists as a single, finite object. You are able to comprehend its shape and its size, and you can see the whole thing as a single unit. You understand its nature, purpose and function. You may not be able to see the inside of the ball, but can be pretty confident that you know what’s in there. The ball, in my analogy, represents a complete thought. If you pull the end of the string, the ball begins to unravel into a linear form. This is the process of creating sentences, writing, etc.
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— 07:25:59 PM
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