I recently had an encounter with the Sphinx. The hands of the clock were reaching for heaven when I saw him sitting proudly on my chest, facing me with chestnut eyes swirling like whirlpools of wisdom, small rolls of furry fat tickling my sides. I sensed that he was going to lick my face immediately, but instead we had the following telepathic communication:

Sphinx:
Riddle me this,
What has four legs in the evening,
Eight legs in the middle of the night,
And six legs in the morning?
Answer true and on to Nod.
Answer false I’ll slurp till dawn.

Me: (Lost in thought for a moment) That’s easy, it’s you. You have four legs when I go to sleep, eight legs when you’re wrestling Jasper at 2AM, and six legs every morning, when you sit here and lick my face like there’s a Tootsie Roll inside.

Sphinx: That is correct. (Saunters off, clearly disappointed, probably to mangle then eat a roll of toilet paper)

Normally I wouldn’t have been able to figure this out, but lately I’ve been feeling very relaxed, which has loosened my brain and let it wander like an undulating wet noodle in outer space.
A lot of times, these extra degrees of al dente mental freedom manifest themselves randomly. I might be looking at a Ginkgo leaf and then remember hiding in an old storage closet when I was six. There’ve been a few times when I’ve been able to find a link between what I’m seeing and what I’m thinking, but those associations have been so tenuous I’m not convinced that any real connection occurs.
Since we live in our consciousness, it’s easy to think that it constitutes the whole of our mental processes, but there’s actually a huge amount of inhibition going on in various brain regions, the purpose of which is to prevent inconsequential information from flooding the cortex (the “thinking” part) and overwhelming our ability to process information. If those blockades are there to help you focus on pressing details of daily life, and relaxation releases you from some of those constraints, it might be easier for deep-swimming thoughts to come up for air. Back to that in a minute.
I snuck into a neurobiology lecture this past week dealing with the description of a new class of brainwaves. To summarize, neurons in your brain will often fire synchronously in large groups, so it’s possible to measure their combined activity by placing small detectors on the scalp. Using this technique, (EEG) it’s been found that there are different frequencies of electrical activity in the brain that correspond to different states (sleeping, concentration, relaxation, etc), most of which occur around 60 cycles/sec (Hz). The lecturer[i], by placing electrodes directly on a conscious person’s brain during surgery[ii], was measuring the normal waves, but also was also finding frequencies upwards of 250Hz[iii]. These weren’t very powerful, which is why they’re not picked up by a standard EEG, and no one is quite sure what this high frequency activity represents.

There are three reasons I wrote that last paragraph: First, I wanted to sound smart. Second, it was a cool lecture and I don’t like keeping cool things to myself. It also ties to what I was talking about before, though it’s a bit of a stretch.

I think it’s common that when we imagine what another person is thinking, we passively believe that their thought process mirrors our on some basic level. As a result, the possibility of a wide disparity in mental states usually isn’t considered when we form opinions about someone or their actions.[iv] For instance, when you talk to me, you would never guess that I’m probably thinking about various fruits taking place in track and field events.[v] This is hyperbolic, but my point is that most of our impressions of other people’s actions presume a standard state of consciousness and a worldview that conforms to something with which we would at least be familiar, which I don’t believe to be a workable assumption.
It’s not just the various ways that life experience affects how we think and how we view the world, but it's the whole of factors including biology, experience, environment, free will, etc. that serve to give every person a perspective so unique and ultimately unapproachable that generalization across individuals is absurd, especially given our limited knowledge of how the brain even works. Based on what I heard at the lecture, we're still discovering very basic principles of brain function, and it will be some time before we understand the mechanics of an individual’s thought process. And when that’s possible, I would bet that cross-cutting principles are going to be quite rare.


[i] Robert Knight, PhD. http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/rknight.html
[ii] The brain itself doesn’t have any pain receptors, so surgeons will often keep a person conscious and talking to make sure nothing’s being cut that’s really important.
[iii] http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/94/6/4269
[iv] By “how a person thinks”, I mean their stream of consciousness, how they respond to stimuli, generally the mental processes that would classify someone as his or herself.
[v] I am