I know a scientist who plays interior Tetris, rearranging proteins in his dreams. I have a friend who thinks during yoga, and another who browses and compares mental photographs. Ask someone how she thinks and you might learn that she talks to herself silently, or cogitates visually, or moves through mental space by traversing physical space. I’m scarcely alone in having a mental “style,” or believing I do. I’m an inveterate talker, a professional writer, and a lifelong photographer-a heady person who’s determined to get things out of my head, to a place where I can apprehend them. My minimalist mental theatre has shaped my life. I sometimes go for a swim just to talk to myself far from shore, where no one can hear me. When that fails, I pace my empty house, muttering.
If no interlocutor is available, I write. My wife, consequently, is the other half of my brain. Thinking happens as a kind of pressure behind my eyes, but I need to talk out loud in order to complete most of my thoughts. Blankness, too: I see hardly any visual images, rarely picturing things, people, or places. (Remember the milk! Ten more reps!) On the whole, though, silence reigns. My head isn’t entirely word-free like many people, I occasionally talk to myself in an inner monologue. It was happening even then, as I talked with my friend: I was articulating thoughts that had been unspecified yet present in my mind. At the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental cloud. (“How can he be thinking about nothing?” she’d ask me.) I’ve always been on Team Dad I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. Later, describing the moment to a friend, I recalled how, when I was a kid, my mother had often asked my father, “What are you thinking?” He’d shrug and say, “Nothing”-a response that irritated her to no end. But I hadn’t known what the thought would be until I spoke it. Where had they come from? Evidently, I’d had a thought-that was why I’d raised my hand. Then the teacher called on me, I opened my mouth, and words emerged. I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room, discussing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or possibly “The Waves.” I raised my hand to say something and suddenly realized that I had no idea what I planned to say. I was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed.