I used to have so much trouble recalling the word "paisley". I could see the image of the pattern in my mind's eye, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what the squiggly beasties were collectively called. If I had a dollar for every time I tried to look it up by searching under "curlicue patterns" or the like, I'd be at least somewhat richer. Now, it's no problem. I can call up that name any time I "want to" -- but "wanting" to remember something that we had not been thinking about? How is that even possible? Remembering to remember something?
We are not the masters of our thoughts. On the contrary, we are at their mercy. We cannot deliberately generate a particular thought, out of the mental blue, whenever we "want to" -- rather, the thought happens to us. That would imply we must somehow have been thinking about thinking about it already. How could we want to remember something, if we had not been thinking of it already? But what does that mean? How or why does the wish to remember something -- not the thing itself, mind you, but the pre-recall desire to try and recall it -- suddenly pop into our heads? You might say "Oh, some stray sensory stimulus must have reminded us of ___"; but consider -- once I was certain of my mastery of the name "paisley", I actually counted the number of times I successfully recalled "paisley" in one day. Seven times. How or why did I conceive the wish to recall "paisley" that many times, unless at some unconscious level I had been thinking of it all along? But that seems weirdly paradoxical somehow... being unaware of continuously thinking about "paisley"?
No comments:
Post a Comment