Fumfer Physics 36: Proto-Thoughts, Context, and Memory Hooks

Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks whether it is naïve to look for a discrete “unit” of thought, given that thoughts vary in informational content and rarely arrive as neat sentences. Rick Rosner argues that language captures only a thin slice of cognition: perception, background knowledge, self-critique, and half-formed associations run in parallel as “proto-thoughts.” He uses the example of viewing a painting to show how sensory input and contextual inference accompany any sentence-like notion. Most thoughts, he adds, pass without leaving retrieval “hooks,” much like dreams. Without deliberate encoding—or a later contextual trigger—mental material vanishes, because recall depends on activating the right associative patterns.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is it a naïve argument to try to identify a discrete, basic constituent of a thought? We have talked about this before, but this is a different framing. Different thoughts can have different informational content, which means the amount of information—or “brain units”—they involve can vary.

When we talk about a thought, we often imagine something fully or partially formed. One way to define an idea might be as whatever neural network brings something into conscious awareness. However, there is also the whole thought itself.

When people talk about thoughts, they usually describe them with words, which constrains discussion by turning thoughts into sentences. People say, “I thought this,” and then provide a sentence. However, that is not really what thoughts look like. You may think of components of a sentence, but you are also experiencing many other things while forming the thought.

Those other elements are also thoughts, or partial thoughts, or proto-thoughts. At the very least, understanding a thought requires the surrounding mental context in which it arises.

Rick Rosner: If you are standing in front of a painting and thinking, artists in the seventeenth century really liked fat asses, that sentence is only a small part of what is happening mentally.

At the same time, you are seeing the painting. You are also thinking that it is not a very original observation. You are not fully articulating it, but you have a background sense that this is common knowledge—that people have noticed this before, that body fat once signalled prosperity. All of that accompanies the sentence-like thought.

You have a collection of incomplete, contextual, semi-thoughts running alongside the main one, which may not even fully crystallize. If you are talking with other people or paying attention to something else, you might register the bodies in the painting and think, Yes, historically that makes sense, but the thought never fully forms into language.

A lot is bubbling up. The neural code for asses will certainly activate—enough neurons associated with “butt” light up. You are clearly seeing a butt, or two butts, or many butts, depending on the painting. You are thinking about butts—but you are also thinking about many other things at the same time.

People like Marcel Proust tried to describe this stream of consciousness. I have never actually read him, but that was the project. Writers like Nicholson Baker have produced books that spend a hundred pages describing an hour or two of someone’s mental life.

It cannot be expressed as a series of sentences, because that is not how thoughts unfold.

Jacobsen: Right, most thoughts are trivial nonsense.

Rosner: Most thoughts pass through us. We have them—or half have them—and we do not even remember them, because they do not trigger a chain of further thinking. It is like dreams. If you wake up and do not actively try to remember a dream, you usually will not, because there are not enough hooks to retrieve it later.

Unless you build hooks by writing them down, the dream disappears.

I had a Kimmel dream last night. I often dream that I am back at Kimmel. Nobody really wants me there. I am not getting paid. They are reluctantly letting me hang out and submit ideas, and I am hoping to get rehired. I have that dream a lot.

In last night’s version, I do not remember most of it. What I remember is a sense of sadness, because it has been so long since I worked there, and because they had installed new wood panelling. In the dream, the room I was in had wood panelling, and I remember thinking, That is new.

That is basically all I remember, because I did not sit down afterward and try to reconstruct the rest. I have had enough Kimmel dreams to recognize them when they happen.

I remember the wood panelling because I am currently in the one room of my house that has wood panelling. Usually, though, you do not remember dreams at all. Occasionally, something happens hours later that triggers a memory—some feature of the environment grabs a hook from the dream and pulls it back into awareness. However, most of the time, that does not happen.

You usually forget dreams completely because the hooks are hard to grab. Dreams are structured in such a strange way. They contain so many scrambled elements of your thinking that it is unlikely anything in your waking life will activate enough of those elements to pull the dream back up.

Retrieval depends on contextual association. You have to activate enough of the right neural patterns for something to signify and return to awareness.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.