010_The apples of your mind's eye
Here are the three images that preceded my first post. If you’ve read the other posts, they should seem pretty familiar by now, but so far we haven’t seen them like this.
In the case of 想 think about, the Canjeez 木 tree and 目 eye are side by side. But here, I have arranged the three items vertically, with “close” things at the bottom and “distant” things at the top. The tree is “out there” and in colour to help us remember that in some sense it’s a “real” thing. The heart is “in here”. And the eye is doing the Hokey Cokey, partly “in” and partly “out”.
It’s an obvious point, perhaps, but the heart cannot see the tree. Only the eye can. And remember that the eye stands for any of our senses.
First of all, we notice the tree. But why are we noticing it? In this case because an image received by the mind’s eye has prompted a comparison with images in memory. Soon (as in a fraction of a second), a match is returned to the mind’s eye.
I’ll use a triangle to represent the attention of the mind’s eye being drawn to the tree. The base of the triangle can be thought of as inputs from “out there” on one side being tallied with inputs from “in here” on the other side.
To make it easier to picture this, I’m going to pull part of the mind’s eye out to one side of the vertical column:
This circle defines the universe of memory. It contains what we know about ourself and our life. It contains what we remember about ourself and our life. This circle contains our likes, dislikes, and various characteristics that have been part of our identity since birth.
Memory reacts to the image that we receive and returns a matching response. But it is not an identical match. The image that comes back from memory includes something we like to eat. What is it? Let’s take a closer look:
An apple. We have a happy memory of eating a delicious apple from a tree that looked just like this one.
Does this tree have an edible apple? We pay attention to the tree in order to answer our question. We are looking at the tree with a specific goal in mind: eating an apple.
The tree illustration below has an angle shape at top left and at bottom right. Think of these shapes as the thumb and forefinger of each hand framing the tree, as if you were preparing to film it. Our attention is locked onto the tree:
Now we zoom in. We pay closer attention to the tree, scanning its branches:
We want to compare this new image with a reference image in memory, so let’s add a second set of “framing fingers”. One set is for the zoomed-in tree “out there” and the other set represents our focus on the image of the zoomed-in tree “in here” (in the circle, on the right side of the vertical column). These two sets of framing fingers create a square:
Now let’s pull this part of the mind’s eye out to the other side of the vertical column, so that we can see everything more clearly:
The square, on the left, is our interface with the world. It is a space for making sense of items “out there”.
The circle, on the right, contains the image retrieved from memory. This is what we are looking for: an apple to eat.
The triangle, in the middle, is where we tally inputs from “out there” with inputs from “in here”.
We scan every bough of the tree, but no joy. No apple. Before long, though, we notice another apple tree. We repeat the process. And this time…
Ringo!
I’m not suddenly recalling a Beatle. “Ringo” is the Japanese word for “apple” and it just occurred to me that it rhymes with “bingo”. (At my age, weak wordplay is strong entertainment.)
Now we are ready to take the next step (#005) as we move towards our goal of eating an apple.
The whole process started with one tree reminding us of another tree. Memory was activated in response to an incoming image of something that might be valuable.
As I wrote previously, nothing about this process is specific to human behaviour. What is uniquely human is our ability to describe it.
This time, we have used a few simple shapes to visualise the reality distilled in the Canjeez 想 think about.
Might we be able to use the same shapes to visualise the reality distilled in the Canjeez 音 sound, 意 mind, and 憶 memory?
Hold my beer.