Brain Food #379
When something pops to mind
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Do you ever wake up and have random words appear in your head?
If so, you are not alone. And these words, in fact, are not random at all.
In psychology, this phenomenon is formally known as involuntary memory, and more colloquially described as a “mind-pop”. It is when fragments of knowledge - a song, a word, an image - suddenly manifest into one’s consciousness.
More importantly, mind-pops are likely to occur when doing a habitual activity. It is when we let our guards down, so to speak, that we give the mind some room to roam.
In such moments, our brain is trying to tell us something, perhaps to bring back a memory that is important, or to help us make a connection between seemingly unrelated facts. Do we ignore it or follow it?
More on memory, and how language attempts to represent it, tomorrow.
Blue Rubrics, by William Kentridge, is an art piece that depicts the fleeting nature of floating words:
“The phrases are caught somewhere between reading and looking. It’s where language hovers at the edge of meaning. It is language where, rather than clarifying things, it becomes a series of riddles without a solution. They have enough meaning to crawl into your head, they produce a series of associations.