Landscape Within Landscape: Thought as Topography and Topology
What does it feel like when you think? Over the years, I've become more aware of a tactile sense of space that the act of thinking opens in my head: internal shapes that move about a landscape. Is it just a product of being synaesthetically suggestible, or is there something more to the idea of a mental geography that maps onto our understanding of analogy and place?
This is my attempt at articulating a feeling I've had in my mind since I was a boy.
The question of where thought takes place is most often raised by teenagers between the hours of 2 am and 5 am, by children between the ages of five and seven (‘sometimes I think inside my head, sometimes my thoughts are in my arms and in my stomach’), and by philosophers across intervals of centuries, off and on. Aristotle wrote that the heart was the centre of all thought and that the brain was just an organ tasked with cooling all the ‘hot-blooded’ emotions that would sometimes bubble over.
Most days, we don’t give the question much airtime - we think, and that’s enough. It feels like it’s happening in our head, probably because we know that our brain makes it all real. For many of us, we orient to the world through our eyes and our vestibular system (our inner ears), and our mouth produces words that represent the ideas coming from the thought factory on our shoulders: so, this is where consciousness naturally feels like it is located. In the theatre of our skull.
That certainly resonates to me. This is where thought feels like it is located - but then, what is the actual feeling of thought? Does it have a tactile resonance, a sense of movement? A geography, a geometry? It does for me, stronger than visual cues or other potential synaesthetic overlaps. It is something I have been increasingly aware of over the decades, in my own head, but only recently able to articulate. Importantly, I feel like I can think better and with more clarity and health when I pay attention to the relief of shapes being cast and recast in my head. I’ll tell you what I mean.
Preface: Spherical Rubber, Soft Light
For me, thought has a feeling. It carves out negative space from the dust of consciousness that blooms on the stage behind our eyes. It manifests as a shape that expands, contorts and becomes landscape within our internal empire. To think is to be a cartographer of a mental geography that mirrors the panorama of daylit trajectories we navigate across our waking lives.
This is thought as both topography and topology. There is no more accurate phenomenology of the experience of thinking for me than recognising the feeling of spherical rubber, made from soft light, fold into a torus in the middle of my head, stretching out and doubling back on itself as a cross surface that becomes a city on one side and a pastoral sheet of memories that rapidly reel back in and become thoughts the size of five-cent coins, and then a bus, and then a hill that becomes a declivity into darkness as my thinking stops and some background buffering gives time for the shape to reform, a node facing due north in the medically designated centre of my mind.
One: Nature’s Cognitive Mirror
As a child I can remember the feeling of sitting in my bedroom, closing my eyes and having thoughts - I used to think about walking along telegraph wires during sunset - that had a physical resonance to them. The thoughts felt like the inside of my head was a balloon expanding and filling up the room. Then, the thought would shift - a memory would enter, or I would plan a game - and the feeling of thought would become like a plate in some midground space between my nose and my shoulders.
In my early thirties, I would tell my wife, ‘I need to start the day by walking through the city, to feel my thoughts fill the streets’, which I would suggest is a similar sensation for anybody who feels cramped up in their house and needs to get outside to see the sky, or for those who live near the ocean and are able to stand in front of it and feel a sense of expansive potential. The link between physical landscapes and thought is as old as poetry - likely, the birth of poetry - as ideas were linked with clouds (now, more than ever, since this is where our digital brains live), stories with rivers, accomplishments and challenges with mountains, freedom with flight (above cities, above fields).
The use of metaphor to reflect the subjective human experience against the curtain of nature’s stage is not, to my mind, a curious path that our linguistics developed. I’d suggest it is the very material of thought, this sublimation of mind and matter, one into the other, subject as object, that gives form to consciousness: this is the feeling of thought, an internal architecture of meaning, of light, that occupies a geography in our heads reflective of the shapes, colours and textures we see around us. It is a synaesthetic sensation in so far as it mirrors the forms we are capable of feeling.
Two: Internal Windows Rattling
When we think about thinking, we often focus on content rather than form. But what if the shape of thought - its volume, texture, spatial dimensions - is just as present as what we're thinking about? What if a thought about mathematics isn't just thematically different from a thought about love but structurally and ontologically distinct? While I am on a walk and think about a friend's face, I have a rubber battery shape in my mind that flattens out slowly like a petal becoming warm. Then, it becomes a wide tent structure at the same instant I conjure their voice and remember a funny joke they told as a teenager. I do not see the tent; I feel it in my mind. It feels like the relief of a tent, the physical echo of a shape within the dark mesh space of no vision (closed eyes).
Philosopher David Pitt published a book last year called The Quality of Thought. In it, he makes a case for the phenomenology of thought in a way that seems true to me - thought has a feeling; it is not just a frictionless stream of symbols and language and semi-transparent images that glide on without a broader, describable experiential quality. There is a viscerality to thought that gives flesh to idealism.
Friedrich Nietzsche described thoughts' impact on him, within him, as a train passing by and rattling the windows of his interior. Thoughts were always physical for Nietzsche - ‘I am affected by my thoughts as others are by their passions… a thought, even a possibility, can shatter me; my courage arises in the freshness of my thought; my vitality pours into me with my blood; even my muscles celebrate a feast’.
Three: Place After Place
When Australian author Gerald Murnane reads Thomas Hardy, he reads the description Hardy has penned of a hill. Then, he wonders what lies behind that hill - not in an imagined sense, of some fanciful daydream of a fictional township or a field shadowed by cloud cover that might exist behind the hill in Hardy’s story, but rather where is that hill within the mental geography of Murnane’s subjectivity, and where does it exist in relation to the other hills Murnane has read or thought about: this is memory not as chronology but as space.
In a letter Murnane wrote me last year, he said 'what we call time is our confused perception of place after place’. When I think about what lies behind Hardy’s hill, I feel my thoughts hollow out a riverbank in some coordinate some ten or twenty kilometres behind a field W G Sebald once described a manor house occupying. I can travel from one to the next, or rather, there is a felt mental shape that carries the distance.
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse describes a competitive academic sport played between two people who face each other and conjure analogies. One player will bring up a phrase of music, and the other will find a relationship between the shape of the passage - a geometric pathway of counterpoint fifths in a Toccata by Bach - with the antithetical steps between historical periods exemplifying a theory of Hegel’s. A harmonious connection is made and is witnessed by the audience physically - the glass beads are tokens that represent the shape of thoughts; they illuminate the symbolic connections and the aesthetic feelings rendered. The act of thinking is explicitly experienced, and its beauty and complexity are what preserve human culture.
I’ve never seen the cognitive computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter reference Hermann Hesse, but it feels to me that Hofstadter’s central linguistic tenet - that all thoughts are analogies, that they can only exist as analogy, that the core property of any idea, any mental state, is one of analogy, of relationship, of mirroring - is a reasoned explication of Hesse’s game. So too of Murnane’s notion of ‘place after place’ - or, rather, ‘this place and its relationship with this other place’. Mental landscape as an analogy of our sense of the external world, one shaping the other. Behind Hardy’s hill is an analogy of a rise once traversed as a young one holding the hand of a parent during some infinite afternoon not in the past, but of a place.
Four: Analogy of Self
If a feeling of thinking is a geography of geometries shaping and reshaping inside our head, then the landscapes manifested are not a sign of intellectual capacity. Unlike other models of thought or intelligence, my approximation here is that a mental landscape of the interior would be experienced in an equal quality of range and shape across a variety of minds in the true sense of neurodiversity. A child would not experience a diminished plane of small thinking - their landscape would be as rich and bountiful as any adult who values the breadth and depth of their capacity to think. An individual who has sustained a traumatic brain injury would not furnish a topography with less peaks and valleys than a university professor lecturing on James Joyce, but rather the shapes and motions of their mental map would reach as far into the distance as any other mind, and as intimately curated to local fascinations of a nature that is not measurable on assessments or scales.
From this perspective, I look into the eyes of a baby and see not a mind waiting to grow and unfurl in a scaffold of academic mastery but a landscape already present with kilometre-wide smiles from parents and loved ones, the shape of the call of baby’s name transfiguring the scale of a musical motif first played down a laneway of yesterday and tomorrow, orienting itself to the potentials of a map not growing bigger by the day, or more accurate or populated with a greater density of thoughts, but a map inherently complete, reflecting the fully formed analogy of self.
Five: Impacting Geometry
What is the Kantian interface here, between the external trajectories of the world that our internal geography is mirrored against, and the manner in which the shape of our mental topography influences the attention we pay to the physical world, reconfiguring its orientation based on the movement of our interior? How much does the media landscape around us, the paradigms of the age, the menu of videos and spreadsheets we feed ourselves, impact the geometry we feel in our thoughts? Yes, we are born with an internal landscape of inherent quality, but how is it restructured by external forces into shapes that work for and against the capacity of our thoughts to travel?
After a day of emails, the shapes in my head are not swift and flourishing - they are flat and barely tangible, barely a shadow felt. Put me amongst the morning streets, holding a soft hand in mine, listening to the roof of the world rub against space and resonate a harmonic spread - now my mind is becoming expansive again. Wide sheets that flap out like a flag, becoming droplets that fractal and hold, a sense of shelves levitating and becoming bird-like. The medium is the message of the topology of the topography.
When Jaron Lanier first experimented with a virtual reality application involving a character walking around a town, there was a glitch whereby the hand of the body of the character grew too big, to the size of a football field. This, for him, was the real dawn of possibility for how technology could reimagine the proprioception of the human form - what is better, a virtual reality that mirrors the physical world, or one that distorts a strategic fragment of it to kick open the doors of perception?
This is the challenge that is visited upon us by artificial intelligence, too: how will interacting with a mirror, an analogy, of our human cognition, expand or contract our mental landscape? Having AI write poetry for us through the flat reduction of glass we slink our heads towards in the artificial light of some anonymous mid-morning is not going to fuel new geometries behind our eyes, but rather it’ll cement our reductions. However, if the posture of our dialogue with ambient computing can spin a dialogue with AI into new opportunities for executive functioning, new creative trajectories not previously considered, then the map will continue to stay true to the inherent malleability of neurodiversity we came packaged with.
Six: Thought Playlists
At the end of the day, I look forward to reclining on my bed, closing my eyes and choosing from a playlist of thoughts to sequence through. No visual stimulation, no auditory accompaniment other than the ambience of the world. I have a couple of thought playlists written out on a pad that I think through - here is one of them:
Walking through a multistory carpark with my wife some decade ago, looking over the city of Newcastle, the spires of the cathedral, the flat rooftops with party lights strung across clotheslines.
Eating at a table somewhere in Queensland, at seven years of age, at what may have been Grundy’s Entertainment Centre, hearing music and seeing a digital video loop for a television production company against a black starfield.
Looking out the ice-laced windows of a hotel room in the early morning, during the middle of winter, as a train carrying logs made its way through a weave of chimney smoke through a town in Tasmania.
Eating Spanish food with a mate down on the Central Coast, thinking about the topics we covered that night, how I wrote them down later that evening and into the early morning to fashion some prose.
As a teenager, sitting my bedroom with fifty tabs open on an internet browser, after having downloaded a Bomberman game emulation from a Warez site, as two friends arrive on their bikes to catch up and see what's happening.
Climbing the rocky ridgeline of beachscape and shale from Bar Beach to the Bogey Hole, swimming partway there, reclining on a rock near where a cormorant had settled, becoming one with the sun and stone.
Six is enough - that can take a good hour to strobe through. The written playlist next to my bed is much simpler: Carpark with T, Grundy’s, Winter Train, Los Dos Hombres, Bomberman, Beach. That is enough to trigger the sequence of thoughts that I visualise and think through, but the emphasis is less on the internal cinema of my mind - this is critically important - and much more, overwhelmingly more, on the feel of the thoughts as I bring the memories to mind. These are the shapes that form, the feeling of some internal movement of shadow, lightly pressed, of a gradient of tone that stretches sideways, becomes a circle, a balloon, a head within a head, an analogy of a place.
There is an ethical imperative here, I’m sure of it - for me, I want to preserve this feeling of thought, this attention and awareness of a quality of thought that may be quite different to yours, or it may resonate, or signal some other synaesthetic token of internal cognition, the composition of your own Glass Bead Game. Thought has forever been the most invisible part of our ontology, and now that we occupy a world of images and an abundance of language that can make our own linguistics feel minor beneath the acres of data storage units filling up every second, I am driven to once again turn inward, to look beneath the broadcast of information cast along telegraph lines and motorways into the cartography of avenues hewn from the centre of the mind outward, the irreplaceable shapes, the pressure applied to a gap that has travelled with you all this way. Spherical rubber, soft light, place after place after place.