Floaters
I liken my experience to that of the 17th-century Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who looked through his new-fangled microscope and discovered microbes swimming in a drop of rainwater. Only in this case the “microbes” swimming around in my field of vision were inside my own eyeball. I had recently undergone cataract surgery, which kicked up a lot of the detritus that settles over time in the bottom of your eye. My ophthalmologist compared it to what happens when you shake a glass snow globe. The shadows cast by those tiny filaments were what I was seeing as they swam in formation across my line of sight. My doctor assured me these floaters, as they are called, are essentially harmless, albeit annoying.
It occurs to me floaters are a lot like thoughts. Our thoughts arrive unbidden and drift through our minds much like those annoying little specks and squiggles that dance before our eyes. One difference is that we do not observe thoughts the way we see floaters. We see “through” our thoughts to whatever it is they are pointing to. Floaters are clearly seen as intruders, whereas we take ownership of our thoughts, identifying them as some manifestation of “me.” Rarely are we able to distance ourselves enough from the process of thinking to study thoughts as a pure phenomenon.
Where exactly do thoughts come from? Scientific understanding is still fairly rudimentary on this score. Most research to date has occurred within the framework of thought itself, rather than from the outside looking in. Obviously, neuroscientists can’t just peer into the brain the way my ophthalmologist peers into my eyeball. Brain scans are one approach, but all they can really do is tell you which parts of the brain light up when the test subject reports a thought.
The prevailing theory on the origins of “inner speech” was put forward in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist. He believed the little voice in our heads develops in tandem with learning to talk. A small child begins talking out loud to himself, which eventually becomes internalized. Vygotsky’s theory is supported by neuroimaging that shows the same areas of the brain are activated by inner speech and talking out loud.
What about people who claim to hear voices inside their heads that they don’t recognize as their own? This can be symptomatic of severe mental disturbance, especially schizophrenia, although others have reported similar occurrences, usually fleetingly. Psychologists call these phenomena “auditory verbal hallucinations,” and hypothesize that they are simply inner speech that the hearer doesn’t recognize as self-generated. Either way, the same speech areas of the brain are activated when it happens.
If auditory hallucinations are neurologically indistinguishable from regular inner speech, we can draw one of two conclusions. Either we wrongly identify those other voices in our heads as belonging to someone else, or we wrongly identify the more familiar voice as somehow belonging to me. I don’t want to push this too far for fear of being mistaken for one of those people who believe aliens or the KGB has set up shop inside their heads. But the truth is we don’t really know where thoughts originate. They sure sound like they are coming from inside my head, but then so does the music I listen to through earbuds.
It is said that one indicator of sanity is to ask whether you control your thoughts or the thoughts control you. With all due respect, I have found even in my sanest moments that any control of my thoughts is at best provisional. Many spiritual traditions have developed meditation techniques to help you gain mastery over your thoughts. These can certainly help. But I have found my thoughts, like those annoying floaters in my eye, tend to show up uninvited and wander where they will. In the end, the best that can be said for them is they appear to have a mind of their own.
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