The old-school Rolodex, invented in 1956, carried a maximum of 400 file cards. Current models have kept to this limit. All the cards are mounted on a wheel. If the wheel were somehow set to rotate steadily without human intervention then its cards would drop alphabetically into view one by one.
The rotary desk-top device was designed as a data store and memory surrogate but in its capacity as a provider of discrete, framed packets of information it can be seen as a crude thinking machine – the slow-witted cousin of, for example, the punch card data sorting system, introduced by IBM in 1928, that would evolve, under the auspices of Bletchley Park, into decryption machines. The much earlier Jacquard loom, patented in 1804, had seen the punch card used to accelerate the production of complex fabric patterns.
The Rolodex accessed by human intervention i.e. its normal use, delivers something that superficially resembles planned, deliberate, focused, step-by-step thought. Such a thing probably doesn’t exist but an enormous amount of effort to produce it is continuously applied to such a project by our species.
Our experience of thought is generally of a streaming process in which the separation of the stream into component units is not deemed essential unless, for example, it is considered that a problem might be solved by selecting and rearranging some of these units into a plan, an explanation, a theory etc. By clustering one specialised array of units – contact details – into an outsourced collection, the Rolodex eases a small part of the sorting process. It’s a list on a wheel. It does not think, it serves the thinker.
Of the many mental activities not taken into account by sophisticated computing devices, let alone rudimentary mechanical memory aids, is the business of sorting the material that, in human thought, is suppressed in order to achieve momentary focus. A significant category of mental activity is simply missing from the picture. Coders and their programmes cannot take into consideration more than a tiny fraction of factors that seem, like junk DNA, to have no functional significance. That, indeed, is the point of these single-minded devices.
In the case of the Rolodex it’s taken for granted that the other 399 available sets on the rotary wheel will not crowd in on the card you’re reading or that rogue cards will simply appear for a moment then vaporise.
In our everyday minds arise myriad mental effects, some of them thoughts, others thought-like, others mere wisps that vanish within moments of their arrival, routinely passing through consciousness and out the other side. These are routinely ignored. They must be ignored. We all learn how to do this. Some can do it better than others. The Rolodex, in its modest way, does it for you. The device does not hold myriad filecards that might attempt to emulate the capacity of the mind. It would be at least as big as a small county if it did. The desk would have to be situated inside it somehow. It would be widely regarded as a storehouse of utterly useless information.
In the case of the Rolodex you fill the filecards one by one and clip them onto the wheel. It becomes a citadel of unlikely purity. It cannot dealphabetise itself and it will not generate novelty. It has, therefore, a comforting quality if comfort is to be found in packets of data that arise in single file. It was not, of course, designed to do any more than augment memory and organise data sets.
Staying with it for a little longer, however, imagining a modestly enormous device – a London Eye of a filing system, loaded with numberless bits of information and monitored by a human observer – then, over time, as its great wheel rotated, what appeared at first to be a succession of discrete, unrelated cards would appear intermittently to form classes, clusters and themes. Obviously this would only occur if the human observer were to attribute significance to any combinations and sequences that might crop up. Even if a pattern could be discerned it would probably be construed as unworthy of remark; in the genetic sense, a ‘sport’ but not one with desirable characteristics.
On the other hand, the observer need not find any significances at all, they might simply regard links as inevitable and unimportant.
It’s tempting to compare these discounted instances to the contents of daydreaming – a state of mind in which thinking has no apparent purpose, it just ticks along. It feels like it could go anywhere. (If the thinker has this thought during a daydream the daydream will abruptly terminate.) The daydreamer may not even know they are daydreaming. So little value is conferred that the paying of attention itself is suspended. You could almost claim that most daydreaming is lost as soon as it is found insofar as awareness of the activity is largely retrospective – you realise you’ve been doing it and within moments all that was air is vacuum.
Daydreams often strike us – if we can manage to assess them at all – as random successions of thoughts having no connection to each other. We tell ourselves, perhaps, that this is what unfocused thinking is. It may be the case, however, that the reduced attention paid to daydreams facilitates the emergence of another class of thought, one that is as worthy of consideration as the purposeful organising that shapes much conventionally motivated thinking.
With daydreaming you are off-piste. One moment you’re pursuing a thought and the next moment there is no pursuit. One thing has led to another. But you didn’t particularly notice. You wouldn’t be able to retrace your steps.
Daydreaming is always off-piste. It cannot be initiated and it is not possible to detect the moment at which the conscious pursuit of a thought is suspended, either at the moment when this occurs or in retrospect. The moments that ensue cannot usually be counted, even if they were separable into countable units, which they may not be. It is conceivable that they could go on for hours. But they don’t. Something breaks the flow and the piste is restored within a split second. You may be able to remember where you were before the interruption – gazing out of a bus window, maybe, thinking about something more or less purposefully. But it is, alas, impossible to recall what you were thinking just a split second before going off-piste. If it were possible then you could examine this pre-off-piste thought in order to see the extent to which it might have either enabled or fallen foul of the daydreamed thought that followed it.
If you could do this then you could identify the characteristics of an off-piste enabling thought and deliberately shape other thoughts in such a way that within moments of thinking them you were off-piste. Such a proposal only makes sense if one subscribes to the notion that going off-piste is worth it even if you can’t remember what you were daydreaming about.
The goal is to become capable of lucid off-piste daydreaming. It is not the case that everyone needs to do this. Some will find it useful however.
The tissue is thin. Think of those times when you’re reading drowsily. Someone has been trying to get three lengths of wood to fit in the side of a wall. This really needs to be done. A group of people is still waiting for the arrangements to be concluded. They are standing near the wood.
Excuse me for a moment, I nodded off.
In so doing I dropped into an ongoing situation featuring wood lengths. But now I’m back, drowsily reading whatever I was reading before I dropped off. I can just about make out the tail feathers of the last moments spent within the daydream before I snapped out of it. Something to do with wood. The tissue is so thin. Within a second the sentences printed on the page had disappeared and were replaced with something that apparently had nothing whatsoever to do with what I was reading. The absence of conventional sense in the thoughts and images that ensue is spellbinding. It feels like they could stream indefinitely. There appear to be no constraints other than impending sleep or someone dropping a cooking implement next door.
It’s remarkable how thin the tissue is. We sometimes speak of our dreams with awe, as if we were honoured to be visited by these compressed, elusive packages of bad grammar. And even if we don’t improve the grammar thereby knocking some sense into the irruptions, they often tend to be memorable, if we remember them, despite their lack of legibility. Almost as if there were something irresistible about illegibility. And the thing is, these tricky items don’t actually require a tired or drowsy subject – they find the latter convenient certainly but it’s not as if you daydream only when you’re gazing out of the bus window or similar, you can be wide awake firing on all cylinders and all it takes, in this case, is the fact that there’s nothing much to do until you get to your destination. And next thing you know…
11/2024