Elizabeth's Story — The Accompanying Vision

How insights can arrive in visual form

Elizabeth: There was one last part of the stone-to-jello screen experience that I haven’t yet described. I explained that the phrase I inserted into the Thanksgiving scene in my uneditable, calcified manuscript declared that I am someone who needs to speak. But, in addition, when I was typing those words, I saw myself speaking them. I spoke the words out loud, but not to my mother. Instead I spoke them to the reader.

Barbara: You had a literal visual image of this?

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Elizabeth: Yes. In my mind’s eye, I pictured the Thanksgiving scene I’d written as being on a stage. We were all sitting around the dining room table like actors sitting in our places and speaking our lines, and I was sitting there with everyone else. But a large audience was watching that drama from slightly below in the orchestra, and I was simultaneously watching, too, but from behind the back curtain at the rear of the stage. I was backstage observing both the scene being enacted and the audience, none of whom knew me. So I spoke directly to them, because I felt I needed to convince them. 

Barbara: Of what?

Elizabeth: I wanted them to trust that I was telling the truth, that my rendition of events was true.

When I was typing in the parenthetical remark, I saw myself pulling apart the back curtain, sticking out my head, and loudly whispering the line to the audience, “I’m a person who, in all other situations, needs to get in her two cents.” 

I’m just now realizing that parentheses — (.......) — look like two curtains being drawn apart! Basically, I was saying to the audience, to the reader, “I’m here, the person behind the play, the writer, an adult who can get things done, who has what to say, I’m here!”

Barbara: In essence you were saying, “Don’t believe my mother’s version!” 

Elizabeth: Exactly. I am not that silenced, repressed, pathetic person you see on the stage. 

Barbara: So, you pull apart the curtains, and you say to the audience. “This is who I really am.”

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Elizabeth: Yes, but also, “Don’t worry. By the end of this book, you will see that I survived.” 

When I am writing, I’m very aware of wanting readers to identify with me and to come along with me in the story. But when I was writing my memoir, I worried that they wouldn’t want to share the mindset of someone ineffectual and voiceless. And also because my life has been privileged — I had a nanny! Connecting with the reader is so important to me because my whole drive to write is to express my thoughts and to be heard. I want to define myself (in opposition to the way my mother saw me) and to be connected to others. As I’m saying this, I’m noticing how primal it is! 

Barbara: It’s so interesting that the idea that led to the ending of your writer’s block was accompanied by a visual image. 

Elizabeth: It occurs to me now that the phrase itself was visual. It’s not that the words came to me but that the image of them in parentheses came to me. A parenthetical remark is something slipped into a sentence or paragraph, and right after the image appeared, I had the impulse to insert the phrase.

Barbara:  There is a famous story that illustrates a solution to a problem appearing through a visual image — discovery of the benzene ring-structure, in the 1800s. Chemists knew there were six carbon atoms in a benzene molecule, but they didn’t know how these atoms were arranged. It was a puzzle. The solution came to August Kekule, when he fell into a reverie in front of the fire. He saw molecules dancing about and a snake biting its tail. Immediately he realized the solution. Benzene was a ring of carbon atoms. 

Elizabeth: I know that problem-solving can happen during REM sleep and often does. I’ve gone to sleep with a problem I’m struggling with and woken up with the answer. But dreams come in images, don’t they? 

Barbara: Well, I just want to correct a few generalizations you’ve made. While we do generally dream in images, not all dreams are during REM sleep and not all dreams are visual. For instance, think of dreams in which you just have a sense of someone’s presence. Plus, solutions don’t necessarily come in visual form. 

The brain is always processing information, and that information comes in many forms, including visceral, visual, spatial, olfactory, tactile, plus, of course, auditory, which includes language. That said, a large portion of the brain is devoted to vision — about 25% — and humans do rely most on visual information. Not just you! After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. 

Any one image contains an enormous amount of information, transmitted all at once. And images can be symbolic. So, when Kekule experienced the dream-image of a snake biting its own tail, it meant something to him. It was a ring. A ring was the solution to the problem he had been puzzling over so intensely. It was a “special delivery” message in the language of the brain. But it was a clue he had to comprehend the meaning of.

When you saw yourself peeking between the curtains and whispering the words in parentheses, you were receiving a clue you had to interpret. You perceived that this image had deep meaning. You sensed that the image was metaphorically you intruding your current-day self into the Thanksgiving of yesteryear, and defying your mother’s gag order, and speaking up, and trying to convince the audience to trust you. 

Elizabeth: But I don’t see the image as a clue needing interpretation. The list of things you mentioned I perceived as one with the image. I didn’t need to reflect and to find the meaning. The image, like the metaphoric image of the stone screen, contained the information in itself. 

Barbara: Well, while you may have recognized all those meanings at once and while it felt like they were obviously contained in the image, I’d argue that the recognition of the meaning was a separate process. The brain produced the image without your awareness, and you immediately recognized the multitude of meanings it contained. So it seemed to you that it was one process. But I would say that different aspects of brain function were involved. An image itself is mainly produced by the visual cortex. But conceptual thinking about the image involves higher-level thinking being applied to that image. 

The proof of this is that you only just recognized that the parentheses look like the parted curtains! You’re still deconstructing/analyzing the layers of meaning in that image.

Elizabeth: OK. You win!

Barbara: And, by the way, in contrast to you, I do not have internal mental images at all (other than in dreams)! We are so remarkably different in this way. There’s a spectrum in terms of the vividness of internal visualizations people. have, and you and I are at the two opposite ends.

Elizabeth: For a change of pace, next week, why don’t we explore the extremely different ways our brains work in this regard?