Thinking in Pictures

The magazine Nautilus has a series on Consciousness this month. I was drawn to an article titled The Kekule Problem by Cormac McCarthy. The late Friedrich August Kekule was a famous organic chemist, while Cormac McCarthy is not a chemist of any sort, as far as I know. Kekule is known for his elucidations of chemical structure. He was also a pioneer in building the field known as theoretical chemistry (I’m closely related as a computational chemist). But he is best known for elucidating the structure of benzene, in a Eureka moment, by dreaming of a snake eating its own tail. At least that’s how the story goes.

Where did Language come from? That’s the root question McCarthy is attempting to answer. He has an intriguing and speculative hypothesis, rooted in how the unconscious “thinks”, not in words but in pictures. This he calls the Kekule Problem. McCarthy begins with a question: “Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak with us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures?”

We think that we think in words, but McCarthy suggests that the “actual process of thinking… is an unconscious affair.” Language is a very useful tool in posing problems and explaining them, asking questions and answering them, but it is a sign-posting tool – one that we use as a breadcrumb to mark our trail. McCarthy discusses evolutionary ideas of language, making comparisons to other biological evolutionary processes. But he still feels that nagging questions remain, perhaps even ones that cannot quite be put into words.

Could dreams be the gateway into the process? McCarthy writes: “Of the known characteristics of the unconscious its persistence is among the most notable. Everyone is familiar with repetitive dreams. Here the unconscious may well be imagined to have more than one voice: He’s not getting it, is he? No. He’s pretty thick. What do you want to do? I don’t know. Do you want to try using his mother? His mother is dead. What difference does that make?” This is, of course, a caricature personifying the unconscious speaking in a language and using words. But McCarthy is a writer, and that’s how he communicates this idea to us. Although if we were in Star Trek world, perhaps a Vulcan mind-meld may achieve the wordless communication.

As to the evolution of language: “[Language] would begin with the names of things. After that would come descriptions of these things and descriptions of what they do. The growth of languages into their present shape and form—their syntax and grammar—has a universality that suggests a common rule. The rule is that languages have followed their own requirements. The rule is that they are charged with describing the world. There is nothing else to describe.”

I’d like to ask John McWhorter what he thinks about this. Three weeks ago I read The Language Hoax, which, in my opinion, thoroughly and successfully debunks the popular and speculative versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. An example of such Whorfian thinking is that if a language has different words for the color blue, speakers of that language physically perceive blues differently. Thanks to The Arrival movie, sci-fi has run with this idea and created a masterful narrative of dreams, aliens, and the blending of the conscious and unconscious in a time-travel story. It’s very clever and very effective. McWhorter discusses why such ideas are so popular despite evidence against them, and his book was written before the movie was released. He has an even greater uphill task now.

McCarthy discusses the idea that the unconscious “thinks” or narrates in pictures. Pictures have the advantage of simplicity-in-complexity. A picture is rich in structure and content, and can potentially be recalled in their entirety much more easily than an essay of a thousand words. “The log of knowledge or information contained in the brain of the average citizen is enormous. But the form in which it resides is largely unknown. You may have read a thousand books and be able to discuss any one of them without remembering a word of the text.” The unconscious also resembles a parable, a tool for teaching and learning; it requires the conscious to chew and churn over to learn its secrets. Is this why oracles and prophets receive their knowledge in dreams?

I’ve been thinking a lot about pictures lately. They are indispensable, in my opinion to grasping the unseen world of chemistry at the molecular level. The representations are artificial in the sense that they represent models we can see and touch to get a “feel” for how chemistry works. Videos add a dynamic layer of representation – crucial for chemistry unless you’re at zero kelvin. Even then, the atoms still “move”. It seems fitting that pictures and representations help us handle the cognitive load as we learn the “language” of chemistry. Imagine trying to learn chemistry in a purely narrative text. I’m not sure I could.

But the image of the molecule is not the thing-in-itself. It simply provides a facet, a signpost, a breadcrumb on the trail. Kekule’s idea of the ring isn’t exactly what the pi-electrons are doing in benzene. We don’t really no what the electrons are doing, but we no they are delocalized, and we can measure a ring current. In General Chemistry, we teach students how to draw Lewis structures of molecules including their resonance structures. It is difficult to describe exactly what a set of “good” resonance structures represents – the true structure is not exactly the average of the set, even though I tell the students to sort-of-think in this way, at least when we discuss properties such as bond lengths, formal charges, and dipoles.

Perhaps magical spell-casting power is mediated through pictures. I’ve speculated about this, at least in terms of chemistry. The words themselves are perhaps simply an anchoring channel. They do not need to be verbalized, but maybe a word acts as a signpost in the organization of mental-thought power. Maybe thinking in pictures should be a key curricular piece in a Hogwarts education. I recommend “Arts for the Magical Arts”! My personal challenge (likely to remain unfulfilled): Can I draw a picture to represent the thousand words in this essay?