Well I don’t know about the second one but I was deffinately dazed and I’m deffinately bruised and scraped and damaged.
I crashed my bike earlier, turned a corner on a rainy road and there was a drain cover not flat with the road, my front wheel hit it and jumped a mile into the oncoming traffic , then my back wheel hit it and went spinning into my foot which had gone down onto the road to try and prevent a mad dash under the wheels of a lorry. My throat went down onto the edge of my handle bar and one thigh slid along the road onto the pavement, going at right angles to where the bike wanted to go which meant it hooked my other foot into the back wheel, pulled itself across me (most notably across my bellybutton piercing) and was anchored unstably by the aforementioned foot stuck in the wheel.
Traffic seemed to be moving about an inch away from the handle bars and my thoat was trying to choke itself…wierdly enough though I didn’t feel much till I moved and all my brain did was blast Cerys Matthews at me. It’s like it turned itself to ‘radio’ mode, no thoughts, no pictures, impressions, words or feelings just an audible Cerys singing…no belting out ‘Day-ey-eyezed, ByootiFUL AND BRUISED!`. I now have a perfect heart shaped pinky-purple bruise on my throat, just above where my collarbone has the nobble, above my breast bone. Which is wierd because my handle bar edge is round, not heart shaped.
It is bizarre how we think. I had this conversation with Mixed Bag last night. He’s actually tri-lingual as opposed to me having a semi-decent grasp of three languages, we’re both learning our fourth language however. And suddenly we’re getting a real understanding that people don’t think in English or French or whatever language it is that they speak. I know that this probably sounds a bit dumb not to have really realised this by this point in my life but I just haven’t noticed it. When I think, I think in concepts, sounds, smells, ideas and then I grab the nearest word and vocalise it (in my head obviously). And sometimes the French is closer to the concept in my head than the English, or the Spanish or Japanese or whatever.
I know my Favourite Uncle has been telling me forever that language shapes the way we think but I’m only just getting it. You think in concepts and then grab the nearest word but if you only know one language then there might not be quite the right word to grab and you grab the word that you think you mean and soon you can’t quite grasp the other concept because there isn’t a word for it. English works as a second language but there are too many concepts that it doesn’t cover, so it ony works as a main language if it continues to absorb other words from different languages.
We think in a sea of flavours. And sometimes I hear voices in my head 🙂 Luckily Cerys Matthews is fairly harmless I think.
This is something I’ve had to explain to people for years. Although I do have thoughts in both Vietnamese, and English, I would say my actual thoughts are in a third "language" somehow. It’s a language of no words, just the purer ideas, that we filter through language. I’ve always noticed how certain languages tend to filter out different things, and certain things would pass through easily in one language, but in another get stuck. Kind of a complicated idea, but so far its the best metephor I’ve ever thought of.
More (very) vague memories from Psychology:
Some people do think in language, if I recall, while others do it like you, in concepts.
I think it may be something to do with the whole which-side-of-the-brain-is-dominant thing, that decides whether you’re of a creative or technical mindset.
I find I’m mainly conceptual, but with subtitles.