Useless Theory #1

Here is the debut of Useless Theory Hour. I am calling it "hour" because it sounds more catchy than "blog" or "journal." This is when I take a concept, problem or idea and tell you how I think it works or how to solve it USING ABSOLUTELY NO SCIENTIFIC OR EVEN LOGICAL PROOF. And that is why these are useless theories. But I hope they are fun theories.

The theory I am going to talk about today is the theory of thought-space. I have coined thought-space to describe the physical dimension or realm in which our thoughts exist. We perceive the world in three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. But modern physics tells us that there exists the possibility for other dimensions. Imagine trying to wrap your mind around having another dimension of space and having your math teacher instruct you to draw a graph of a 4 coordinate system! Most people I know would rather not even think about number lines. How on earth can we imagine extra dimensions if we only understand the world in three? And so I thought about thought.

What are thoughts anyway? Do they simply exist in our heads? Are they just pulses of electricity turned into language? Do thoughts have mass? If they only exist in our heads, where does intuition come from? What about two people who always seem to say the same thing at the same time? You could say that intuition and coincidence simply come from our innate ability to interpret nonverbal language of others. But that's boring! If there is any subject that has no weird unanswered questions, I'd say we're probably wrong about most of the stuff we think we know about it. The universe is too big and too weird and the human experience too complicated and crazy for us to give a boring answer to a weird question.

So now here is a weird question: what if thoughts occupy their own dimension, and just as lines on a 2-D curve can intersect, so can thoughts. To ruin your life and put things in the language of math for a little bit, I could even go so far as to say that thoughts are vectors. Think about it! Thoughts exist and some are more dominant than others so you could say they have a magnitude. But what about when we are trying to think of something and we know we're getting close? What about when we're trying to relate concepts but they simply don't match up? Do you think it's possible that thoughts can have a direction too? It's kind of a neat thought to me. But back to thoughts existing on their own dimensional plane. Since thoughts are centered around people in particular--and perhaps animals but that's beside the point--it makes sense that more thoughts will concentrate in areas with more people.

So now I come to the question: why do some people get mentally exhausted when they're surrounded by too many people? Could Sherlock from the BBC drama actually get annoyed at the "sound" of someone thinking in his personal space? Could you? I remember in philosophy class, I would always walk out with a headache. It felt like there was so much pressure on my head that dissipated almost the instant I walked out of class. During the discussions, I felt like I couldn't think because my mind was feeling crowded by the presence of other people. Every so often I would jokingly rant to my friends, "They crowd my thought-space!" To give another example, I have trouble sleeping when I know there is someone else awake in the room, which is why I am almost always the last person to fall asleep. Can it be that their thoughts are disrupting mine? What about when people seem to know exactly what the other is thinking? Maybe, these are caused by intersections of the "thought-lines" in the "thought-space."

I think that is enough about thought for now. This is how I pass the time anyway--make up ridiculous theories of everything. This is also why I think life is cool. There are so many crazy questions to think about, I don't know why people are always so bored.