How Human Sensory Awareness May Either Help Our Thinking Or Make it Harder

Part of what must be asked is which sense we are thinking with. I offer this only as an observation, not a scientific claim. The eye, and the visual habits of a neurotypical mind, tend to flatten what they take in into a single picture: one scene, seen from one place. The ear works differently. It can hold several voices at once, in parallel, as an audience holds Shakespeare’s characters speaking from different positions on the same stage. What the ear hears as many-dimensional thinking, with relationships folding through one another, the eye may press flat into a diagram. A Socratic exchange is closer to listening than to looking. It keeps more than one voice alive long enough for the shape of the question to appear.

VII. Where ideas travel

Ideas, it is said, can travel where standing armies cannot. (The line is usually credited to Thomas Paine, though I have never found it in his writings. Someone should have said it.) A different intelligence can carry ideas farther and faster than any press. Which logic travels with them is up to us.