Thinking happens as a kind of pressure behind my eyes, but I need to talk out loud in order to complete most of my thoughts. Blankness, too: I see hardly any visual images, rarely picturing things, people, or places. (Remember the milk! Ten more reps!) On the whole, though, silence reigns. My head isn’t entirely word-free like many people, I occasionally talk to myself in an inner monologue. It was happening even then, as I talked with my friend: I was articulating thoughts that had been unspecified yet present in my mind. At the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental cloud. (“How can he be thinking about nothing?” she’d ask me.) I’ve always been on Team Dad I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. Later, describing the moment to a friend, I recalled how, when I was a kid, my mother had often asked my father, “What are you thinking?” He’d shrug and say, “Nothing”-a response that irritated her to no end. But I hadn’t known what the thought would be until I spoke it. Where had they come from? Evidently, I’d had a thought-that was why I’d raised my hand.

Then the teacher called on me, I opened my mouth, and words emerged.

I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room, discussing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or possibly “The Waves.” I raised my hand to say something and suddenly realized that I had no idea what I planned to say. I was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed.

You aren t your thoughts