The Meaning Of Bats In The Belfry

I have a longtime friend who thinks in seven levels at once. He is not admired for this ability, instead, most people find his conversation confusing; he skips around from subject to subject, changes times of reference, sensory modalities, and other dimensions of normal conversation. His discussion drifts, we are soon in a sea of ideas, lost. I ask: “what were we talking about?” He looks at me as if I were simple. Have I been inattentive? I am unsure and confused, after half an hour, I think I am losing my mind.

He plummets down through all the layers of his seven- dimensional chessboard pulling it all together with metaphor, analogy, simile, and poetic language. Of course! I understood it all along. He just neglected to mention the central theme of his monologue. Rather, he was so comfortable thinking and sharing his thoughts that he opened the window to his mind and let me listen. This verbal review is his way of discovering the central theme binding the parts. As he leaps his way through the labyrinth of associations and ideas that are present in his mind, discovering new connections, he becomes rapidly animated. If he pulls in a good net-full of ideas, he can mimic mania.

He is most certainly dyslexic and definitely brilliant. He is an original thinker who finds it somewhat difficult to read, and particularly painful to write because these forms are so linear, while his modalities of thought are spatial and multi-dimensional. He is able to ‘ride’ his own internal observation process; to say what his mind is doing as it works through a problem or idea. He is also totally unable to forego that ride. Perhaps because his brain has more than the normal numbers of actual physical connections—nerve pathways—and active data storage sites, features that Maclean asserts are characteristic of the dyslexic brain.

These rides are wonderfully productive for him, and for me because I have such familiarity with his process as a friend and listener. We ride together, touring each other’s minds like intoxicated bats in a library. You see by now that I am a bit of a bat myself.