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Wild Thoughts

Introducing the Ecosystem of the Mind

Keith R Wilson

Aug 11

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I used to think my mind was a thought factory, working constantly at peak capacity, three shifts a day, seven days a week. I believed it churned thoughts out on speculation or manufactured them to order, as when someone asks me what I think. It squeezes them out in the morning with my toothpaste. It really gets humming when I am at work, solving problems, coming up with clever things to say. The night shift keeps things going in my dreams. The thought factory makes everything from trauma to jokes, ruminations to conclusions, prejudices to perceptions. I took ownership of my thoughts in the same way I claim my books, my kids, and my signature dish of shrimp etouffee.

But, if my mind is a thought factory, most of what it produces is not my design. Memories come out of storage different from the way they went in. The workers in my brain seem to do whatever the hell they want with no regard to my being in charge. It turns out shoddy goods one moment and an astute observation the next. If my mind is a factory at all, it's the type that receives fully assembled generic product in the back door and pushes labeled brand-name merchandise out the front. Have I had an original thought, ever? My mind only appears to be creating thoughts; truthfully, they have little to do with me.

I looked around for another analogy for my mind. It was a computer, processing information. But computers don't wake up at three in the morning, worried about things that happened twenty years ago. My mind was a steam boiler, like Freud said, building up pressure until it found release. But who was feeding coal into the furnace? My mind was a theater. But why was the director not showing up for rehearsals?

It makes more sense to regard my thoughts as wild things and my mind as their habitat. By wild thoughts, I don't just mean unrestrained thoughts of doing something I would never tell my mother. I mean all of them, every mental event, even the most staid and boring. All reasoning, pondering, feeling, conniving, planning, contemplating, deliberating, reflecting, sensing, ruminating, cogitating, meditating, musing, brooding, mulling over, calculating, strategizing, analyzing, or perceiving are wild thoughts and I'm the swamp from which they came.

Even if you live in an urban environment, you live with wild things, inside and out. Birds and bugs fly overhead; rats, raccoons, and roaches dine on your garbage; and grass sprouts on your sidewalk. There are also microbes that take residence in your gut and mites that burrow in your skin. Why should your mind be any different? Your skull is the home of millions of wild, wild thoughts. They grow fat on the crumbs of your sensations and breed in orgies of associations.

A thought is any mental event, from the fleeting recognition that there's coffee in your cup to the awareness it's getting cold. From the hunch that chooses your bets to the reasoning that leads you to change careers. They're the basic units of mental activity, the fundamental particles of both consciousness and non-consciousness that combine in countless ways. Thoughts include sensations converted into recognizable patterns, memories surfacing unbidden, feelings coloring your perception, and the endless stream of ideas.

Next to my keyboard is a coffee cup. My recognition that it's a cup is a thought, that it's for coffee is a thought, that I could take a sip is a thought, that I could spill it accidentally on my keyboard is a thought, that it reminds me of another cup is a thought, that Stanley's cup is awarded to hockey players is a thought, that I can cup my hands is a thought, that cups are found in both bras and jockstraps is a thought, that a cup is like a glass, like a bowl, like a plate, and so on are thoughts. None of these thoughts were summoned by conscious intention. They arose spontaneously, following their own logic, not mine.

Memes

The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins got me started conceiving of thoughts as wild things. In his book, The Selfish Gene, he coined the term "meme" to describe units of culture that replicate themselves from mind to mind through imitation. Dawkins said that ideas, tunes, catch-phrases, and behaviors spread through populations like genes spread through gene pools, subject to selection and inheritance. The word, meme, itself, is wild, has gone viral, and evolved to signify something different. Now the word refers to images and jokes that get widely shared on the internet.

Dawkins focused on how ideas spread between minds, like a wild thing. But a thought doesn't go wild the minute it escapes your skull and becomes a meme. It was wild when it was in your skull, living, breeding, competing, and collaborating just like any organism. Your mind isn't just a way station where memes pause before hopping to the next host. It's a complete ecosystem, as complex and dynamic as rainforest, where different species of thoughts have evolved to fill every conceivable niche. Understanding this internal ecosystem changes everything about how we think about thinking itself.

The Ecosystem of the Mind

In the natural world, all living things exploit niches in the ecosystem. Thoughts find their niche in the same way.

Perceptions as Plants
You have thoughts that take information offered by the senses and convert them into perceptions. These are like plants and algae in the natural world, feeding off whatever sunlight is available.

Cognitions as Herbivores
Grazing animals come by and eat the plants, storing the energy as fat and meat. In the world of the mind, these grazing animals are your beliefs, assumptions, concepts, notions, ideas, knowledge, constructs, plans, and experience. I'll collectively call them cognitions. Cognitions digest perceptions, first by chewing them into patterns and categories, then by abstracting general principles from specific instances and integrating perceptual streams into coherent understanding. Then these herbivores of the mind excrete interpretations, which go on to fertilize future perceptions.

Memory as Decomposers
Herbivores are not the only thing feeding off plants. As plants decay, decomposers like fungi, bacteria, earthworms, and other critters eat and digest them, producing the organic compounds of the soil, which then nourish plant life. In the world of the mind, memories take your perceptions and cognitions, digest them, and store them for later use by any thought that needs them.

Feelings as Pollinators
Plants are marvelous organisms, but they have a problem. They're rooted to the soil and can't get around to have sex, so they must enlist pollinators to help them reproduce. Similarly, perceptions are tied to the sensations they feed off of. What type of thought will spread a perception and ensure that it reproduces? Who are their pollinators? It's the events of the mind called feelings, that's who.

Just as various pollinators are attracted to certain plants, every feeling has its favorite flavor of perception. One very effective pollinator is anger. It enjoys the nectar of a perceived harm and will connect one perceived harm to others, ensuring that you will perceive much harm in the future. This is how feelings supercharge perceptions, making them more vivid and persistent. Plentiful perceptions will go on to nourish beefy cognitions, as well as bullshit interpretations.

Critical Thoughts as Predators
Cognitions and feelings would accumulate and overrun the entire ecosystem, and the whole world would be buried in interpretations, were it not for the predators. The predators in the ecosystem of the mind are the critical thoughts. They look closely at perceptions to ensure that they're not illusions, feed off the memories to ensure that they're accurate, kill feelings, so they don't take over, and cull the weakest cognitions from the herd.

Critical thoughts include everything from questioning assumptions, seeking multiple perspectives, evaluating evidence, recognizing logical fallacies, and considering context and nuance. When critical thinking is active, it doesn't let any of your other thinking get lazy or overconfident. It's always circling back to examine whether you heard it right, whether you're remembering correctly, whether your feelings are overheated, and whether your cognitions are supported.

Achieving Equilibrium
No ecosystem achieves perfect health. It's a constant struggle to balance the predators with the prey. When the predators get the upper hand, the population of prey goes down, which then starves the predators and allows the prey to catch up in their population. An ecosystem is perpetually unbalanced in this way but seeking equilibrium.

Just as an ecosystem struggles to find balance, so too does the mind. Certain thoughts come to dominate and need to be balanced by other thoughts. It might be helpful to think of mental illness, not as a broken brain but as an ecosystem of thoughts out of balance, requiring the intervention of a therapist, a crisis, or both.

Wild Thoughts Observed

I was trying to imagine a way to convey this idea, so I took a break and went for a hike. When thoughts don't come when called, sometimes they show up when they think you're not looking. I walked until I came to a gap in the trees and saw the pond I'd been hiking towards. The water was covered with lily pads in bloom with white blossoms.

That charming scene was a perception. The lilies were there and I saw them. It was as simple as that until a feeling came along that made my day. The feeling was delight, attracted by the perception of the lily pads. I gazed at the flowers, drinking in the nectar of their beauty. Even after I looked away, I carried something of the flowers with me. Having been put in such a delightful mood, I could see the beauty of everything around me. That's what I mean when I say the feelings are pollinators. They spread perceptions around, both good and bad.

The next thought that flew into my mind was that the lilies were taking over and killing the pond. This was a cognition, munching on my perception. A critical thought came along right away to say I didn't know what I was talking about. It questioned whether lilies signified the dying of a pond or the health of it. I might have Googled the question if I was in range, but a second critical thought came along to ask, why are you killing your delight with thoughts of death?

It was then that a second cognition stepped in. I realized I had an example I could give you. I took another look at the lilies with the intent of describing them to you in a way that might capture the delight I felt. I still felt delight at their beauty, but there was the additional delight that I found an example. My critical thoughts left this idea alone, judging it too fit for pursuit. Later, they'll help me edit this piece, or kill the whole project, entirely.

Now, I'm at my desk, writing this up. I don't have the lilies in front of me. I'm relying on my memory, which digested the perception of the flowers, the delights I felt, and my various cognitions and critical thoughts. Just as the soil holds the nutrients needed for more plants, I have all the basic elements I need to conjure it up again.

Incidentally, I Googled my concern about the health of the pond. Lily pads don't signify that a pond is dying. In fact, they're often indicators of a healthy aquatic ecosystem when present in moderate numbers. However, they can become problematic if they cover too much of the pond's surface. Then they choke out everything else.

That brings me to my next question, which I will address in Part Two. If thoughts are wild things in the mind's ecosystem, how do they come to dominate and throw everything out of whack?

Thanks for reading The Reflective Eclectic! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Coming Next in the Wild Thoughts Series

You've just taken your first steps into the ecosystem of the mind, discovering how your thoughts aren't manufactured products but wild creatures living in their own habitat. But this is only the beginning in understanding the mental wilderness.

Next week in Part 2: "When Thoughts Take Over" - Ever wonder why some thoughts become impossible to shake? We'll explore how certain mental species become invasive, dominating entire psychological landscapes through adaptation, reproduction, and migration.

Part 3: "The Domestication of Thoughts" reveals the ambitious farmer of your mind - the ego, or the thought of "I." Watch as this master domesticator attempts to tame the mental wilderness. But even the best-run mental farm has weeds...

Part 4: "The Wildlife Sanctuary of the Mind" - Instead of battling untameable thoughts, learn to create protected spaces where wild thoughts can exist in their natural state; neither eliminated nor controlled, but wisely managed.

Ready to explore the full ecosystem now? Become a paid subscriber to unlock all four parts immediately and dive deep into the complete journey through your mental wilderness.

Prefer to wait? I'll be releasing each part weekly for free subscribers. Either way, the wild thoughts in your mind are waiting to be understood, not as problems to solve, but as living creatures with their own wisdom to share.

The ecosystem of your mind has been waiting for you to come home.