I was thinking today that the human mind seems to work in circles. The linear concept seems impossible to grasp, whether this is because people have only a limited ability to perceive things, or because reality is a cycle of cycles. An obvious example is the roundness of the world. If you move through space for a long enough period of time, you end up where you started again. Direction is an open-ended concept. Temperature is similar. There comes a point when something that is extremely hot feels the same as something that is extremely cold. Our sense of touch perceives things in cycles. This works for light, too. If a light is too bright, we cannot see it. We might as well be in pitch darkness, in fact, this is what it feels like. Of course, it’s highly probable that the human senses are just too limited to analyse some things. But I wonder why this is. Is this because the roundness of the world extends to all things within the world? Or perhaps because infinity bends straight lines?
Some evolutionary psychologists, and I think William James, thought that imagination evolved for the purpose of creating scenarios and testing their outcome.
Sometimes anxious people will continuously run through problems that are either unsolvable or that they lack the knowledge to solve until they become exhausted. In some cases the person will wake up in the middle of the night involuntarily to resume thinking about the problem.
So, maybe the human mind is circular because it needs to keep checking and rechecking ideas until the most satisfying result comes up.
As I think of it though, what I describe is not exactly circular. If thoughts have slight variations then it could be argued that they are linear due to the fact that you aren’t having the same exact thought over and over.