In fifty-eight years, one thing I have learned about myself is that I do not always think like other people. I tend to see things from a different perspective. Sometimes, that makes me seem a little jaded to some people. For example, when I see on the news that a mother and her child get kicked off a plane "for no apparent reason", I always assume there is a reason we are not being told about. I second guess almost everything I hear before putting my own stamp of validity on it.

That's not what I am going to write about to day. I want to explore the way my brain perceives the world around me. I honestly don't know that my brain works differently from others, but conversations on the subject lead me to think it might. It certainly seems possible to me. Perfect sameness in operation seems pretty unrealistic. Have you been to an auto assembly line? Each car is built exactly the same. How then, do you explain lemons?

I want to get one thing out of the way. I am not talking about what we see or how it is seen. Let's talk about green. Those of us with normal vision all know what the color green is. We can agree that certain things are green, or at least what each of us calls green. Afterall, we only know the color green because someone pointed to it and called it green as we were first learning about the world around us. Isn't it possible that what you actually "see" when you are looking at green, is what I actually "see" when I look at red? How could we know? We call what we actually "see" by the name we were taught to call it.

What I am talking about today, is how my brain sees an object and decides what it is. I believe that my brain has a database of images in a grid system. When I see something, it flashes through the images until it finds the closest match. When I am looking at something unfamiliar, this is almost a physical process for me. I feel it happening in my brain and visualize the different images flashing before my eyes at lightning speed. When I see a familiar object, I do not experience this at all. My assumption is that frequent familiar images are found in the database too quickly for me to notice.

Two days ago, I was hiking in the woods at Kerrville Schreiner Park. I saw something just off the trail about fifty yards ahead of me. I couldn't make out what it was at first. My brain quickly started flashing images before locking onto the image of a deer. I was absolutely convinced that I was looking at a buck standing still ahead of me. I decided to keep walking and see how close I could get to it before it ran off. To my amazement, the buck disappeared after a few steps down the trail, and was replaced by some bleached out branches of cedar piled in front of a tree trunk. From a distance, the arrangement of the pieces was close enough to my brain's grid image of a deer, for my brain to assign it the tag of deer.

This mental process also happens to me when I see an old photograph. My mind will flash images and even video-like clips before my eyes until it places the event where it was taken. I'm sure this happens to everyone. I'm not sure that everyone is as aware of the process happening as I sometimes am.

This is not something new for me. I remember it happening as a very small child. My mother would come into my room to check on me before she went to bed at night. Unfortunately for me, she would turn the light on to get a good look at me sleeping. I would see a red glow that woke me up gradually. Then my eyes would open to see someone looking down at me. My semi-conscious state would cause my brain to flip through faces before settling on my mother's.

There were two times that I remember very vividly when my brain's grid system malfunctioned. The first happened around 1988 as I was driving home from work. I came to an intersection (410 and Bandera) which was known for an extremely long red light. I don't know if I fell asleep. I only know that I was suddenly sitting there with horns blasting behind me desperately trying to figure out what the round thing I was holding onto was, and what I was supposed to do with it. That horrible event lasted about 30 seconds before everything snapped into place. I was rattled about it for weeks. At one point I was even convinced that I had some form of early onset Alzheimer's.

I have had a life-long problem with dysnomia. However, this was more than that. It wasn't just that I couldn't recall the name. I didn't have a clue what the steering wheel was. The second time was even more disturbing. I was sitting on my bed looking at the bedroom door. I could not for the life of me figure out what the round thing on the door was for. I walked over and investigated. The door opened, of course, but, even then, I still had no idea what it was. I remember sitting back on the bed in a very agitated state. I knew that I should obviously know what that damned doorknob was, and it totally freaked me out that I did not.

I'm sure some of you have experienced something similar to this. For example, have you ever been talking about an old movie, but can't recall the name of an actor? It is right there on the tip of your tongue. But, if you are like me, you won't be able to think of it- no matter what you try- until you stop trying. I am so grateful that we have the Internet now. I can do a Google search to come up with those missing things. I remember arguing with my buddy Jim Gips around 1977 about the name of Kris Kristofferson's wife, Rita Coolidge. He didn't think the man was married. I knew he was, but could not pull that Rita's name out of my brain. The next day, it just popped into my head.

Well, this has surely been a weird thing to write about. I think it would make a good conversation topic at a brew pub. Anyone want to meet me somewhere to discuss it?