I don’t know if everyone’s mind works this way, but I almost always visualize a place when I think of an idea.

Let me try and be more specific. Name a thing—a book, a movie, an event, anything—and I’ll tell you the place with which I involuntarily associate it.

For example: when I think of global warming, I almost always think of the first floor of my college library. I start thinking about climate change, and my brain calls up a hazy image of how that room looked when I attended college. (So, when I went to see An Inconvenient Truth the other day, that library was hovering in my head much of the time.)

Here’s another one. The vastness of the universe, infinity, and astronomy in general reminds me of the main room of my preschool. Whenever I ponder how enormous and how old the universe is, I see the cubbyholes and coatracks near the entrance of my preschool, a building I haven’t been inside for over twenty-five years. The mere mention of Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking’s names usually conjures this image.

Actually, scratch that—Stephen Hawking’s name conjures, for whatever reason, the first-floor addition of my grandmother’s house, where she slept, and where her canary lived.

How about a more topical one: when I think of politics these days, specifically the 2004 election and Iraq, I think of the kitchen in my old apartment in Chicago. This one makes some sense: that’s where I lived during the aforementioned events, and I spent my nights going to the fridge for another beer to take of the edge off.

9/11, however, still makes me think of my living room in Iowa City, on Melrose Court. This is, naturally, where I watched the television coverage that day.

There are other things, like the arts. A lot of recent albums, when I listen to them still, equal my cubicle at my old job, since that’s when I first listened to them on my iPod. This is, needless to say, unfortunate. Infinite Jest reminds me of three places: the flat in London where I first read it, the day care where I worked the summer I read it again, and my apartment last summer, when I read it a third time. The Big Lebowski is Mark and Win’s 1998/99 apartment on Broad St. Any song from the 1980s = my grandmother’s living room, unless it’s my third-grade classroom. Chicago (the band, not the city) is my fourth-grade classroom in Ann Arbor. Soul Coughing = my senior-year dorm room.

Some more:

Bill Clinton = the kitchen of the person I was dating during Lewinsky etc.
Pearl Jam = Stewart Library in Grinnell
pogs = my parents’ dining room
The Boy Scouts = The Methodist Church in Grinnell
Brian Eno = O’Hare
The Beatles = Paris
coffee and/or the 2000 election = Cedar House (1126 Broad St)
Russia/the Soviet Union = my 11th grade history classroom
drumsticks = our living room in Ann Arbor
Ghostbusters = Wes’ parents’ basement
Shakespeare = the lawn outside Main Hall at Lawrence
Richard Brautigan = camp
lunch = my kindergarten classroom
2001: A Space Odyssey (the movie) = an unspecified classroom in fourth grade
2001: A Space Odyssey (the book) = my middle-school library (sorry, “Media Center”)
Tom DeLay = the shitty bathroom in my previous apartment
David Byrne = my bedroom at 505 Melrose Ct
German = my fourth-grade school library
Leah = The Deadwood
Ransom = The Deadwood
Dino = The Deadwood
The Simpsons and/or Christmas and/or Michael Dukakis = my parents’ living room
music theory = my college dining hall
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind = Aden & Kate’s kitchen
Pool (the game) and/or Television (the band) = the Down Under Pub in Grinnell
Groove Armada = the indoor track at the rec center at the University of Iowa
economics = the playground near my grandmother’s house
The Oklahoma City bombing = my high school Spanish classroom
u2 and/or the Midwestern flood of 1993 = The Mall of America

Most of these make sense, some don’t; for instance, the preschool thing. Maybe because that’s where I first developed a sense of myself as a discrete, sentient being, and therefore immediately became aware of the universe’s enormity, my own mortality, etc. Oh, that reminds me: death = the rear pews of my church, St. Mary’s. I don’t know why the rear pews.

I don’t know anything about psychology, but this and similar cognitive hiccups get me about as close as I’ll ever come to understanding how my own mind works. And I’m sure I’m not alone in this phenomenon; it’s just a matter of how common it is, and what it says about me. That I’m a visual thinker?

Well, I’m off. It’s time for my kindergarten classroom (ha, ha).