I have a somewhat unflattering answer to the question of which fictional character I identify with. It's Pinky, from Pinky and the Brain.
What resonates with me isn't really that Pinky says strange things. It's the gap between how he seems to experience his own thinking and how everyone else receives it.
Brain says "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" expecting Pinky to say "try to take over the world!" But Pinky gives a seeming non-sequitur instead, apparently expecting it to belong to the conversation. Brain hears it as something ridiculous. Here, Pinky doesn't seem to realize how much information he isn't conveying between the thought he had and what he actually said.
There's an episode called "The Pinky P.O.V." that lets us follow some of those missing steps. Brain is explaining his plan as usual, and Pinky notices the size of Brain's head. That reminds him of hippos, and he starts thinking about the problems their size might create for clothing, and he eventually lands on beachwear. When Brain asks if Pinky is "thinking what' I'm thinking?", Pinky responds with a concern about a hippo wearing a beach thong.
Brain gets the beach thong reference.
This time, we got the full thought process.
And now that we've seen the full thought process, the answer is honestly still ridiculous. But it doesn't seem random anymore.
From Pinky's perspective, there was a clear sequence between point A and point H that Brain just didn't follow.
I recognize this perhaps more than I would necessarily like to.
I for sure know the experience of arriving somewhere through a series of connections and then speaking as though the person beside me traveled there with me. The intermediate steps can seem so immediate that I don't notice that I haven't actually said them, or that they aren't inherently obvious. What I experience as continuing a thought can sound to someone else like I've abruptly and totally changed the subject.
Sometimes (read: often), I don't even discover the mismatch until the other person responds. Their confusion will surprise me because I can clearly see steps A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H.
I want to make sure I'm keeping a couple of things separate, though.
First: communication. Having a path to an answer doesn't actually make the answer useful, correct, or relevant to someone else's question or comment. Prinky really did stop listening to Brain. The existence of the hippo -> beachwear chain doesn't change that his response had nothing to do with the topic. Communication does involve some work from the speaker, like figuring out what the other person knows, making enough of the connections visible, and noticing when you've wandered somewhere they haven't followed.
But the other thing is interpretation. There's a difference between deciding that someone's contribution doesn't make sense to you and deciding that that person doesn't make sense. Once you understand someone as foolish, scattered, unserious, or incapable, unfamiliar connections start to become evidence for the thing you've already decided. There's less reason to wonder what happened between point A and point Q. That's just how they are.
The Pinky P.O.V. is interesting because it gives the audience access to Pinky's thought process that Brain doesn't have. Pinky isn't secretly paying perfect attention. His contribution isn't actually a useful contribution. It does change the kind of thing his answer is, though. Something that at least follows some process.
I keep thinking about how much of our judgment of other people's thinking is based on the part of the process we can see. We generally encounter the output, the comment, the answer, the idea that seems to come from out of nowhere. We don't necessarily see the associations, memories, observations, analogies, half-formed questions, or transitions that produce it.
And maybe sometimes the process really is an aside. But sometimes it can actually be the most interesting part.
I think that's part of why Pinky resonates with me. I'm not saying every strange connection should be understood or legitimized, or that having an explanation makes the thought a good one. It's that there is a process that can be seen if unveiled. And I feel like I would see a rather large difference in my own communications if I got better at showing people the road I took to get between thoughts. But I also wonder what might happen if Brain were ever curious enough to ask Pinky how he got to his ridiculous response.
Sarah, remember: this is allowed to be unfinished. If it were finished, it wouldn’t be a Research Note.