Knight's move thinking

"Knight's move thinking" is a psychiatric term describing a thought disorder where in speech the usual logical sequence of ideas is lost, the sufferer jumping from one idea to another with no apparent connection. It is most commonly found in schizophrenia. To anyone who cares to observe this is also a phenomenon pretty common among people without any psychiatric diagnosis. If you analyse the chain of steps between topics in most casual conversations, there seems to be little logical progression. Casual, drunken or drugged talk relies on very subjective and tenuous jumps from one subject to another. Intellectually rigorous or disciplined dialogues where a central theme is examined by conversants from different angles and no sidetracking occurs isn't always the rule. Maybe schizophrenics do it more, but I think we all do it.

To examine it in more detail there is an implication that there is a kind of logic at work but that knight's move thinking is more a case of eliding three steps of a more linear logic into one leap that is harder for the listening party to follow. I would ask whether a thinker who used this lateral leaping method could in fact emulate a linear step by step argument by clever moves, rather as a knight's tour around a chessboard reaches every square eventually.

Works by writers like James Joyce or William Faulkner may also have an element of this style of idea linkage. Punning and misspelling as a connection between ideas in a conversational flow is very connected to the idea also. Clang association is also based on this idea of a kind of semantic perversity in how one communicates.

I leave you with a poem written by a sufferer of schizophrenia (me actually), which demonstrates a dense serious of lateral associations between terms. Was I suffering from thought disorder when i wrote it ? I am not sure, though there may well also be an ironic simulation of the symptom by self aware sufferers who are not in relapse.