Sensory experiences, even of the most abstract kind, happen in a figure and ground inter-relation and hence easily suggest the idea of a background consciousness. Thoughts, however, as cognitive fragments, as a flow of detached discursive elements or precursors of such elements, do not share this figure and ground pattern. It would be easier if they did, and so you might think of something like an underlying process of signifiers, a whispering sensory matter of thought, but these are only fabulations. The structure of thinking, if it has any structure at all, has no sensory analogy, being neither like seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling or feeling. That is perhaps why it is sometimes treated as a distinctive kind of sense. It is laminar, absolutely flat; it can refer endlessly to matters of perspective while masking the fact that it has absolutely none itself.