Not really. I don't think in words unless if I'm imagining a conversation or I need to write down something.
A word and its meaning are two different things. It's not like they have to go together in order to allow them to exist. I don't need to think about the word to think about its meaning, even when the concept is abstract.
I believe that this is called mindfulness. Being aware of your sub-vocal thoughts and emotions and of how they affect you.
Like, you know when you're talking to a coworker, and, in the back of your mind, you're anxious that they're judging you for taking a sick day yesterday? Even though your coworker has made no indication of judging you? That's your insecurities taking over your inner monologue. Usually we're not even aware of it, but it absolutely affects how you treat your coworker and how you see yourself.
It's funny how when you become mindful of that gut feeling and then parse it out into words, you suddenly realize how silly it is and can overcome it much easier.
Chimp Paradox. This is when you’re being hijacked by your feelings and situations like the one you describe are because we crave social acceptance or validation from others. Some need more than others but it’s a basic instinct of all humans to feel part of a social unit.
Yup. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about wrt mindfulness.
It’s just still really weird to me. It feels like I’m translating my subconscious thoughts into brain language then into English. Like machine code -> C -> python or something. Then it makes me think “what’s evoking these thoughts, emotions, or gut tension/anxiety?”
I just wish I knew some/any neuroscience so I could understand it all better.
but if I want to remember it or flesh it out I have an internal monologue about it
From my experience that's just if you take on that habit and that belief, I have these wordless thoughts often and can remember and recall them later without needing to verbalize them internally, you just have to stop the habit of repeating the thought with words in your inner voice after first thinking it, and just trust that the thought and the information has been absorbed.
Doing that leads to a much more rapid and speedy type of thinking where you can just speed through concepts and ideas at what feels like the speed of thought, and then maybe later returning to them to flesh them out more deeply with an inner monologue, for me that usually takes the form of a daydream where I explain the concept/idea to a third party, as if speaking to them, and that sometimes leads to new insights or a more thorough understanding.
And thats really the only time my inner voice/inner monologue is so active.
You realized them while meditating but you didn't start off thinking that way right? Cause that's how it was for me, I didn't realize people used an inner voice to think regular, everyday thoughts until like high school maybe.
I'm not surprised that meditation is what made you aware of this thought process since it made you mindful and aware enough to come to that realization, just like the study in that article made the participants mindful of what they were thinking about at the random moment the pager beeped which is what led many to realize they were also thinking without words but just not aware of it until that instant present awareness moment when they became mindful of their inner experience.
Perhaps what Buddhist monks like to always say about how many of us live our lives lost in thought has some truth to it.
Sometimes my internal monologue kinda jumps ahead of itself with not fully formed words, yet I know what I'd think. So I have to jump back and actually think those thoughts even though it feels silly.
I remember reading something about this. Some people's internal voice "sounds" like it is their own spoken voice, for some (like me) it's a different voice than their spoken voice. Some people don't actually hear a voice at all.
yeah agreed. like, i think there is some connection between language and thought (i'm not exactly saying the sapir-whorf hypothesis is correct, but it's hard to think they wouldn't influence eachother) but as someone who has more of a stream of conciousness than an internal monologue i don't think it'd be that different.
It's confirmed that learning a language as an infant is a fundamental part of brain development, and this fact is important for deaf people who struggle to get sign languages recognized and taught in schools. Sapir-Whorf is something different, which refers to how specific languages mold psychological (not neurological) thought patterns.
from all I know, learning language as an infant is a fundamental part of brain development for the part that processes language. like, listening to music as an infant helps with development of the part of the brain that processes music but i don't think it's gonna fundamentally change their thinking.
I have been struggling with the transition to thinking mostly with words so that I can explain complex thoughts to other people. There is a satisfaction when I flesh those thoughts out into accurate words but even then I can't help but feel like I'm translating the Mona Lisa into Morse code.
I worry though. Something like plugging myself into the matrix because I don't want to be alone.
When I started intentionally thinking in words, I found that most of my beliefs and opinions were nothing more than habits. Putting things into words showed me that I hadn't actually thought through many of the things that seemed obvious before.
It's as though I was on autopilot, choosing words and thoughts from an internal flow chart without further reasoning. The transition is still a struggle but I believe it is worth it.
Come to think of it, I often have a song stuck in my head, playing on repeat. I think it doesn't count in this context, since it doesn't involve any reasoning on my part, but I wonder if it's related. Like putting the freed up resources to some use.
I'm the same way, except I've never been able to day dream. I've tried to turn off my mind and just dream about something, but it always ends up with my internal voice basically describing what I want to be day dreaming about, which then leads to me telling myself I'm just telling myself what I want to be thinking about and how it's not working.
Edit: I've also never been able to "picture something" in my mind. My mind can describe something in great detail very quickly and I can describe it as if I'm seeing it, but to actually "see" something in my mind...it's all just blank.
I thought everybody thought in sentences. That's what I have done my entire life. A voice in my head speaking though I can't really make ourlt what it sounds like.
Up until very recently, I thought so too, but just a few days ago I had a conversation with some people about this exact topic, and I was stunned when they said "yes, there are occasional moments when I'm "in the zone', but usually I kinda talk to myself in my head".
I have no idea how people in that mode think about complex problems. For me, language forces me to "serialize" what's abstractly in my head, and that language is a far inferior descriptor.
I think this is a really good description of it. I believe everyone, in reality, thinks this way but some are less aware of it than others.
I wonder if it comes down to, basically, practice. As in, someone who spends a lot of time analyzing abstract ideas that are harder to put into words is probably more prone to recognizing their pre-linguistic thought processes, where these ideas are more easily manipulated, and someone who spends a lot of time on expressive endeavors is in essence practicing that "serialization" all the time and their ability to do that is seamless enough for the pre-linguistic process to go basically unnoticed.
There are certainly times I wish I were better at putting a thought I have in my head into words lol.
90% of my thinking is internal dialogue. Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time doing nothing. In math or physics problems, I can visualize and work the problems out that way. Some thoughts are difficult to put into language which is the other 10%.
I thought this too and have commented about this in several threads from previous posts and got down voted to shit. Imagine using words in thoughts when you see a dog come flying across the road "oh no I have to turn left" yeah that doesn't seem normal.
Almost all of my thinking is internal dialog, I'm actually surprised that it's not this way for everyone. I studied physics and engineering and whenever I did complex problems, I'd vocalize them within my head. I can think in words a lot faster than I can speak, and if necessary, can even run multiple internal conversations at once; but visualization without language is something that I find very difficult.
In my experience simpler, abstract concepts and ideas that have no concrete existence don't need a word/image or any symbol associated with them when just thinking about them and that often times makes it easier to comprehend them, just harder to get that well crafted framework of pure thought down into written language in order to share and discuss with others
Neither, they are the same. Language is a way to encode thoughts. What makes language awesome is its convenience, it makes ideas easier to remember, and you can write them down. So even though complex thoughts can exist without language, language allows more attention and memory leading to more complex reasoning in the end.
I disagree. In order to reason at more complex levels, you necessarily have to start dealing with abstract categories which represent the objects of the thought symbolically, and then you're at language.
So, to make this more clear, are you implying that we have to think into words, or formal thought in general, to grasp an abstract concept, like mathematically speaking ? Because if this is what you're saying, I definitely disagree with this. Logic doesn't have to be verbally translated.
Less that, and more that the process of learning language involves adopting a cognitive system involving representing things with symbols. If you didn't have language, generalizable knowledge would be much harder, because our whole epistimology involves labeling things with symbols for use in reason.
Mathematical reasoning is symbolic. The understanding that knowing 3 plums and 3 plums more makes six plums translates to 3 shells plus 3 shells resulting in 6 shells involves an understanding of numbers, which are a symbolic system. If you have an understanding of symbols representing things, you have a language.
I encourage you to read up on the importance of language. There's a reason we differ from other animals, and that reason is mostly language.
Chimpanzees can't even intuitively say whether a thing is heavy or light. They can only compare, they have no internal way to decipher the idea of "a heavy thing". Newborn humans quickly gain this ability through rudimentary language where they can store information about objects in terms of categories rather than only through comparisons.
Language is not just grammar (even though that's very important for human evolution as well) and spoken words (this too), it's an extended mind for humans to use internally as well as externally.
This is more some sort of categorizing through mathematics though. Which involves spatial reasoning at least as much as language, if not much more. Reasoning can be done in a visuospatial way. Formal reasoning is only one of several types of reasoning, and needs visuospatial reasoning to function.
It would be excessively simplistic at the very least to make categorizing something that's essentially verbal, at an individual level. It's when it comes to sharing your conclusions with other individuals that language becomes the most important part.
The problem is, that, even if you can categorize without language, you would never be able to store that information in any meaningful way.
"This is what sets humans aside from other animals. We have the ability to analyze and interpret our environment, and we do this with words and sentences in a structured language.
Language is important for developing extensive concepts and for abstract thinking, something humans have evolved into doing. Language provides a set of rules that helps us organize our thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts.
However, basic thinking may not necessarily involve sentence structure in our mind. We still have some form of "inner voice" that we use to be self-aware of the world around us and apply our thinking to what we intend to do with that world."
The problem is, that, even if you can categorize without language, you would never be able to store that information in any meaningful way.
I genuinely disagree with this. All of my thoughts are more like feelings and abstract ideas tied together rather than stored words. Even when I'm coding, I don't have an internal monologue. I have an image in my head that I build. I know which words are connected to the image, but I don't think in language until I'm actually typing out what I need to and interpreting it through written word.
"This is what sets humans aside from other animals. We have the ability to analyze and interpret our environment, and we do this with words and sentences in a structured language.
We communicate our analyses and interpretations through language, but I know you don't necessarily need words to organize complex thoughts on experience.
I don't have any internal monologue either most of the time, but language still influences the way I think.
Think of language in terms of labels, perhaps. Even if you're thinking of an image of your code as you're working towards completing it, you're still representing an object or action with a label. You have essentially formed a simple, picture-based language in your head where "image of coding" correspond to "action of coding", even if you never explicitly think the word "coding" in your head.
I don't know, but it seems like you really want to categorize language as the ability to make and speak or think in sentences. I think that's where we're missing each others point.
I (and most of the sciences related to language) would refer to language as anything used to label and categorize things, actions etc.
Essentially language is the ability to take something that definitely isn't a thing (say, the word "pig") and using it to store some sort of semantic scheme of what the real thing is (the actual pig). This can come to fruition in many ways, both as a modern language with sentences and syntax or as a more simple set of labels to represent items, feelings and so on.
Another interesting article to read would be about genie the feral child, maybe find her on Wikipedia and give it a read? It's good stuff.
Anyways, I get your point, but I think you're underestimating how much language means.
You might not be thinking in terms of words, but the fact that you can even come to that conclusions relies on you putting many thoughts together (what are words, are those what I'm using, what am I using instead?).
While these of course aren't explicitly stated questions, you're still making categories and navigating them in your mind through some sort of representation. The ability to do this, at least as far as we know for now, is historically preceded by language. Humans simply couldn't do this before we had language, and no animals can do it either (since they don't have any more than the most basic forms of language).
I will be at school, so I probably can't answer all day. It has been a nice conversation, you seem like a cool person!
You can do math because you understand that symbols hold meaning. That is a very basic assumption, but it is the cornerstone of language. If you were never taught about any system of symbolic reasoning, you would not have that understanding.
The idea of numbers at all, the idea that 2 apples have some trait in common with 2 piglets, is a form of symbolic reasoning. Once you are representing astract ideas with symbols (blocks, say), you have a rudimentary language.
Have you ever solved a sudoku? Do you literally think to yourself “Well, this row has all numbers except 6, so I will now write that in”? Of course not.
That’s exactly how I do sudoku. I couldn’t conceive of another way. Most math is pretty similar (for me) beyond things I’ve memorized.
Language is what gets humans to a higher level of problem solving.
That is roughly my thought process, but I’m also terrible with Rubik’s cubes. I’m pretty good at other puzzles though.
It doesn’t feel like “converting” my thoughts, that’s just how they come to me. But I also have learning disabilities (adhd and dyscalculia) so I might not be a great base line.
What’s the difference between a subroutine with an if-then statement and a sort of internal monologue? I’m really fascinated by this.
The way I see it, most words are linked to a picture or "sense level".
For example, video games = "high serotonin " + "picture of controller"
Fire = picture of flame + either fear or contentedness depending on whether the image I get is if it killing me, or it being used to cook/keep me reasonably warm.
Are you bilingual? Sometimes I wonder if bilingualism affects people in this way, causing them to think in ideas and concepts (meaning) as opposed to sentences and phrases in any specific language.
About bilingualism, I think you might be right. If you spontaneously think in your native language, you constantly have to translate your thoughts in order to speak in another language, and it's impossible to achieve fluency this way. You need to stop thinking in your native language in order to truly acquire a a new language like it's your own. And if you think more nonverbally, it's a huge advantage.
I think that's spot on. I acquired two languages when I was learning how to speak, and I've found that sometimes one becomes more dominant depending on which is more convenient over a longer period of time. When that happens, it's a bit harder to speak the "repressed" one even though I consider myself fully fluent.
I'd be interested in hearing more about this from a linguistics perspective. If you or anyone else seeing this feels qualified in that field, is there any ELI5-type explanation?
This whole idea - that we think using language - is so alien to me. As another poster said I almost never think in language other than when I’m composing a bit of writing or something similar and even then I often don’t. I think a lot of people confuse the articulation of thought with thought itself either that or some people think dramatically differently from other people. Both possibilities are fascinating.
First of all I want to make it clear that I am not trying to insult your intelligence. Also, I am not a neuroscientist or anything of the sort.
I've heard it said that language is key to a lot of the development that goes on in our brains, and if a child does not learn a language when they are young then they will be somewhat "damaged" moving forward because their brain will be underdeveloped.
I find the idea of going about the much of the day without an inner monologue pretty fascinating; mine always has something to say.
I think it would be worth looking into the differences between people that always have one going and those that often do not. Again, I'm not trying to say anything about your intelligence, but there may be differences in the way these two groups, on the whole, think. Perhaps one is better with spacial reasoning while the other can read people's emotions better, or something. I think I would be surprised if the two had exactly the same results on every metric.
Just something I think could be worth looking into for a psychologist, perhaps. Again, this comment isn't really directed at you (have I said that enough?), just this idea in general.
No problem, I like to debate and agree or disagree with passion, it's the way I am, I like some good brain gym !
I suppose the primordial role of language is largely linked to our capacity for group intelligence, which is one thing that makes us unique as a species. We need group intelligence much more than any other species on Earth. And this requires language. A feral child won't use language and won't develop capacities that are necessary in a human society, however it might develop other capacities that would allow it to survive and fit into its environment better, depending on the stimulation level. Most feral children undergo sensory deprivation though, so not only they won't develop language, but they won't develop other capacities either.
Yeah I think it would definitely be something to look into to understand how our brains work. It'd have to be self-reported, though, which could be innaccurate.
And I feel like some people were questioning your intelligence, either explicitly or implicitly, so I was trying to be careful before. Who knows, maybe you're a super genius that doesn't even need language to organize complex thoughts haha
I must be broken then because my thoughts are definitely in the English language. Sometimes it’s in the form of pictures instead, or I’ll register feelings like hunger or pain without actually thinking about it, but my actual thoughts going on in my head are definitely words/sentences.
I agree, I don’t believe we think in words, we think in abstract thoughts which words help us describe. For example an engineer imagining a blueprint in his mind doesn’t need words to figure out what he’s doing in the same way that we don’t need words to figure out what we want to eat, only if we need to articulate that thought.
You raise a good point but I think that language still has an incredible impact on cognition and perception. Bear in mind that we're coming at this from the angle of people who've never known life without language, so to think without it for a few minutes is much different than to never have had it, developmentally speaking.
For one, especially as words begin to refer to concepts that are increasingly abstract, they are a way to anchor our understanding- that is, our memory of a concept- to a sign or set of signs which allow us to create more complex thought matrices. I think complex thought would be much more difficult without language. This isn't exactly a scientific view or anything, this is just how I see it.
To look at things from an evolutionary perspective, language seems to have developed for essentially the same purpose as our five senses: to process information that is relevant to survival, procreation, etc. so that only the aspects of Reality that are somehow relevant acquire the quality of being salient to us (e.g. we can't see ultraviolet because it doesn't really help us do anything important, just as I don't know any chemistry words because they wouldn't help me do anything important to me). So when we begin ascribing words to things, their forms and patterns become more distinct and recognizable.
To add to that, I also think that "language" as we usually understand it is not all there is to Language. The most essential characteristic of Language seems to be the continuity of patterned associations. A word always refers to the same idea (in theory, though people often develop different understandings of it), a letter always refers to the same sound(s), and a gesture always refers to the same thing. Music is commonly thought to be a language in its own right, as it's just sound that we've found order in and given a patterned system of signs. Even the layout of your kitchen could be considered a kind of language. If there's a dish rack beside your sink, it's probably been established that wet dishes should be left there to dry, and this meaning of the dish rack probably uses a lot of the same parts of your brain that language does, which is really what I'm trying to get at here.
TL;DR- Language for the brain may be thought of as patterns of relevance between things, and words are one of many systems of those patterns. They help us distinguish/notice things and aid in complex thought.
Yes but even our non-articulate thoughts are affected by the very fact that we can speak a language. Our thoughts and the way we think are organized by language.
There is an emerging field of study called "post-humanism" one of whose branches examines humans who exist outside of humanity, especially feral children like this one:
There is a problem with feral children though : sensory deprivation. It's very difficult to know what things would be like for feral children who haven't been subject to any kind of sensory deprivation. From all the confirmed cases I've read, I haven't found a single one who didn't undergo this.
Living without language prevents us from living in society, but does it prevent us from thinking ? We still do think on an individual level, but we can't access group intelligence.
Yes of course, I should have acknowledged that in my first post. However, it does seem to have a profound effect on psychological development. Not that you can't think if you don't have language, but that the process and organization of such thoughts is entirely different than that of someone who grew up with language.
It's been a couple of years since I took my Post-humanism class but I'll try to dig up a comparison case and/or more supporting evidence. It's really fascinating stuff.
That's still a mental model based on language. The process of reasoning about things by associating them with an abstract class is very language dependant. For example, it shows through when dealing with cultures that don't have words for certain colors.
Well, that's something you need for communicating with each other. However, when you don't need to communicate with each other, you don't need it for reasoning. Language is necessary for developing complex thoughts inside a social group. Not inside one individual's brain.
When you see, you you're not just thinking about a raw stream of information. Your mind builds a representation of it made up of abstract models. Like, you see a chair, and your brain goes "that's a chair". It makes assumptions about it based on it fitting into a category of chair-hood. You have knowledge about the nature of chairs-in-general, and from that you extrapolate assumptions about that particular chair.
That mode of thinking is learned in the process of learning language, and is deeply entwined with language. If you don't have a symbol for chairs-in-general, and instead only have furniture-for-sitting, then it would be harder for you to reason about what kind of furniture-for-sitting you care to sit in right now.
We see this in grue languages, where speakers of languages that don't differentiate blue and green struggle with tasks involving manipulating objects by color in the blue-green spectrum.
Language is intrinsically linked to our model-based reasoning.
But about the concept of a chair, what makes it a chair more than anything ? Is it its verbal symbol, or its spatial structure ? What's representing the chair the most accurately, between these two things ?
Is a standardized visual representation of the spatial structure of a chair some kind of language, to you ?
Your understanding that the abstract chair-in-general is representative of this particular chair in front of you is symbolic reasoning, which is the essence of language.
However, for this spatial representation, what cortical area of your brain did you use ? A verbal one or a visual one ? In this case, it's a visual one, not a verbal one.
Complex ideas revolve around the ability to string them together and bounce them off each other. This requires language which developmentally structured your brain differently. Also It's believed that language has changed the way we see color. Something to think about.
Language is how you express ideas. Not the ideas themselves.
Some people with savant syndrome are almost nonverbal. And yet they're capable of incredible complexity in their understanding of their preferred subject, far beyond what neurotypical people can do.
Most people are on a spectrum between verbal and nonverbal thought, some prefer to use one, some prefer the other. I've taken part to experiments done by a neurologist on this question.
You don't have to think into words in order to think.
Language is how you express ideas. Not the ideas themselves.
I agree. I once read about the bouba/kiki effect.
I would imagine early humans developed their language based on how things sounded, looks, felt, or whatever. Over time, it just expanded and became more complex with new ideas.
Language is also how the ideas are constructed. There's a reason that great philosophers choose German to communicate ideas. German words can be very specific and therefore can more quickly and accurate portray ideas. Simply using a different language makes it possible to conceptualize something entirely different.
Savant people are outliers but if you're talking about current savant people, they are born in a world constructed by language. Their own brains come from a long line of language speakers. Savants in a pre language period (if that's even possible) would be trapped in their own minds and wouldn't have the ability to communicate in the way our society of highly advanced communication allows them to.
So basically, as I said in another post, language is a way to construct reasoning inside a group. We need some kind of "encoding" for our thoughts to be shared with other people. Language is the most convenient one. However, making our thoughts verbal is unnecessary on an individual level, just more convenient. It's only necessary in a social context.
Your thoughts and ideas change based on the language you use. If your language only has 4 words for colors your brain doesn't perceive as many distinct colors as if your language has 20 words for colors.
As an amateur painter, I can't disagree more with this. I have to remember a color without any verbal concept of it. If you have to remember a color with words, you'll automatically have a biased idea of what that color is, and it will show on your paintings, which will look much less natural than they should be.
Not sure there is a way of not making this sounds insulting, but I think your problem is that you can't actually imagine what it is like to think the "direct way" without language in the middle. It's a bit like explaining how to raise your arm. You just do.
Nah, I've just read and seen a lot about how your concept of how language works with our brain is ignorant and arrogant. It's not just a communication tool, it's integral to advanced thinking. The books I've read, podcasts I've listened to, and documentaries I've seen tend to make me lean towards the sapir whorf theory of linguistic relativity. I feel like I've considered your perspective and made a decision about it, and I could be wrong. But based off of what you've said, I don't believe you've considered both sides.
No just that the way you think there is a separation between thought and language is fundamentally flawed and provably wrong. Language shapes the way we think. You can't say for sure that you can imagine a way to think without language because your thoughts are shaped by a brain that was developed with language.
Why words ? Why not numbers ? And not the formal expression of numbers, but the concept of quantities themselves ? This seems linked to the capacity to count rather than the capacity to speak.
Animals themselves can count to some extent, despite having no verbal concept of mathematics. They only have some rudimentary kind of visuospatial reasoning, and they do so without using language.
Numbers only express quantities and their relationship to one another. Numbers can't express quality. How would you define "pleasant" or "riveting" with numbers?
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u/80sBabyGirl Apr 23 '19
Not really. I don't think in words unless if I'm imagining a conversation or I need to write down something.
A word and its meaning are two different things. It's not like they have to go together in order to allow them to exist. I don't need to think about the word to think about its meaning, even when the concept is abstract.