[coppsilgold]

I sometimes have an idea or concept which I cannot put into words, at one point I sat down for an hour trying and couldn't sketch out what was in my mind from any angle.

I wonder if it's a limitation of my linguistic capabilities, insanity or if language simply cannot describe certain things.

[Jordan-117]

I've gotten that feeling from dreams sometimes -- not forgetting the content or having it be something illogical, but instead being a very concrete and visceral situation or concept that is impossible to put into words or even into conscious understanding. But it's usually a "just woke up from deep sleep" feeling -- wild to think about experiencing that with a waking idea.

[mapontosevenths]

I touched on it elsewhere in this post, but many scholars believe that there are things you literally can not think if you don't have the language for the concept. This is called the strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity[0]. The weaker version is the same, but carves out space for things like spacial reasoning to exist independently.

I believe that some people don't think in words at all, and instead think in maths, images, or vague concepts, but I think the result is the same. Regardless of which type of token you use, if you don't have a token for a concept you can only express it as a relationship between other related concepts. This is a less efficient way to think, and is very limited when it comes to processing. It also makes it impossible to think about truly 'unique" concepts which can't be expressed by relationships to something else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity