[andai]

When I was young, a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages, which one do you think in?"

I paused, confused, and replied, "People think in words?"

Fast forward a decade or so, in my twenties, I had lost most of the inner visual sense I had previously used, and developed an overreliance, in my opinion, on language. (I think my dominant sense was some "non visual abstract sense of ideas", but the visual was also very strong.)

In other words, I now do think mostly in words, and it feels a lot harder to get any serious work done. The language-ing is involuntary, and I often wish I had a way to shut it off, because it seems to actively interfere with more subtle mental processes.

More recently, I often have the experience where I will wake up from a dream with some complex idea fully formed in my mind. I write it down before it fades, and then spend the next hour or two trying to understand it.

The best explanation I have right now is that there are at least two minds: one which operates holistically — if it were a 3D printer, it would be like that one with the bath, where the object emerges from the bath, whole.

Whereas the other one (the conscious mind) would be the extrusion printer with the tiny nozzle that has to zip around for a long time to achieve a worse result. (And must be constantly cooled, less it overheat!)

[forshaper]

I find being alone, with no other human around for miles, gets rid of language. Same with combat sports, and more broadly, struggling on the edge of my physical ability.

[the_gipsy]

You just lack (or lacked) introspection, nothing special. Many people claim to have no inner monologue. When pressed, it always comes out. Simply put, it's impossible to function as a human without it. But many people are not aware, and think it means something like "hearing actual voices".

[chmod775]

"Thought is language" is a folk intuition that has been proven wrong over and over. People with severe global or agrammatic aphasia still can score higher on intelligence tasks than you'd expect - even though this data generally comes from people who suffered a stroke, which generally isn't neatly contained to one's language capability. Also, more importantly, even in people with full brain function, the language network appears remarkably unresponsive under neuroimaging when performing arithmetic, logic puzzles, or theory-of-mind tasks. Also famously music tasks: Vissarion Shebalin lost most of his language capabilities to a stroke and still completed his fifth symphony.

There's correlation, and your language network likely augments your intelligence, but as proven by millions of animals, unfortunate humans and also some less-unfortunate human infants, you really don't need language for intelligence.

Where language helps most strongly is metacognition: evidence suggests that it is severely limited without language, and I suppose that is where the common belief that thought is language comes from: the moment you try to think about your thoughts, you use language!

My theory (and this with literally no evidence) is that we use the language network for metacognition precisely because it is not that involved in primary thought. Important to note that "we" here means humans: animals appear to demonstrate metacognition even without language.

[the_gipsy]

Isn't the folk intuition that "words come after thoughts"?

I agree that a stroke cannot isolate language exactly, it's not an ideal approximation of "languagelessness". I think you will find this report interesting: https://nautil.us/what-my-stroke-taught-me-236544

There is no doubt that many marvelous works and concept can be produced entirely without language. Something as complex as driving a car can be done mostly without "thinking about it", without language, without the inner monologue going over all the decision our mind is making.

What we can't do without language, is making a complex plan over time and space, beyond something like "need to fetch hidden item behind the corner to unlock box right in front of me now". The question is how much exactly does language "augment" our intelligence. Is a baby, a human that has not yet learned language, really smarter than an octopus? Or a crow, remarkably smart but interestingly not a mammal, which indicated that intelligence doesn't have to be strongly tied to some evolutionary biological feature. A human stays as "dumb" as an animal if they don't learn language.

Re: your theory, if true, why? The theory implies (though correct me if I'm wrong and strawmanning), that there is another, hidden, way of encoding these extremely complex "information bundles" for lack of another word, in our brains. Why not use that for metacognition too, then?

[ekidd]

When I learned French as an adult, I pushed myself heavily into "forced immersion", avoiding English completely for long periods of time as my French slowly built itself up. This almost entirely silenced my inner monologue in English for those periods of time, and left me with a toddler's ability to think in French. In this comparative silence, it was much easier to observe my non-verbal thought processes moving around "behind" the scarce words.

Then my French inner monologue got good enough that I could mostly think in French, especially when I was in a French-speaking environment. One fascinating detail was that after switching from a French-speaking environment to an English-speaking one, I would actually spontaneously translate from French to English for about 15 minutes until my brain switched back.

So it seems obvious to me that it's possible to suppress or at least severely impoverish the language of thought, that other "layers" of thought exist besides the words, and that it's even possible to change the actual language of verbal thought.

Also, something which at least some other people in the HN crowd might recognize: When I'm deepest in the zone programming and refactoring, I tend to work with a lot of half articulated concepts I can't put into words. You know how people talk about "code smells"? That isn't a literal smell for me, but it's generally a non-verbal sense that a pattern is wrong.

[jeremyjh]

You just stated your vibes like it is a fact.

There was a study about this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679762412430...

[the_gipsy]

> adults who reported low levels of inner speech

[andai]

I'm not sure. I think I had a reasonable amount of metacognition as a child. I remember being eight years old, and having a really cool idea but forgetting it.

So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me.

And so I remembered that I had been fiddling with my seat belt when I had the idea. And so I resumed fiddling, and my cool idea promptly came back.

Metaphors and abstractions came to me much later though. (I struggled with OOP for about 10 years until one day it all just clicked.) Symbolism took me another ten years.

[the_gipsy]

> So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me.

You narrated the ideas back. It's words and language. There is no hidden, unknown, layer of "thought".

[andai]

>You narrated the ideas back

No, I rewound my visual memory, to see what I was doing, and then I did it again, to provide the same stimulus, to retrieve the lost memory.

I've met a few people who have nonverbal cognition, which is also not visual.

It's a bit like this, a "direct manipulation of ideas".

> The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined… The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

Though as I mentioned, I had this more as a child, and I've become overreliant on language, and this "direct" facility has starkly deteriorated. But as the author explains in the rest of this article, this fluency can be regained by sheer force of will, by simply working on a very narrow problem space obsessively for weeks at a time.

(We don't know if that works for everyone, or if it's something weird like perfect pitch. I suspect everyone could gain a great deal of fluency -- that the chunking would reach such a high order level as to make the mnaipulation feel transparent. But possibly, the types of chunks would be different depending on the person.

More data needed!)

[the_gipsy]

There are no movie clips in your brain that you replay. You are re-narrating the scene, you just may not notice it.

[weregiraffe]

Next you gonna say we don't have images in our brain, only descriptions?