This is one of those things that you don't really tend to think about (pun not intended!) until you experience a change in your thinking or meet someone who thinks like you do!
> If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster
With my neurodivergent brain I've always conducted my thoughts in an "uncompressed format" and then eternally struggled to confine it all into words. Only then for people to misinterpret and question it. They might get caught up in the first sentence when the end of the paragraph is where you need to be!
That's why when you meet someone who thinks like you the depth of conversation and thinking you can achieve together is vast and also incredibly liberating! Your no longer limited by words in same way.
Since becoming ill I've suffered badly with brainfog. The cutesy name for a cruel experience. Sometimes there's no memories to draw on when your thinking, the cupboards are bare. You can't leap from thought to thought because they disappear before you get there or after like a cursed platformer. You might be able to grab hold of the thought but you can't reach inside or read it. It's all wrong somehow like when your suddenly convinced a word is spelt wrong even though you know it's right. You can't maintain focus long enough to finish your train of thought.
Even that subconscious processing is affected I used to prime my brain with information all day and instead of waking up with the solution I'll wake up frustrated but not knowing why. Just the vague notion that I failed at something that used to come so easily.
I don't have an "inner monologue" and don't think in words, only in images, but I've never experienced what this author is describing in terms of "nonsense words" or "hand vibrations".
I was with some friends that were in a band together, and we got thinking about this topic, and ended up arranging ourselves from least verbal to most verbal. I was on one end, where all of my thoughts appear as emotions or images; on the other end was our bassist, who experienced his thoughts as fully formed sentences. He said when he's getting to a difficult passage in a song the words "better focus here, don't mess up" will ring out in his head. He also said he has fully dictated mental conversations with himself.
I also read very quickly because I look at the shape of paragraphs and assemble the word-shapes into mental images and pick up meaning that way; high speed, but low comprehension. I struggle greatly to read philosophy because it's quite difficult to visualize. My wife reads slowly but hears every word in her head; her comprehension is much higher. I can do high comprehension reading by slowing down and looking at every word, but it feels like holding back an excitable dog.
Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy. Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it’s very difficult to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving the words around without having internalized the idea.
A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.
I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.
I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than my hand-wavy rationalisation.
It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.
"Keller would construct an analysis in the form of an analytic score written for the same forces as the work under consideration and structured as a succession of 'analytic interludes' designed to be played between its movements."[1]
Problem solving is a well-explored field in experimental psychology. TFA is a bit unfocused, making both some generally supported speculations and some traditional ideas that haven't been supported. A very good survey is the edited volume, The Psychology of Problem Solving (Davidson 2003).
Although TFA doesn't refer to it by name, "insight" problem solving is when you are stuck on something and then suddenly realize the solution. The common explanation for being stuck is "fixation" on the wrong things. In agreement with TFA, there is indication that verbalization supports fixation more than visualization.
I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another person at the company would write books and take credit for his creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only for purpose of communication.
When making visual art, I don’t think in words. Shapes, colors, shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do I translate this to words. I’m not sure what trying to draw by thinking in words would even look like.
Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words provide a good starting point).
Coding ends in “words”, or at least some form of written language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.
Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but they’re not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely different context and origin.
I don’t deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me it’s just one part of the whole stream of conscious.
I’m curious if anyone else feels this way about words?
But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought. The proof is that you can stop your inner words mid-sentence and you still know what you were going to think, because the thought itself takes a few milliseconds, and happens before the words start.
> But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought
That seems valid at first, but if look at that premise closely, you'll see that even assuming wordless thoughts always come first, doesn't mean that during the process of thinking they don't give way to words. That is to say, thoughts can be a precursor, but words do offer a framework which you can use structure thought.
That's specially handy for abstract concepts, like individuality, the split of the self and the world, which are fundamental to thought as we understand it through language.
Nothing prevents you from understanding a concept with the help of language and then using the concept by itself, detached from the symbols you used to arrive at it, to think. But that requires a certain effort and intention that maybe is what the article is aiming for.
Before right or wrong, it's a concept, it defines the boundaries of the body. It might well be an illusion, a source of unnecessary suffering, but it's a concept you can understand and reason about. I'm taking about frameworks of thought that comes before any value judgement.
The question reminds me of a quote from Rilke: "There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought".
Been thinking a lot recently about what my thoughts look like. They definitely aren't words (though as I type this, I can imagine hearing myself think ahead to the end of the sentence). The best I can describe it is visualisations - whether that's images of maths notation, 3D rotating models, or a flow/map/block diagram.
One pattern is that I'm a very prolific connection-forming machine.
Exhibit A: The first thing that enters my mind for each word.
(OnePlus One) (android pattern unlock) (Islamic State) (unit vector named t) (ich bin) (emoji-blood-type-A) (Latin etymology word root with verily) (https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)
Are you a native German speaker? or additional language? (it's an interesting/seemingly-random association)
The rest is similar to my (dyslexic) reading process. From what I can tell, I coped by memorizing the "shape" or image of words and associated them other things/images/sounds/dictionary-definition/feeling/emotions/experiences or some other abstract things I don't know how to describe -- attached metadata, if you will. The biggest issue is words like (is, that, a, etc) since the associations are weak at best, leading to them being disappeared/changed/hallucinated/moved or replaced by others in the same sentence/paragraph. Sometime when it's really messed up, leads to rereading a sentence or paragraph multiple times until the sequence of all of that makes sense.
But sounding out words is an absolute disaster no matter how much I try and fell behind in early grade school until my overwhelming need to not disappoint family, who were getting frustrated with me, kicked in and I developed my coping methods. It takes longer to read and learn new words but the associating and pattern matching resulted in my comprehension and language scores in school being so high no one picked up on how slow I read (or the disaster that reading aloud is) and how poorly I spell as being something off.
My wife was confounded when I told her I don't think in words. For her, it's a one to one correlation.
She had assumed that all people think in this mode. I had assumed that all people think in "thoughts" and went through a separate step to articulate them.
Made both of us aware of a difference in people.
I don't feel vibrations or sensations though, and I definitely don't think in images. I only have a thought level, and it's very independent of any external presentation.
You sound a little like me. I wasn't aware people thought like that until my partner told me her thoughts took the form of a constant stream of well-formed English. My default mode of thinking isn't natural language (though I can force myself to think this way, it's laborious, as the article mentions), nor images (I struggle with visualization), but more like abstract sequences of both logical connections and intuitive feelings.
Reminds me of the description of Peter Scholze as he was coming up with condensed mathematics. Didn't write a thing until he had it all worked out in his head (which is how he always works). Knew if he didn't get it worked out before the weekend he'd never be able to build it up again. Once he worked it out, he was able to retain it for months until finally writing it down.
I've certainly noticed a bit of a pattern where programmers who can listen to podcasts or lyrics while they code (I can't; I rely too much on my verbal center for coding) can operate much faster and solve more complex problems than your average bear. They're rare, so I don't have enough data to feel certain, but I have a suspicion that sometimes they're forced into it by living in noisy environments where tuning out the words or thinking without them makes more sense.
Glad you pointed out Feynman’s experience. The paper and the writing were the work. Oftentimes, I don’t settle on a meaningful, elegant solution until I have tried to explain my thoughts many times. “Eureka!” becomes “oh wait…” and back—a pendulum that eventually settles on a beautiful solution.
Anecdotally, the degree to which one does certain types of thinking can change over time, too.
Around 2020, I decided to try to learn as much as I could about "higher" mathematics in earnest, having basically no background in the subject. Five years later, I have finally read and suffered enough to be able to pick up texts in any of the abstract branches of mathematics and at least understand most of what's being shown/said at a basic level.
More fascinating to me, though, is that this shift in focus has lead to a definite shift in my thinking. My thinking used to be almost hyperlinguistic. Words were my medium of choice, and I had a strong stream of inner linguistic thought running through my head. Now, that inner voice is mostly quiet. I also find that I tend to think about certain situations in terms of abstract "relationship pictures" rather than a descriptive sentence.
I actually kind of miss the old linguistic tendencies I had at times. I'm hoping a shift back into literature helps reestablish some of that.
And yeah, as with all general proclamations that sound nice because they allow us to seemingly boil complexities down to a singular thing, the whole "wiring is thinking" idea isn't true. The truth in that statement is more akin to "human thought is often tool assisted"—and a manner of tools can aid in elaborating thought. Thought and action are not as severed as we tend to think.
This is one of those things that you don't really tend to think about (pun not intended!) until you experience a change in your thinking or meet someone who thinks like you do!
> If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster
With my neurodivergent brain I've always conducted my thoughts in an "uncompressed format" and then eternally struggled to confine it all into words. Only then for people to misinterpret and question it. They might get caught up in the first sentence when the end of the paragraph is where you need to be!
That's why when you meet someone who thinks like you the depth of conversation and thinking you can achieve together is vast and also incredibly liberating! Your no longer limited by words in same way.
Since becoming ill I've suffered badly with brainfog. The cutesy name for a cruel experience. Sometimes there's no memories to draw on when your thinking, the cupboards are bare. You can't leap from thought to thought because they disappear before you get there or after like a cursed platformer. You might be able to grab hold of the thought but you can't reach inside or read it. It's all wrong somehow like when your suddenly convinced a word is spelt wrong even though you know it's right. You can't maintain focus long enough to finish your train of thought.
Even that subconscious processing is affected I used to prime my brain with information all day and instead of waking up with the solution I'll wake up frustrated but not knowing why. Just the vague notion that I failed at something that used to come so easily.
I don't have an "inner monologue" and don't think in words, only in images, but I've never experienced what this author is describing in terms of "nonsense words" or "hand vibrations".
I was with some friends that were in a band together, and we got thinking about this topic, and ended up arranging ourselves from least verbal to most verbal. I was on one end, where all of my thoughts appear as emotions or images; on the other end was our bassist, who experienced his thoughts as fully formed sentences. He said when he's getting to a difficult passage in a song the words "better focus here, don't mess up" will ring out in his head. He also said he has fully dictated mental conversations with himself.
I also read very quickly because I look at the shape of paragraphs and assemble the word-shapes into mental images and pick up meaning that way; high speed, but low comprehension. I struggle greatly to read philosophy because it's quite difficult to visualize. My wife reads slowly but hears every word in her head; her comprehension is much higher. I can do high comprehension reading by slowing down and looking at every word, but it feels like holding back an excitable dog.
Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy. Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it’s very difficult to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving the words around without having internalized the idea.
A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.
I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.
I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than my hand-wavy rationalisation.
It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.
Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?
This reminded me of Hans Keller's wordless functional musical analysis. I came across it listening to his documentary on Schoenberg, available here: https://archive.org/download/miscellaneous_plays_1983-02-07_...
"Keller would construct an analysis in the form of an analytic score written for the same forces as the work under consideration and structured as a succession of 'analytic interludes' designed to be played between its movements."[1]
[1] https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Wordless_functional_ana...
Problem solving is a well-explored field in experimental psychology. TFA is a bit unfocused, making both some generally supported speculations and some traditional ideas that haven't been supported. A very good survey is the edited volume, The Psychology of Problem Solving (Davidson 2003).
Although TFA doesn't refer to it by name, "insight" problem solving is when you are stuck on something and then suddenly realize the solution. The common explanation for being stuck is "fixation" on the wrong things. In agreement with TFA, there is indication that verbalization supports fixation more than visualization.
I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another person at the company would write books and take credit for his creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only for purpose of communication.
When making visual art, I don’t think in words. Shapes, colors, shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do I translate this to words. I’m not sure what trying to draw by thinking in words would even look like.
Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words provide a good starting point).
Coding ends in “words”, or at least some form of written language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.
Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but they’re not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely different context and origin.
I don’t deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me it’s just one part of the whole stream of conscious.
I’m curious if anyone else feels this way about words?
But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought. The proof is that you can stop your inner words mid-sentence and you still know what you were going to think, because the thought itself takes a few milliseconds, and happens before the words start.
I think a better way to show this, would be that anendophasia [0] is a thing.
Some people have no inner voice, but aren't thoughtless automatons. They can still task-switch the same as everyone else.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/
Or by watching rats solve mazes
> But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought
That seems valid at first, but if look at that premise closely, you'll see that even assuming wordless thoughts always come first, doesn't mean that during the process of thinking they don't give way to words. That is to say, thoughts can be a precursor, but words do offer a framework which you can use structure thought.
That's specially handy for abstract concepts, like individuality, the split of the self and the world, which are fundamental to thought as we understand it through language.
Nothing prevents you from understanding a concept with the help of language and then using the concept by itself, detached from the symbols you used to arrive at it, to think. But that requires a certain effort and intention that maybe is what the article is aiming for.
"the split of the self and the world"
is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an illusion and fundamental error
Before right or wrong, it's a concept, it defines the boundaries of the body. It might well be an illusion, a source of unnecessary suffering, but it's a concept you can understand and reason about. I'm taking about frameworks of thought that comes before any value judgement.
The question reminds me of a quote from Rilke: "There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought".
Been thinking a lot recently about what my thoughts look like. They definitely aren't words (though as I type this, I can imagine hearing myself think ahead to the end of the sentence). The best I can describe it is visualisations - whether that's images of maths notation, 3D rotating models, or a flow/map/block diagram.
One pattern is that I'm a very prolific connection-forming machine.
Exhibit A: The first thing that enters my mind for each word. (OnePlus One) (android pattern unlock) (Islamic State) (unit vector named t) (ich bin) (emoji-blood-type-A) (Latin etymology word root with verily) (https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)
> (ich bin)
Are you a native German speaker? or additional language? (it's an interesting/seemingly-random association)
The rest is similar to my (dyslexic) reading process. From what I can tell, I coped by memorizing the "shape" or image of words and associated them other things/images/sounds/dictionary-definition/feeling/emotions/experiences or some other abstract things I don't know how to describe -- attached metadata, if you will. The biggest issue is words like (is, that, a, etc) since the associations are weak at best, leading to them being disappeared/changed/hallucinated/moved or replaced by others in the same sentence/paragraph. Sometime when it's really messed up, leads to rereading a sentence or paragraph multiple times until the sequence of all of that makes sense.
But sounding out words is an absolute disaster no matter how much I try and fell behind in early grade school until my overwhelming need to not disappoint family, who were getting frustrated with me, kicked in and I developed my coping methods. It takes longer to read and learn new words but the associating and pattern matching resulted in my comprehension and language scores in school being so high no one picked up on how slow I read (or the disaster that reading aloud is) and how poorly I spell as being something off.
My wife was confounded when I told her I don't think in words. For her, it's a one to one correlation.
She had assumed that all people think in this mode. I had assumed that all people think in "thoughts" and went through a separate step to articulate them.
Made both of us aware of a difference in people.
I don't feel vibrations or sensations though, and I definitely don't think in images. I only have a thought level, and it's very independent of any external presentation.
You sound a little like me. I wasn't aware people thought like that until my partner told me her thoughts took the form of a constant stream of well-formed English. My default mode of thinking isn't natural language (though I can force myself to think this way, it's laborious, as the article mentions), nor images (I struggle with visualization), but more like abstract sequences of both logical connections and intuitive feelings.
Reminds me of the description of Peter Scholze as he was coming up with condensed mathematics. Didn't write a thing until he had it all worked out in his head (which is how he always works). Knew if he didn't get it worked out before the weekend he'd never be able to build it up again. Once he worked it out, he was able to retain it for months until finally writing it down.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirm...
In athletics words can be a hindrance, as they add time to the thinking/doing gap.
I’ve been spending time learning meditation, which is essentially not thinking :)
I've certainly noticed a bit of a pattern where programmers who can listen to podcasts or lyrics while they code (I can't; I rely too much on my verbal center for coding) can operate much faster and solve more complex problems than your average bear. They're rare, so I don't have enough data to feel certain, but I have a suspicion that sometimes they're forced into it by living in noisy environments where tuning out the words or thinking without them makes more sense.
I knew my mid-workday naps were productive…
> they didn’t think in words
Does this suggest most people think in words? Really?
When a sophon is trying read your mind
Glad you pointed out Feynman’s experience. The paper and the writing were the work. Oftentimes, I don’t settle on a meaningful, elegant solution until I have tried to explain my thoughts many times. “Eureka!” becomes “oh wait…” and back—a pendulum that eventually settles on a beautiful solution.
Anecdotally, the degree to which one does certain types of thinking can change over time, too.
Around 2020, I decided to try to learn as much as I could about "higher" mathematics in earnest, having basically no background in the subject. Five years later, I have finally read and suffered enough to be able to pick up texts in any of the abstract branches of mathematics and at least understand most of what's being shown/said at a basic level.
More fascinating to me, though, is that this shift in focus has lead to a definite shift in my thinking. My thinking used to be almost hyperlinguistic. Words were my medium of choice, and I had a strong stream of inner linguistic thought running through my head. Now, that inner voice is mostly quiet. I also find that I tend to think about certain situations in terms of abstract "relationship pictures" rather than a descriptive sentence.
I actually kind of miss the old linguistic tendencies I had at times. I'm hoping a shift back into literature helps reestablish some of that.
And yeah, as with all general proclamations that sound nice because they allow us to seemingly boil complexities down to a singular thing, the whole "wiring is thinking" idea isn't true. The truth in that statement is more akin to "human thought is often tool assisted"—and a manner of tools can aid in elaborating thought. Thought and action are not as severed as we tend to think.
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