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Speaking just for myself, language is thought and thought is language. I've talked to other people about their inner monologues (or lack of one) and everyone ha

by mwfunk 10y ago

Speaking just for myself, language is thought and thought is language. I've talked to other people about their inner monologues (or lack of one) and everyone has different experiences (or different perceptions of similar experiences, a la the blind men and the elephant). Unless I have articulated a thought in my head in terms of language, I don't feel like I have thought of anything at all. My nonverbal "thoughts" are just a mishmash of emotions, memories, images, sensory input, reflexive reactions to things, and pseudorandom associations that pop up occasionally. If other people can think in depth about abstract concepts through some means other than imagining words to describe those concepts, I'm either very very jealous, or they don't mean the same thing I do by words like "thought" and "thinking". In the same way that we use language to serialize ideas from one person to another, my own mind uses language to communicate with my own lower-level cognitive processes. Those low-level processes are the real sources of thought, but without language to interpret what bubbles up from that level, and without language to steer thinking at that level, I would lose the ability to debug my own brain (root out biases, play devil's advocate against myself, examine my own mental state, make good life choices, understand other people's points of view, etc.). I don't know if this applies to anyone but me, but without using language as a tool for reasoning, I feel like I would 100% be a product of my environment, and not someone who is capable of imagining different paths that my life could take and then going down one of the non-default paths (which is good, because otherwise I'm pretty sure I would've been dead or in jail by age 30 :).

ktRolster 10y ago
Speaking just for myself, language is thought and thought is language. I used to be like that, but then I learned a second language, and learned to think in the second language. Soon, I realized their was a place in my mind where thoughts were formed, before being verbalized (although the verbalization happened so fast and automatically before that I didn't notice it). Then I learned to trust that non-verbalized part of my brain, and I could think faster by not using words. Another way to see the same effect while not going to the effort is while playing a game like chess; you can think "she moves here, then I move there, the she moves there...." going with words through all the variations. But if you just look at the variations without putting them into words, you can go faster.

by mwfunk 10y ago

ktRolster 10y ago

Speaking just for myself, language is thought and thought is language. I used to be like that, but then I learned a second language, and learned to think in the second language. Soon, I realized their was a place in my mind where thoughts were formed, before being verbalized (although the verbalization happened so fast and automatically before that I didn't notice it). Then I learned to trust that non-verbalized part of my brain, and I could think faster by not using words. Another way to see the same effect while not going to the effort is while playing a game like chess; you can think "she moves here, then I move there, the she moves there...." going with words through all the variations. But if you just look at the variations without putting them into words, you can go faster.