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Nobody thinks in English or any language. I know this, because I actually thought about the problem you are describing when I was a child of about 8 - I was fac

Nobody thinks in English or any language. I know this, because I actually thought about the problem you are describing when I was a child of about 8 - I was faced with the problem because some guy said he thinks in words. I realised that I didn't think in words, but in concepts. Later, when I was much older, I realised that parts of my thinking seemed to be words - but just seemed. With some effort, it's possible to remove the words from the thinking and just think in concepts - the words are automatically placed on your thoughts, but you are not thinking in them. Let me explain again : You have a thought, and then the words matching that thought are created. Then you reprocess those words as input. You can also skip the reprocessing step, but for that you have to avoid a fatal mistake - the replacement for words is not images. Rather, you need to simply not try to inteprete the concepts you are working with in your head. For example, if I say 'empathy', you know what it means without a dictionary definition of empathy. If I write out a sentence - the man felt empathy with his begging son, you can imagine the situation without needing words or pictures, and only when the entire concept is finished do you convert it into words. I.e, in the sentence above, you are not breaking empathy down, you are breaking the entire sentence down. There is a simple way to discover how to do this - think of some random object. Then think of something related to that object, then something else related to it. For example Book, Page, Letters, Reader. And so on. Just go through a list of interconnected things, but as you do so, try actively to avoid putting words on the concepts. After a while, also try not putting pictures either. You should see your thinking speed up significantly as you improve.

palish 18y ago
That's remarkable. This is exactly the sort of information I hoped I would be fortunate enough to receive. I want to say "write more", but I'm not sure there is anything left to say. But you should definitely write a blog post about this, if you're interested. I find it interesting that you discovered this at such a young age. Maybe that's one reason it's so natural for you not to think in a language. By the way, roughly how fast do you read? (Extremely fast, average, very slow, etc.)
jd 18y ago
How can you not attach a picture to a word or concept? And if you do not attach a picture to something - what do you see? Tennis. So, did you see a racket, people playing tennis or something else as you read the word? And if not, what did happen as you skimmed from paragraph to paragraph? edit: Hmm. I just realized that when I read a list of words [ball, car, frisbee] I don't visualize anything, but when I think of any of the words individually I do visualize. Even when just writing down a simple list. That's peculiar. edit 2: It can only mean one thing - that when reading you don't think at all about the nouns. Obvious in retrospect. This also explains why you immediately forget a list when just reading over it, but recall perfectly when you visualize each item for an instant. edit 3: > Just go through a list of interconnected things For most people this should be really difficult when listening to music with lyrics, and really easy in a quiet environment. "proving" that you're still using the linguistic part of your brain, even when you're painting a mental picture.
- markessien 18y ago
  When a word or concept 'ends', you will translate it. Before it ends, you can can deal with it without converting it into a picture or a word. For example, the sentence: "there is a lion coming". How do you deal with the sentence. Do you imagine a lion coming? If so, where is the lion coming to? To me or to you? What's the context? There are too many variables, so it's difficult to convert that sentence directly into a picture - but you still understand what it means. It's just a fragment, but it represents some type of mental concept, and this mental concept could be related to danger. As soon as I can complete the fragment: "There is a lion coming up behind your desk", you can immediately convert it away from a a mental concept into pictures or words.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
wheels 18y ago
Nobody thinks in English or any language. That's a pretty bold statement that many eminent linguists and psychologists would disagree with. From my limited knowledge of linguistics what I've gathered is that current thoughts are that people think in symbols, which are often words, and that our abilities to think in many types of abstract thought are directly connected to the language faculty of the brain. Modern linguistics is driving towards there being a fundamental underlying universal grammar in which human languages can be seen as specializations of. The unification of cognitive psychology and linguistics seems to be one of the goals at the moment, and there is the notion that abstract thought and language aren't fundamentally different things.
- markessien 18y ago
  Alright, what about a child who sees cars everyday, but has never been told what a car is. He can still manipulate the car concept as easily as if he knew the word for it. Or some people have very small vocabularies, simply because they have been exposed to a small number of words - does that affect their cognitive skills? Abstract though and language may not be fundamental different things, I don't have enough information to say. But what I am saying in my post is that first you think in a concept, then you translate it into a word. You don't think in the word first. So you can think without needing to translate it into words. The relationship between the words and the concepts is of course strong, because we use words to vocalize the concepts we have. Think about it - what is a word actually? It's just a series of sounds we create in the air. So the sound of a word is quite irrelevant to the concept behind it - the construction of the word is not relevant. Imagine we did not have mouths but instead we communicated by flashing a series of pictures in the air. The part of us that creates these pictures is just a sensory IO appliance like our eyes or mouth. Would that change us in any fundamental way? No - we would construct a similar grammar and communication method with pictures as we would with words. What this implies is that the words themselves are unimportant, they are just representations of concepts we are dealing with. This representation can take many forms - but because we are used to vocalising our thoughts, when we do indeed think, we automatically prepare the things we are dealing with for vocalisation, leading to the illusion that words are actually involved. What happens this is that this vocalisation becomes a sort of feedback loop for your thoughts - you think of concepts, convert them into words, then reabsorb the words to be reprocessed as if someone told you them. That is, they come back in as if you were listening to them from other people. You can observe this sometimes with people when they mutter to themselves. When we rehear our own thoughts, we can sometimes process them better (for reasons I don't know). But this step is optional, one can also do it without reprocessing, though this will fail with very abstract things that actually need concepts alien to us.

palish 18y ago

That's remarkable. This is exactly the sort of information I hoped I would be fortunate enough to receive. I want to say "write more", but I'm not sure there is anything left to say. But you should definitely write a blog post about this, if you're interested. I find it interesting that you discovered this at such a young age. Maybe that's one reason it's so natural for you not to think in a language. By the way, roughly how fast do you read? (Extremely fast, average, very slow, etc.)

jd 18y ago

How can you not attach a picture to a word or concept? And if you do not attach a picture to something - what do you see? Tennis. So, did you see a racket, people playing tennis or something else as you read the word? And if not, what did happen as you skimmed from paragraph to paragraph? edit: Hmm. I just realized that when I read a list of words [ball, car, frisbee] I don't visualize anything, but when I think of any of the words individually I do visualize. Even when just writing down a simple list. That's peculiar. edit 2: It can only mean one thing - that when reading you don't think at all about the nouns. Obvious in retrospect. This also explains why you immediately forget a list when just reading over it, but recall perfectly when you visualize each item for an instant. edit 3: > Just go through a list of interconnected things For most people this should be really difficult when listening to music with lyrics, and really easy in a quiet environment. "proving" that you're still using the linguistic part of your brain, even when you're painting a mental picture.

markessien 18y ago
When a word or concept 'ends', you will translate it. Before it ends, you can can deal with it without converting it into a picture or a word. For example, the sentence: "there is a lion coming". How do you deal with the sentence. Do you imagine a lion coming? If so, where is the lion coming to? To me or to you? What's the context? There are too many variables, so it's difficult to convert that sentence directly into a picture - but you still understand what it means. It's just a fragment, but it represents some type of mental concept, and this mental concept could be related to danger. As soon as I can complete the fragment: "There is a lion coming up behind your desk", you can immediately convert it away from a a mental concept into pictures or words.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

wheels 18y ago

Nobody thinks in English or any language. That's a pretty bold statement that many eminent linguists and psychologists would disagree with. From my limited knowledge of linguistics what I've gathered is that current thoughts are that people think in symbols, which are often words, and that our abilities to think in many types of abstract thought are directly connected to the language faculty of the brain. Modern linguistics is driving towards there being a fundamental underlying universal grammar in which human languages can be seen as specializations of. The unification of cognitive psychology and linguistics seems to be one of the goals at the moment, and there is the notion that abstract thought and language aren't fundamentally different things.

markessien 18y ago
Alright, what about a child who sees cars everyday, but has never been told what a car is. He can still manipulate the car concept as easily as if he knew the word for it. Or some people have very small vocabularies, simply because they have been exposed to a small number of words - does that affect their cognitive skills? Abstract though and language may not be fundamental different things, I don't have enough information to say. But what I am saying in my post is that first you think in a concept, then you translate it into a word. You don't think in the word first. So you can think without needing to translate it into words. The relationship between the words and the concepts is of course strong, because we use words to vocalize the concepts we have. Think about it - what is a word actually? It's just a series of sounds we create in the air. So the sound of a word is quite irrelevant to the concept behind it - the construction of the word is not relevant. Imagine we did not have mouths but instead we communicated by flashing a series of pictures in the air. The part of us that creates these pictures is just a sensory IO appliance like our eyes or mouth. Would that change us in any fundamental way? No - we would construct a similar grammar and communication method with pictures as we would with words. What this implies is that the words themselves are unimportant, they are just representations of concepts we are dealing with. This representation can take many forms - but because we are used to vocalising our thoughts, when we do indeed think, we automatically prepare the things we are dealing with for vocalisation, leading to the illusion that words are actually involved. What happens this is that this vocalisation becomes a sort of feedback loop for your thoughts - you think of concepts, convert them into words, then reabsorb the words to be reprocessed as if someone told you them. That is, they come back in as if you were listening to them from other people. You can observe this sometimes with people when they mutter to themselves. When we rehear our own thoughts, we can sometimes process them better (for reasons I don't know). But this step is optional, one can also do it without reprocessing, though this will fail with very abstract things that actually need concepts alien to us.