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When is it better to think without words?

284 points by Curiositry 1y ago

mjunyeopkim 1y ago
[dead]
wrp 1y ago
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.
- mellosouls 1y ago
  It's quite frustrating when writers like the author - who seem quite thoughtful and potentially useful to read - appear to pontificate on a field without seemingly being aware of it; using a great mathematician's thoughts on it as a springboard doesn't justify it as its not his field of expertise either. The essay might be more useful grounded with references to the sort of thing you link to.
supportengineer 1y ago
When a sophon is trying read your mind
daxfohl 1y ago
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-confirms-peter-scholze-proof-20210728/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirm...
stavros 1y ago
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.
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  > 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.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    "the split of the self and the world" is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an illusion and fundamental error
    - gchamonlive 1y ago
      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.
- shakna 1y ago
  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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/
chrisweekly 1y ago
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".
quacked 1y ago
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.
- larrry 1y ago
  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.
- Liftyee 1y ago
  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.
- EGreg 1y ago
  Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?
  - 1y ago
larrry 1y ago
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?
- liqilin1567 1y ago
  Is it like this?: It's one of those things you can't really describe - you just feel it
  - larrry 1y ago
    Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process, I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good, did I find morels this season, does the code work as required)
stephenlf 1y ago
I knew my mid-workday naps were productive…
stephenlf 1y ago
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.
apricot13 1y ago
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.
- verisimi 1y ago
  > 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. Hmm.... I have to say, while I like the idea of being unlimited by words - the state of 'purer communion' is one I have frequently sought - I think it is far more likely that what is going on is that you mind is projecting 'likeness'. Both people in the conversation imagine that the other 'gets it' - a delusory and false assumption. After all, no one knows what goes on in another's mind - we simply don't have access. I think talking is our means of 'ideas exchange', and that the greatest connections comes after lots of conversations, where one can (rightly) assume a shared understanding because one knows the terms are more-or-less lined up. Language is an unavoidable throttling valve to me. And additionally, it's not the brain that's actually registering value/meaning either for me. You can call it the subconscious if you like, but I prefer 'soul' as that sense of oneself that is always there, has innate knowing, etc. Which is to say, there really is no way to express the depth of experience to another. But this is fine.
mathattack 1y ago
In athletics words can be a hindrance, as they add time to the thinking/doing gap.
cnees 1y ago
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.
- stOneskull 1y ago
  do you find music without lyrics helps? i do for sure. a bit of bach or beethoven, or some dub kinda music.
Liftyee 1y ago
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/ https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)
- 1659447091 1y ago
  > (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.
Aargau 1y ago
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.
- shitter 1y ago
  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.
  - v7n 1y ago
    Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble remembering for example number sequences.
- deleted 1y ago
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voidhorse 1y ago
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.
karmakaze 1y ago
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.
- mewpmewp2 1y ago
  I would say that this is the intuitive, naive way of starting coding if no one has taught you coding or you haven't had to care about maintainability or other people reading your code.
  - karmakaze 1y ago
    We could today give it to an AI and tell it to name the variables after manually renaming the input and output ones.
  - karmakaze 11mo ago
    Here's an example of a recent HN post for illustration[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777
geoffbp 1y ago
I’ve been spending time learning meditation, which is essentially not thinking :)
est 1y ago
> they didn’t think in words Does this suggest most people think in words? Really?
petethomas 1y ago
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_when_the_wind_blows/portrait_of_shoenberg_1967-xx-xx_a_hans_keller_programme.mp3 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_analysis https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Wordless_functional_ana...
ethersteeds 1y ago
On that note! I am an intensely verbal person, with words and narrative as my primary mode of thought. This essay and discussion reminds me of a desire I've felt before to develop the muscles, so to speak, of thinking without words. Does anyone have any advice or techniques to that end?
- pramodbiligiri 1y ago
  Perhaps do activities like manipulating physical objects (carpentry?, Lego, Rubiks cube), games like Tetris, or complex body movements where verbalization won't be of much use. Or standard Quantitative Reasoning problems from entrance exams. A few years back, the wordcel vs shape rotator debate/binary was being discussed online: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?r=53sw https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?r=53sw I'd come across this book "Visual Thinking in Mathematics" (https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-Giaquinto/dp/0199285942 https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-Gia...) which goes into some of this.
Rajni07 1y ago
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blubber 1y ago
Isn't it already too late, when you ask yourself that question?
- noduerme 1y ago
  Like, that's funny. But asking yourself that question might just be a step toward answering it. I grew up around a lot of autistic kids who had to train themselves to verbalize anything, but also to restrain themselves from verbalizing random thoughts. Then you reach an age where you start to spew out everything in words, and you have to learn that putting something into language too soon can strip it of its actual meaning and ossify it before you have a chance to fully examine it.
noduerme 1y ago
>> the moment when the solution to a problem emerges “in the shower” unexpectedly after a long period of unconscious incubation. A lot of responses here seem to place this chain-of-thought on a spectrum between verbal and "vibe". I don't think that solving problems pre-verbally is actually at odds with verbal intelligence, or that a person must by definition be better at one than another. The pregnant, mathematical, nonverbal thought in the shower is only really useful if it can be organized and stated rationally at some point later. Likewise, the wordy explanation is useless without a well-reasoned theory it's explaining. For me, I find that dreams help bridge this gap. Oftentimes I'll be struggling with a difficult mental model of a problem, and thinking of a lot of math in my head in the shower. But when I sleep, I'll have some dream that acts as a metaphor for the problem. Say, e.g. I'm thinking about how to time two independent processes to deconflict some data. I might have a dream about missing a flight because the plane already arrived but was announced at the wrong gate, and I'm running across the airport. Then I wake up and see the answer to the problem. Moreover, I then see how to explain the problem I just solved, using a metaphor that most people can understand. As far as actually explaining it formally in writing, I usually test the code a zillion ways first and then write the documentation.
helloworld4728 1y ago
A way that can be walked is not The Way A name that can be named is not The Name Tao is both Named and Nameless As Nameless, it is the origin of all things As Named, it is the mother of all things A mind free of thought, merged within itself, beholds the essence of Tao A mind filled with thought, identified with its own perceptions, beholds the mere forms of this world
EigenLord 1y ago
I've always felt that you can't think in anything besides thought. Words, images, symbols, etc, are all side-effects. They absolutely bend back and influence the thought process, but they are always secondary and indirect. Thought itself is ineffable.
boje 1y ago
I'm not sure if I understand correctly about "thinking in concrete English sentences or words" as other comments have mentioned, so here's a description of what happens to me: I can visualize things in my mind, and it's almost as if I was playing a video or rotating 3D models in Blender, but they happen as if they were at a 70-80% brightness level. I can verbalize my thoughts or words I am reading from some text as if someone were speaking into my head, but that's not how I "comprehend" them, especially if they have more than a negligible amount of complexity. They have to be converted into a set of visualizations, however vague or abstract, somewhat resembling what GenAI does. This has a noticeable delay and I almost always lose track of, say, what a lecturer is saying in real time. Because of this, I almost always prefer having text or a prerecorded video being available. I can "render" text in my head too, as if they were being written down in a word processor or like a screenshot of a blogpost, but it's still an image. I find difficulty trying to manipulate any symbols in my head. Mental math or algebra with more than a miniscule amount of rigor is hard for me to do and I always require pen and paper as a support. Trying to do this requires me to "graphically" move symbols around a written equation, and because of my usual scatterbrained-ness, the context quickly breaks down and evaporates. I have to maintain that context with paper. I find it easier, however, to visualize an algorithm or similar things in my head as a video-animation "playback". Here's an example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animation_250x250.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animat... - This is exactly what occurs in my brain when I think of tree rotations (extended to larger tree heights), and was the only, singular useful thing for me in the entire wikipedia article on tree rotations. As an aside, the imagery that video GenAI generates, with spontaneous, random pop-ins of objects is eerily similar to what happens in my dreams and in my mental imagery. Second, I'm not particularly fond of reading books, literature or poetry, but I do find myself semi-regularly reading long blogposts or texts if they interest me, and watching long-form videos or podcasts.
- boje 1y ago
  Another aside - I do end up spending a lot of time working on the presentation of a thing like trying to polish things like user interfaces, vector or raster graphics, typesetting, CSS and other visual-ish stuff. It's something I've tried to suppress to actually get functional aspects of a work done. Admittedly, this is the more fun part of a work for me.
bnferguson 1y ago
The book "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity" has a large thread exploring this among both historical and contemporary mathematicians. How people who seem to have an almost supernatural gift for math are often just able to "see" more clearly. Not in equations or words, but images. Also discussing the development of the ability/discipline and the difficulties in transcribing what you now intuitively know but need to describe to other mathematicians so they can understand (notation/equations). It's a book that's stuck in my head since reading it and wondering how to apply some of this to other problem spaces.
Ozzie_osman 1y ago
The way I think about it is that words constrain a problem. Constraining a problem makes it easier to understand, remember, and convey. But it makes it harder to have, well, unconstrained, creative thoughts about it. Structure can be both good and bad. This is true of any abstraction.
arkensaw 1y ago
!
netdevphoenix 1y ago
Thinking without words has 2 main problems imo: - You are unable to verify that your ideas are logical and not just feelings (i.e. the feeling of something being logical, the feeling of x and y being related, etc). The confusion between fact, logic and feelings is all so common in ASC - You are unable to get a third party view on those ideas (language is the only form of telepathy we are capable of)
- a5c11 1y ago
  You definitely should read the whole article. The author says that wrapping ideas in words at later stages is important to complete the process of inventing. It's all about the initial processing, to free your mind from language's constraints, because language is indeed constraining. It feels like multiplexing numerous parallel streams of thoughts into a single spoken channel. You have to do it at some point, but only when you are confident you know what those parallel streams carry. Otherwise you will get mess.
fjfaase 1y ago
In the family of my maternal grandfather there are many individuals who are much better at science but have difficulty with language (often in combination with dyslexia) in school. I have some evidence that those individuals (myself included) have a significant higher non-verbal IQ (20 to 30 points) than verbal IQ as categorized by the WISC-V intelligence tests. I often struggle to express my ideas with words. When I think about algorithms it is often in 'abstract' visual images. While developing software, I find myself searching for functions/methods a lot, because I often forget their names or the order of the parameters. Academic performance is strongly correlated with the verbal components of intelligence. I wonder if there are other people who know that their non-verbal IQ is measurable higher than their verbal IQ.
- blueflow 1y ago
  IQ is the measurement, not the real thing, so don't focus too much on it. The vocabulary is limited by what the recipients will understand, while your thoughts are not. My favourite example: Complex thoughts can have many forms of negative results, but there isn't widespread vocabulary other than "i don't know" to express it.
- giva 1y ago
  I can relate. May ask you how your relation with AI tools is? I tend to find myself translating my mental model into natural language, to have a machine convert it into code, then reading that code back to mental model. It's unnerving. It feels much more natural writing my mental model directly into code.
  - fjfaase 1y ago
    I am not using AI tools for code generation. I have only used it for 'querying' information, for example, when I started to work with Device Trees and Yocto for embedded Linux development. I am happy with IntelliSense. Yes, AI tools can very quickly generate some simple app, but I do not believe it will work for more complex problems.
  - bored 1y ago
    I think I can relate with you. It’s unnerving for me to see how poorly written my initial natural language interpretation appears. AI reassures me it’s not also incoherent by generating code that does what I expect.
cttet 1y ago
I rarely think with words, when I think with words it is like 20x slower, it is more robust, but in that case I would use pen and paper for that.
WillAdams 1y ago
Yeah, after a lot of thinking and visualization and brain-storming, a lot of which was the sort of formless void of the wordless prayers of St. John of the Cross and what I would reach for in Buddhist meditation (but never managed to hold on to for long if I even reached it --- given that I was regularly hit with a bamboo can before being told to go sweep up in the bookbinding shop, probably not....) I've managed to make a bit of progress on a project to the point of an actual concept realized in 3D in my head --- the problem has been that getting from mental image to 3D model to files which will can actually be cut on a CNC has been nightmarish --- the 3D CAM tools which I can afford either won't use the tooling which I wish to use in the way I need to use it, or one which did converted a 1" x 1" x 2" test section into a ~140MB file after churning for ~18 minutes (I'll need for this to exist in multiples and to be as much as 48 inches long). Since then, I've been working on a personal project to cut this, but I've been running into issues with the complexity of CSG objects.... tried using linear/rotate_extrude but they rotate the 2D tool representation as if it were being used w/ a 5-axis CNC, but most people (incl. me) use a 3-axis....
KolibriFly 1y ago
For most of us, writing remains the training ground. But it's also humbling to realize that the moment we try to articulate something, we're already losing a ton of nuance
habosa 1y ago
On this topic I strongly recommend “The World I Live In” by Hellen Keller. In some of the essays she describes how before she was taught to communicate she had no inner monologue and didn’t even recognize herself as human. She was surprised to learn that the dog was not able to understand her. Language essentially gave her her mind, although the book does go into great detail about the things she perceived about the world through touch and exploration that few others would.
Viliam1234 1y ago
People find out that we actually think in different ways. Five minutes later: Someone writes an article about why his way of thinking is superior.
- vict7 1y ago
  Yep, as someone whose brain is biased towards a higher verbal IQ and thinks primarily in words, a lot of the replies to this post are amusing. I have genuine curiosity about those that claim to think in “pure abstract thoughts” or whatever. I don’t believe my way of thinking is superior. I’m certain that my constant internal monologue is strongly correlated to my tendency to ruminate. Or, I struggle with concepts that do not translate well into a verbal format. People apparently can’t pass up the opportunity to disparage those with a different thinking style.
  - saltcured 1y ago
    FWIW, I have no inner monologue, and think I ruminate the same ways I think. It only has verbal content if I am remembering a recent conversation or "simulating" an anticipated one.
    - vict7 1y ago
      That is truly fascinating to me. My rumination takes a verbal form almost all the time… but it is also often related to past or anticipated conversations or interactions. With no internal monologue, you can still hear words inside your head, but it would be a more conscious effort rather than an automatic, constant process?
      - saltcured 1y ago
        I rarely "hear" utterances in my mind, but that may be more aphantasia than the lack of monologue... For a recollection, auditory aspects might be present for a high stress moment, such as someone emoting a mere word or syllable. It's more like a static vignette with a brief sound clip. It could also be non-verbal sounds. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but general speech recollection for me is something like a train of AST fragments that I just sort of know/feel. These are some intermediate representation of verbal content, not the serialized phonemes or lexemes, but also not my core thought mode either, which is somehow non-verbal semantics. I also get this train of AST fragments from reading or from trying to compose text in my head. These verbal units are larger than words, shorter than sentences or paragraphs, and I'm not sure they always align with what you would call grammatical phrases either. This train can have a timing aspect to it which correlates with the remembered or planned cadence of speech, a bit like some cue sheet. Or it could correlate with written structures. Ironically, I like poetry but have no appreciation for "spoken word". To me, the structure of rhyme and meter is felt almost spatially when I read the page in silence. Hearing it aloud is distracting, not very enjoyable, and also much harder for me to absorb the content. It's as if I don't have enough short-term memory duration to buffer what is being said and assemble the structures I want. I like music with vocals, but I similarly don't absorb the verbal meaning that much. I like them for the musicality, tone, and emotional content. If I don't read the whole lyric on a page, I might never fully appreciate the verbal content. Weirdly, I can remember lyrics and sing along, even if I haven't read them and fully absorbed them. It's like I have recall cued to the music, but I would not be able to recite those same lines if I wasn't hearing the song to cue me for each little bit.
Marshferm 1y ago
Words are the illusion, they neither exist nor are they directly linked to thoughts. Words are "sportscasting." All thinking is done without words. This is empirical both from the new neurosciences of dynamics/oscillations (see Buzsaki) and neurobiological linguistics (see MIT Language Lab quote below). This is very likely how LLMs have nothing to do with intelligence or thinking. Thoughts are wordless processes built from Sharp Wave Ripples that flow across the entirety of the brain and probably interact ecologically with the outside. Where they are formed, how they interact and integrate with the senses, emotions, memories, motor, simulations and in what order to make action-syntax is still unknown. Words have nothing to do with them. “We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
dapperdrake 1y ago
> When is it better to think without words? Claim: Lambda almost always.
DaveZale 1y ago
try the nyt connections puzzle for a couple of weeks. When you get better at it, you're associating sets of words without thinking in words. The answers just pop up.
7402 1y ago
Am I the only one like this? In my long programming career I feel I did most of my programming nonverbally - large programs always felt I was sculpting a big chunk of stone rather than writing an essay. Once it was done, I had no problem describing it, discussing it, documenting it, etc. But the actual task of programming felt like it was going on the non-verbal part of my brain. These were mostly big programs, by the way: hard-real-time, or machine control, or threaded C++, or scientific data processing. I found my style to be generally incompatible with pair-programming - except for pair debugging once my or someone else's code was written, that I did find useful.
rufus_foreman 1y ago
"My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself." -- William S. Burroughs
Rileyen 1y ago
Sometimes my mind feels the clearest when it’s quiet. Ideas just keep coming when I’m in the shower, zoning out, or about to fall asleep. But the moment I sit down at my computer to write them down, they vanish. Does this happen to anyone else? Or do you need to speak or write things out to get your thoughts moving?

284 points by Curiositry 1y ago

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wrp 1y ago

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.

mellosouls 1y ago
It's quite frustrating when writers like the author - who seem quite thoughtful and potentially useful to read - appear to pontificate on a field without seemingly being aware of it; using a great mathematician's thoughts on it as a springboard doesn't justify it as its not his field of expertise either. The essay might be more useful grounded with references to the sort of thing you link to.

supportengineer 1y ago

When a sophon is trying read your mind

daxfohl 1y ago

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-confirms-peter-scholze-proof-20210728/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirm...

stavros 1y ago

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.

gchamonlive 1y ago
> 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.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  "the split of the self and the world" is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an illusion and fundamental error
  - gchamonlive 1y ago
    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.
shakna 1y ago
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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/

chrisweekly 1y ago

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".

quacked 1y ago

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.

larrry 1y ago
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.
Liftyee 1y ago
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.
EGreg 1y ago
Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?
- 1y ago

larrry 1y ago

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?

liqilin1567 1y ago
Is it like this?: It's one of those things you can't really describe - you just feel it
- larrry 1y ago
  Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process, I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good, did I find morels this season, does the code work as required)

stephenlf 1y ago

I knew my mid-workday naps were productive…

stephenlf 1y ago

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.

apricot13 1y ago

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.

verisimi 1y ago
> 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. Hmm.... I have to say, while I like the idea of being unlimited by words - the state of 'purer communion' is one I have frequently sought - I think it is far more likely that what is going on is that you mind is projecting 'likeness'. Both people in the conversation imagine that the other 'gets it' - a delusory and false assumption. After all, no one knows what goes on in another's mind - we simply don't have access. I think talking is our means of 'ideas exchange', and that the greatest connections comes after lots of conversations, where one can (rightly) assume a shared understanding because one knows the terms are more-or-less lined up. Language is an unavoidable throttling valve to me. And additionally, it's not the brain that's actually registering value/meaning either for me. You can call it the subconscious if you like, but I prefer 'soul' as that sense of oneself that is always there, has innate knowing, etc. Which is to say, there really is no way to express the depth of experience to another. But this is fine.

mathattack 1y ago

In athletics words can be a hindrance, as they add time to the thinking/doing gap.

cnees 1y ago

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.

stOneskull 1y ago
do you find music without lyrics helps? i do for sure. a bit of bach or beethoven, or some dub kinda music.

Liftyee 1y ago

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/ https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)

1659447091 1y ago
> (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.

Aargau 1y ago

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.

shitter 1y ago
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.
- v7n 1y ago
  Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble remembering for example number sequences.
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voidhorse 1y ago

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.

karmakaze 1y ago

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.

mewpmewp2 1y ago
I would say that this is the intuitive, naive way of starting coding if no one has taught you coding or you haven't had to care about maintainability or other people reading your code.
- karmakaze 1y ago
  We could today give it to an AI and tell it to name the variables after manually renaming the input and output ones.
- karmakaze 11mo ago
  Here's an example of a recent HN post for illustration[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777

geoffbp 1y ago

I’ve been spending time learning meditation, which is essentially not thinking :)

est 1y ago

> they didn’t think in words Does this suggest most people think in words? Really?

petethomas 1y ago

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_when_the_wind_blows/portrait_of_shoenberg_1967-xx-xx_a_hans_keller_programme.mp3 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_analysis https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Wordless_functional_ana...

ethersteeds 1y ago

On that note! I am an intensely verbal person, with words and narrative as my primary mode of thought. This essay and discussion reminds me of a desire I've felt before to develop the muscles, so to speak, of thinking without words. Does anyone have any advice or techniques to that end?

pramodbiligiri 1y ago
Perhaps do activities like manipulating physical objects (carpentry?, Lego, Rubiks cube), games like Tetris, or complex body movements where verbalization won't be of much use. Or standard Quantitative Reasoning problems from entrance exams. A few years back, the wordcel vs shape rotator debate/binary was being discussed online: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?r=53sw https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?r=53sw I'd come across this book "Visual Thinking in Mathematics" (https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-Giaquinto/dp/0199285942 https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-Gia...) which goes into some of this.

Rajni07 1y ago

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blubber 1y ago

Isn't it already too late, when you ask yourself that question?

noduerme 1y ago
Like, that's funny. But asking yourself that question might just be a step toward answering it. I grew up around a lot of autistic kids who had to train themselves to verbalize anything, but also to restrain themselves from verbalizing random thoughts. Then you reach an age where you start to spew out everything in words, and you have to learn that putting something into language too soon can strip it of its actual meaning and ossify it before you have a chance to fully examine it.

noduerme 1y ago

>> the moment when the solution to a problem emerges “in the shower” unexpectedly after a long period of unconscious incubation. A lot of responses here seem to place this chain-of-thought on a spectrum between verbal and "vibe". I don't think that solving problems pre-verbally is actually at odds with verbal intelligence, or that a person must by definition be better at one than another. The pregnant, mathematical, nonverbal thought in the shower is only really useful if it can be organized and stated rationally at some point later. Likewise, the wordy explanation is useless without a well-reasoned theory it's explaining. For me, I find that dreams help bridge this gap. Oftentimes I'll be struggling with a difficult mental model of a problem, and thinking of a lot of math in my head in the shower. But when I sleep, I'll have some dream that acts as a metaphor for the problem. Say, e.g. I'm thinking about how to time two independent processes to deconflict some data. I might have a dream about missing a flight because the plane already arrived but was announced at the wrong gate, and I'm running across the airport. Then I wake up and see the answer to the problem. Moreover, I then see how to explain the problem I just solved, using a metaphor that most people can understand. As far as actually explaining it formally in writing, I usually test the code a zillion ways first and then write the documentation.

helloworld4728 1y ago

A way that can be walked is not The Way A name that can be named is not The Name Tao is both Named and Nameless As Nameless, it is the origin of all things As Named, it is the mother of all things A mind free of thought, merged within itself, beholds the essence of Tao A mind filled with thought, identified with its own perceptions, beholds the mere forms of this world

EigenLord 1y ago

I've always felt that you can't think in anything besides thought. Words, images, symbols, etc, are all side-effects. They absolutely bend back and influence the thought process, but they are always secondary and indirect. Thought itself is ineffable.

boje 1y ago

I'm not sure if I understand correctly about "thinking in concrete English sentences or words" as other comments have mentioned, so here's a description of what happens to me: I can visualize things in my mind, and it's almost as if I was playing a video or rotating 3D models in Blender, but they happen as if they were at a 70-80% brightness level. I can verbalize my thoughts or words I am reading from some text as if someone were speaking into my head, but that's not how I "comprehend" them, especially if they have more than a negligible amount of complexity. They have to be converted into a set of visualizations, however vague or abstract, somewhat resembling what GenAI does. This has a noticeable delay and I almost always lose track of, say, what a lecturer is saying in real time. Because of this, I almost always prefer having text or a prerecorded video being available. I can "render" text in my head too, as if they were being written down in a word processor or like a screenshot of a blogpost, but it's still an image. I find difficulty trying to manipulate any symbols in my head. Mental math or algebra with more than a miniscule amount of rigor is hard for me to do and I always require pen and paper as a support. Trying to do this requires me to "graphically" move symbols around a written equation, and because of my usual scatterbrained-ness, the context quickly breaks down and evaporates. I have to maintain that context with paper. I find it easier, however, to visualize an algorithm or similar things in my head as a video-animation "playback". Here's an example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animation_250x250.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animat... - This is exactly what occurs in my brain when I think of tree rotations (extended to larger tree heights), and was the only, singular useful thing for me in the entire wikipedia article on tree rotations. As an aside, the imagery that video GenAI generates, with spontaneous, random pop-ins of objects is eerily similar to what happens in my dreams and in my mental imagery. Second, I'm not particularly fond of reading books, literature or poetry, but I do find myself semi-regularly reading long blogposts or texts if they interest me, and watching long-form videos or podcasts.

boje 1y ago
Another aside - I do end up spending a lot of time working on the presentation of a thing like trying to polish things like user interfaces, vector or raster graphics, typesetting, CSS and other visual-ish stuff. It's something I've tried to suppress to actually get functional aspects of a work done. Admittedly, this is the more fun part of a work for me.

bnferguson 1y ago

The book "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity" has a large thread exploring this among both historical and contemporary mathematicians. How people who seem to have an almost supernatural gift for math are often just able to "see" more clearly. Not in equations or words, but images. Also discussing the development of the ability/discipline and the difficulties in transcribing what you now intuitively know but need to describe to other mathematicians so they can understand (notation/equations). It's a book that's stuck in my head since reading it and wondering how to apply some of this to other problem spaces.

Ozzie_osman 1y ago

The way I think about it is that words constrain a problem. Constraining a problem makes it easier to understand, remember, and convey. But it makes it harder to have, well, unconstrained, creative thoughts about it. Structure can be both good and bad. This is true of any abstraction.

arkensaw 1y ago

netdevphoenix 1y ago

Thinking without words has 2 main problems imo: - You are unable to verify that your ideas are logical and not just feelings (i.e. the feeling of something being logical, the feeling of x and y being related, etc). The confusion between fact, logic and feelings is all so common in ASC - You are unable to get a third party view on those ideas (language is the only form of telepathy we are capable of)

a5c11 1y ago
You definitely should read the whole article. The author says that wrapping ideas in words at later stages is important to complete the process of inventing. It's all about the initial processing, to free your mind from language's constraints, because language is indeed constraining. It feels like multiplexing numerous parallel streams of thoughts into a single spoken channel. You have to do it at some point, but only when you are confident you know what those parallel streams carry. Otherwise you will get mess.

fjfaase 1y ago

In the family of my maternal grandfather there are many individuals who are much better at science but have difficulty with language (often in combination with dyslexia) in school. I have some evidence that those individuals (myself included) have a significant higher non-verbal IQ (20 to 30 points) than verbal IQ as categorized by the WISC-V intelligence tests. I often struggle to express my ideas with words. When I think about algorithms it is often in 'abstract' visual images. While developing software, I find myself searching for functions/methods a lot, because I often forget their names or the order of the parameters. Academic performance is strongly correlated with the verbal components of intelligence. I wonder if there are other people who know that their non-verbal IQ is measurable higher than their verbal IQ.

blueflow 1y ago
IQ is the measurement, not the real thing, so don't focus too much on it. The vocabulary is limited by what the recipients will understand, while your thoughts are not. My favourite example: Complex thoughts can have many forms of negative results, but there isn't widespread vocabulary other than "i don't know" to express it.
giva 1y ago
I can relate. May ask you how your relation with AI tools is? I tend to find myself translating my mental model into natural language, to have a machine convert it into code, then reading that code back to mental model. It's unnerving. It feels much more natural writing my mental model directly into code.
- fjfaase 1y ago
  I am not using AI tools for code generation. I have only used it for 'querying' information, for example, when I started to work with Device Trees and Yocto for embedded Linux development. I am happy with IntelliSense. Yes, AI tools can very quickly generate some simple app, but I do not believe it will work for more complex problems.
- bored 1y ago
  I think I can relate with you. It’s unnerving for me to see how poorly written my initial natural language interpretation appears. AI reassures me it’s not also incoherent by generating code that does what I expect.

cttet 1y ago

I rarely think with words, when I think with words it is like 20x slower, it is more robust, but in that case I would use pen and paper for that.

WillAdams 1y ago

Yeah, after a lot of thinking and visualization and brain-storming, a lot of which was the sort of formless void of the wordless prayers of St. John of the Cross and what I would reach for in Buddhist meditation (but never managed to hold on to for long if I even reached it --- given that I was regularly hit with a bamboo can before being told to go sweep up in the bookbinding shop, probably not....) I've managed to make a bit of progress on a project to the point of an actual concept realized in 3D in my head --- the problem has been that getting from mental image to 3D model to files which will can actually be cut on a CNC has been nightmarish --- the 3D CAM tools which I can afford either won't use the tooling which I wish to use in the way I need to use it, or one which did converted a 1" x 1" x 2" test section into a ~140MB file after churning for ~18 minutes (I'll need for this to exist in multiples and to be as much as 48 inches long). Since then, I've been working on a personal project to cut this, but I've been running into issues with the complexity of CSG objects.... tried using linear/rotate_extrude but they rotate the 2D tool representation as if it were being used w/ a 5-axis CNC, but most people (incl. me) use a 3-axis....

KolibriFly 1y ago

For most of us, writing remains the training ground. But it's also humbling to realize that the moment we try to articulate something, we're already losing a ton of nuance

habosa 1y ago

On this topic I strongly recommend “The World I Live In” by Hellen Keller. In some of the essays she describes how before she was taught to communicate she had no inner monologue and didn’t even recognize herself as human. She was surprised to learn that the dog was not able to understand her. Language essentially gave her her mind, although the book does go into great detail about the things she perceived about the world through touch and exploration that few others would.

Viliam1234 1y ago

People find out that we actually think in different ways. Five minutes later: Someone writes an article about why his way of thinking is superior.

vict7 1y ago
Yep, as someone whose brain is biased towards a higher verbal IQ and thinks primarily in words, a lot of the replies to this post are amusing. I have genuine curiosity about those that claim to think in “pure abstract thoughts” or whatever. I don’t believe my way of thinking is superior. I’m certain that my constant internal monologue is strongly correlated to my tendency to ruminate. Or, I struggle with concepts that do not translate well into a verbal format. People apparently can’t pass up the opportunity to disparage those with a different thinking style.
- saltcured 1y ago
  FWIW, I have no inner monologue, and think I ruminate the same ways I think. It only has verbal content if I am remembering a recent conversation or "simulating" an anticipated one.
  - vict7 1y ago
    That is truly fascinating to me. My rumination takes a verbal form almost all the time… but it is also often related to past or anticipated conversations or interactions. With no internal monologue, you can still hear words inside your head, but it would be a more conscious effort rather than an automatic, constant process?
    - saltcured 1y ago
      I rarely "hear" utterances in my mind, but that may be more aphantasia than the lack of monologue... For a recollection, auditory aspects might be present for a high stress moment, such as someone emoting a mere word or syllable. It's more like a static vignette with a brief sound clip. It could also be non-verbal sounds. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but general speech recollection for me is something like a train of AST fragments that I just sort of know/feel. These are some intermediate representation of verbal content, not the serialized phonemes or lexemes, but also not my core thought mode either, which is somehow non-verbal semantics. I also get this train of AST fragments from reading or from trying to compose text in my head. These verbal units are larger than words, shorter than sentences or paragraphs, and I'm not sure they always align with what you would call grammatical phrases either. This train can have a timing aspect to it which correlates with the remembered or planned cadence of speech, a bit like some cue sheet. Or it could correlate with written structures. Ironically, I like poetry but have no appreciation for "spoken word". To me, the structure of rhyme and meter is felt almost spatially when I read the page in silence. Hearing it aloud is distracting, not very enjoyable, and also much harder for me to absorb the content. It's as if I don't have enough short-term memory duration to buffer what is being said and assemble the structures I want. I like music with vocals, but I similarly don't absorb the verbal meaning that much. I like them for the musicality, tone, and emotional content. If I don't read the whole lyric on a page, I might never fully appreciate the verbal content. Weirdly, I can remember lyrics and sing along, even if I haven't read them and fully absorbed them. It's like I have recall cued to the music, but I would not be able to recite those same lines if I wasn't hearing the song to cue me for each little bit.

Marshferm 1y ago

Words are the illusion, they neither exist nor are they directly linked to thoughts. Words are "sportscasting." All thinking is done without words. This is empirical both from the new neurosciences of dynamics/oscillations (see Buzsaki) and neurobiological linguistics (see MIT Language Lab quote below). This is very likely how LLMs have nothing to do with intelligence or thinking. Thoughts are wordless processes built from Sharp Wave Ripples that flow across the entirety of the brain and probably interact ecologically with the outside. Where they are formed, how they interact and integrate with the senses, emotions, memories, motor, simulations and in what order to make action-syntax is still unknown. Words have nothing to do with them. “We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024

dapperdrake 1y ago

> When is it better to think without words? Claim: Lambda almost always.

DaveZale 1y ago

try the nyt connections puzzle for a couple of weeks. When you get better at it, you're associating sets of words without thinking in words. The answers just pop up.

7402 1y ago

Am I the only one like this? In my long programming career I feel I did most of my programming nonverbally - large programs always felt I was sculpting a big chunk of stone rather than writing an essay. Once it was done, I had no problem describing it, discussing it, documenting it, etc. But the actual task of programming felt like it was going on the non-verbal part of my brain. These were mostly big programs, by the way: hard-real-time, or machine control, or threaded C++, or scientific data processing. I found my style to be generally incompatible with pair-programming - except for pair debugging once my or someone else's code was written, that I did find useful.

rufus_foreman 1y ago

"My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself." -- William S. Burroughs

Rileyen 1y ago

Sometimes my mind feels the clearest when it’s quiet. Ideas just keep coming when I’m in the shower, zoning out, or about to fall asleep. But the moment I sit down at my computer to write them down, they vanish. Does this happen to anyone else? Or do you need to speak or write things out to get your thoughts moving?