Albert Einstein in a letter to Jacques Hadamard: The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thou

Albert Einstein in a letter to Jacques Hadamard: The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined. .... This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others Good thought doesn't have to be linguistic. I speculate that the reason most of us only think in words because it's the way we're taught. We can hear the word "dog" because at a young age we were told about the association from each letter => sound. "What does A sound like? aaaaah". But what if instead our parents and teachers taught us that A was a picture? A could be a red square, and B a purple box. "DOG" might be a pink triangle next to a red and a green circle. Great, then you start to remember those three shapes as one image, just as you remember the sounds "duh" "aww" "guh" as one. And you would learn to assemble them together in all the same ways. I bet you would get very good at it. I think that every verbal system could be represented in a visual system by just replacing each sound with a shape. I actually know of people who do this, who do this fully, just not with boxes and circles. The deaf. They can learn how to read despite having no hearing. They will report that instead of using sounds they think in a combination of hand signs and images. This is the only group of people I know that replaces all sounds with images, but there are a lot of examples of in-betweens too. Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita: The long "a" of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French "a" evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard "g" (vulcanized rubber) and "r" (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal "n", noodle-limp "l", and the ivory-backed hand mirror of an "o" take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French "on" which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Richard Feynman: When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students. tl;dr you can do everything visually. Or you can mash up visuals and words. The problem of "choosing between hierarchies" isn't actually a problem, because just as you can make a sound to decide, you can make a visual symbol. If this were false then you would have to explain how sign language works.