It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:
- People experience their thoughts very differently
- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).
It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.
That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?
Often times i can actively feel how laggy my brain is in wrapping the thoughts in language. Before i even have the words ready, my thinking is already way ahead at the next thought. Not sure if that's just ADHD. I like to think secretly it's because i am not too dumb and actually a quick thinker. On the other hand, my analytical thinking is not that good.
While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for hours, when presented with problems like in school or sometimes even today when someone gives me a riddle, i can also very strongly feel that i am not "thinking" actively. I am just thinking that i should think and often seem to make myself appear as if i was thinking – and that's it. It feels a lot like "fake it till you make it". Often times i have ideas other people call "brilliant" as well, or i seem to have s lot of refreshing takes on things according to others (stated to hide my weirdly self-conscious arrogance), it's not that i actively pursue it. I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain.
> I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain. But maybe, i am truly just mad.
I have a huge quote "Notes" from all the books i've read. This is the first time a quote has made it into the notes that has come from a random comment on the internet. I think i'll carry this quote in the back of my minds eye for the rest of my life.
I'm clearly not in your exact case, but having idea before the words to express it happen to me too (less the more i grow old tbh, when i was in my early twenties it was almost everytime, nowadays it is a bit more limited to subjects i know deeply). It usually end up with my tongue tied and having to take a deep breath and reformulate everything since the beginning with a better exposition plan.
One thing that help is improv theater and pen and paper role play game, because you don't only have to thin about your idea, but how you are going to deliver it, and this is true in professional settings too. Doing that slow down my thought just enough to be clear. Hopefully this advice works for you too
I recognize this "thinking the thoughts twice", and sometimes feel that the "fast" thoughts have to wait for the slow ones (language wrapping) to catch up. Then I try to skip the second phase and let the fast ones roam at full speed, expecting brilliancy. Never succeeded yet, but not giving up.
Funny all the criticism LLMs get for hallucinations/conflabulations as if humans aren't often worse offenders at this very behavior unintentionally or intentionally.
I think you're not mad, but rather demonstrate a learned behavior to a very common situation any person finds themself in. IE they don't know or aren't sure if they don't know and any case don't want to appear as if they don't know certainly so they put in the least amount of effort to obscure ascertaition with some fancy distracting magicians hoodwink.
I think getting answers to nuanced/frontier or non-frontier problems can involve different sets of brain processes and behaviors. For already solved problems with knowledge thats pervasive throughout society, the solution is simply observation and copying, OR recollection and re-execute from memory.
For other problems one can figure out through reasoning and extrapolation.
For other problems no amount of armchair reasoning and theorizing will figure out (frontier problems not yet solved by any humans or at least humans accessible ) it, and they will need to do some trial and error exploration within reality on the path to solving a problem. Thinking in language, recalling by search and retrieval isn't going to find a solution to the problem at hand in these situations, but humans will try and jam the square peg into the circular hole especially if thats easier to do (and it is) than expending a lot more trial and error energy to do reality based experiements instead of pure clean easy brain processes of keyword/descriptor search and retrieval.
Search and retrieval with or without words is a very quick and easy brain process, perhaps anything you do that solely involve those brain processes you perform excellently at. Not all problems solely rely on these process such as analyzing new unsolved puzzles put on your doorstep. Perhaps there's a habitual behavior where you're trying to over-rely on the quick processes and doing the magicians trick to obscure the lack of actual solution with the hopes of retaining social standing. Instead of slowing things down attempting the slow bog down of actually finding the problem while communicating as such OR making use of human language for its actual purpose and networking for someone who has already solved the problem and deferring to their authority.
But all and all humans collectively are driven to collect (no, hoard greedily) solutions to problems at or not at the frontier and incorporate/encode those into their brain in a way that the solutions can be searched and retrieved in an efficient reflex like manner that's conducive to your ADHD speed.
I suck at language but am good at analytical stuff and because of that I'm not going to put any more effort into reducing this lengthy TLDR literature rambling into a concise conducive to reading snippet. My apologies to those that don't skip over this and trudge through this Thesis length reading.
Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.
Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses.
Humanity is like a big puzzle piece.
As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock.
I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but as I got my design read by someone I never met, and it matched 95% of what I already knew about myself, I had to admit that it just fits. And so it is for most people - it fits.
Whereas astrology always was a lame 50/50 "could be true or not true" kind of thing. HD is different.
For example I have open head centers - in HD this means I take in thoughts from others and get carried away with them; I also have an easy time to still my mind and have no inner dialogue.
And in my life I had already observed if I am talking to someone who is genuinely really excited about something, I get excited about it too - to the point where I am joining their project or decide to buy a book etc - but when they leave and it wears off I am thinking... "wait... why was that so exciting again?"... Now I know how to watch it, and how to distinguish their emotions and thoughts from mine, very useful skill.
The question about visualising three dimensional objects is fascinating to me. Because my answer has changed radically in the last five or so years, and I'm not a young person!
I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness).
But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve.
Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it.
I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head.
(One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)
As someone with Aphantasia, this is fascinating to me. There have been other aphantasics who report gaining the ability to visualize after mental exercises, and what you’re describing sounds somewhat similar. No luck for me yet, but I’m really interested in the idea that I could actually learn these skills…
This is very interesting, when I was a kid I didn’t think with words but with “abstract” ideas. When I realized every other kid used language for thinking I tried to do it myself and not only I was able to do it, but it never stopped after that. Now I probably think 90% with language, but I’ve been trying to practice other forms of thought recently.
Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation
The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too.
I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?
How does one even get high inner voice score there? I dialogue in my head all the time and answered “sa” to most of the inner voice questions, but fell on the far left side on that graph. Feels like other questions subtract from it silently. Instead I got high score in object rotation which I can do easily but it isn’t my main mode of thinking. I usually think abstractions and/or speak myself into convincing they are good enough.
I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result.
I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.
>Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation
Interesting, it's the same for me. I'm 94th and 98th percentile on the first two, but 2nd and 25th percentile for the other two. Since we're both on a (primarily) science and tech oriented website, I wonder if there's any correlation between ones occupation/hobbies/skills and their method of thinking.
Also, I'm surprised to hear that I'm an extreme outlier when it comes to the mind's eye. When I think about it, even recalling the face of my partner (who I see daily, including this morning) is not easy and comes out very fuzzy. But I have no problems with imagining complex geometry, maps, navigation, etc.
>It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:
- People experience their thoughts very differently
- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
Well, the first is not exactly right. People might experience thoughts differently, but not that widely so. It's not like "anything goes", more like there are a few cases, and people fall into one or the other (e.g. some can have aphantasia).
And the second, while right, is hardly "mind melting". Why would people assume otherwise, since the only immediate empirically seen thinking they have access to is their own?
(Especially since different modes of thinking is not exactly "anything goes" as we said, so the second-hand examples of thinking they have, e.g. people describing or mimicking thinking and inner monologues in movies and books, match how the majority thinks)
Same here. I had a conversation with friends who said, language influences thinking.
I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.
Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.
To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another.
The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people.
My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.
> Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.
> To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier.
I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them.
On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.
I think to a large extent this is because people define "internal monologue" differently, so let me just clarify:
a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia.
b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue.
c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience.
My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.
For me it was mindblowing the fact that before my brain tumor surgery I had something like a conscience voice and a richer internal dialogue. After that the voice dissapeared and my train of thought is more logic focused instead of instrospection focused, not sure why.
This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135
Love it! I use something similar to remember long numbers. If a code or a pin has let's say 8 digits, I'm unable to remember it the normal way. So I remember the first digit in the inner voice, and the other 4 digits as a picture of the digits.
+ Rudolph Flesh, The Art Of Clear Thinking (1951). He has visualizations in there how people concepualize the months in a year as an ellipsis, and so on.
That test was indeed interesting.
But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.
> Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording
Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride.
Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it.
An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording.
It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque)
Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.
I have the internal audio. I wish I could just hook up an audio interface to my brain for that sometimes as it would be so convenient for making new music.
In theory I could translate it to a DAW (but I'm not that great at transcribing music...it's possible, kinda, but slow), but I can't easily repeat the music in my head (not what I make up at least, proper released songs tend to be easier to repeat), so it would be difficult to recreate it enough to be worth the effort.
Curiously, I have this but I lack the musical education/experience/talent(?) to really use it. I can make up and "hear" music with multiple instruments and stuff, but I'm utterly useless at writing it down. Even just reproducing part of a melody on a keyboard is a frustratingly time consuming chore. :-(
I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.
Hmmm, I don't think I know exactly what words I want so say when opening my mouth, but I usually do know exactly what point I want to express. Also, after having expressed my point I stop making noises. Some people seem to really need to say something, but then just go on meandering without giving any indication that they actually have any point to make.
I am, apparently, someone well on the linguistic side of the spectrum, yet I too was somewhat taken aback by this statement from the abstract: "Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking" [my emphasis].
My own thinking on this has been to consider the origins of language. In a community of hominins on the verge of developing a language, would they not need, as a prerequisite, some non-linguistic ability to consciously grasp that at least some of the vocalizations of their peers represented feelings that they recognized in themselves? But that, by itself, would not be enough for them to develop a language; in addition, I feel, it would take both a desire to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others (motivated in part, I would guess, by recognizing that it would be useful to do so) and the recognition that this might be accomplished through artificial sounds and/or gestures with arbitrarily-allocated yet specific meanings. I feel that there's a bootstrap problem in regarding language as primarily a means of thinking that was found to be useful in communicating.
Like you (and, apparently, the survey compilers) I am surprised to learn that a sizable minority of people report frequently visualizing words as text. On reflection, however, that sounds somewhat like a form of synesthesia, and I occasionally get enough of a hint of that to put it just barely in range of my personal experience - but then, I don't regard people whose experiences differ markedly from mine as wierdos.
> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).
I always had thought this is the case too. Thinking isn't linguistic but it can be helpful as a tool while thinking, especially while thinking about communication.
It also seems obvious to me that language is a tool for communication rather than thought, although sometimes it also includes communication to yourself (in future).
In some cases, I can visualize words as text too, especially if thinking about written communication.
> - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
I wouldn't say that. What I would rather say is that everyone starts with the expectation that they share thought with others.
There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people can tell when others think like them. Not everybody treats this indicator the same way. Some are fascinated when others think differently. Some get uncomfortable when they can't tell what another is thinking or feeling.
I'm sure not everyone understands why there can be others that don't think like them. To a simple mind, it might just seem like there's something wrong with them or that they have unaligned goals/interests; you actually can see that assumption from certain neurotypicals. (I don't know if it's truly specific to neurotypicals.)
However, it is possible not to believe, even secretly, that everyone experiences thought the same; I certainly don't. I try my best to understand exactly how thought can differ between each person, of course, but in the process of doing that research, it does become abundantly clear just how much I don't know, and just how differently others think than how I do.
> We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
Not a universal law. I don’t think I work in the same way as other people at all, as I cannot see what is obvious to others, and they cannot see what is obvious to me.
I don’t think, per se, the information and the integrated results of information are just there. People call it “intuition” but it isn’t some magical sixth sense, it’s just not using one’s language centre for compute, which is what many seem to do.
The moment I start consciously considering something, it all usually goes to hell - so a large part of how I operate is preventing myself from lapsing into “conscious thought”, and instead to keep whatever it is just below the surface until it’s cooked.
I infuriated teachers throughout my childhood by apparently paying zero attention but then inexplicably having the correct answer to whatever was posed to me, and have never quite related to other people, as it usually feels like I’m trying to bridge an immense gap of comprehension - not, to be clear, that I think other people are stupid - just more like I am running fundamentally different software, and everything has to go through an extensive translation and abstraction layer to make sense to others.
If I speak my thoughts directly, then they often emerge as allegory, as it’s the only way I can try to encapsulate the otherwise rather inchoate froth of connection which leads to a result. Sometimes others understand the allegory, but more often than not, they do not, as the symbols mean something else to them.
So yeah. I don’t think my mind works like most other people I encounter. The only other person I know who I think operates in the same way is my sibling, and people who have observed our conversations find them downright bizarre. They sound like beat poetry half the time, as with five well chosen words presenting the correct allegory we can transmit deep meaning to one another.
I don't automatically do what you describe, but I've had good experiences with it: "preventing myself from lapsing into conscious thought". Especially in how I experience ADHD, if I just wait for my subconscious to cook up something for me, it's a good trick for seeing past the weeds to what is actually relevant today, here and now.
This feels to me very similar to my experience - I tend to joke that in order to express a thought to others I have to translate it into words first; and in doing so I also flatten the thought.
And before it, the time of having a raw thought in my brain it just feels like… something, it’s not sound, not light, but “a thing” which I know means the item or concept I am thinking of. And the process of thinking is kind of these “semantic things” bouncing off each other - which usually happens much faster than I can translate it into words.
When solving a problem, I usually tinker with it for a while and then let my “big subconscious coprocessor” deal with it for a while, and more often than not if not a solution but the clear idea of direction and reasoning emerges the next time I look for it.
At the same time I tend to make a fair bit of puns based purely on spelling alone - feels a bit magical to have all the omonyms kind of flash in the head all at once, and then make-pretend pick the wrong one for fun.
I can totally relate. In my case I feel deeply connected to Poincare writings about unconscious processing. It’s not that I have sudden eureka moments, but I observed that if I try to consciously search for an answer, I just won’t find it, like I need to soak on information and do something else to actually get the result after a while.
It's difficult to say what thought is, but LLMs also solve more problems more correctly if you allow them to feed back through themselves multiple times (ask them to show their working) apparently for the obvious reason that it allows more computation to happen. I hypothesize that different people build different recurrence circuits, by chance. Some go through the audio cortex, some through the visual. Helen Keller described herself as driven solely by emotions, like a beast, before she had any kind of language: https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/1jyo53/hellen_kel...
This test really threw me for a loop because it didn’t cover my main mode of thought. For me, I can consciously use my internal voice or visualize things, but if I am not actively trying to, they never happen. Typically, the results of my thoughts simply enter my conscious mind, and what brought them about is opaque to me.
I just did that quiz and the question about the sound of a trumpet getting louder made me notice that my imaginings of talking and instruments actually activate my vocal chords and neck muscles a bit; and imagining a trumpet is more like imagining someone make an imitation trumpet sound.
Also was hoping that quiz would ask about other senses; how easily people can choose to imagine tastes and smells, e.g. on their agree/disagree scales:
1. You can easily imagine the smell of freshly baked bread.
2. You can easily call to mind the taste of peanut butter.
3. You are melting chocolate and somebody suggests adding basil, you can vividly imagine how that would taste before trying it.
4. When remembering an event that happened to you, there is a strong smell memory included.
5. You can imagine feeling the weight and texture of a brick in your hands.
I'm in the 'visualising the words as text' category, and I've always thought I have a bad memory compared to other friends, though I can recall every little detail of large software projects that I've been in.
During exams, where I had to cram lots of theory in a small amount of time, I recall trying to 'access' the slides via how they looked like in my mind and trying to somehow read the stored image, because that's for me easier to remember than the actual text when I'm not doing any deep understanding, but just memorization :/ I hated these kinds of exams, what's the point of repeating 500+ slides out of 14 weeks of courses word by word ?
Open book exams + internet + tricky questions were the best.
This is a big part of why I think LLMs can lead to AGI: humans clearly exist who can think equally well despite having some major gears in their brain going in different directions from each other. If you told me that there was a human who could only think by speaking and who experienced their entire reality and cognition in a textual form, occasionally augmented by flashes of visual or auditory data, I would not be willing to comfortably put an upper limit on their IQ despite all that. I'd just say "yeah, I guess? Weirder things have happened."
This somewhat related to universals and how they are view from Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism. With language we capture a symbolic representation of the ideal form, the red apple, or do we just imagine the last particular apple we saw. Or maybe if you're really modern you imagine the molecular structure and photonic reflective spectrum.
Anecdote: I once tried to suppress my internal monologue. I found thinking elaborate thoughts and checking them for soundness was a lot harder. Might just be not being used to it.
These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.
I score low in all categories. I wonder if that means I'm just not very aware of how I think while I'm not doing it. I think a lot though. A little bit too much
I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.
I'm not convinced it's a fact we all think as differently as implied. Try and get a room full of people to even agree what "internal dialogue" means or whether you actually hear a voice when you recall it.
Can you express your internal monologue in words? If not then it is clearly not an internal monologue. I can't express mine in words, hence I am certain it isn't an internal monologue.
Similarly I doubt others would say they have an internal monologue if they couldn't express it in words. Hence I am fairly certain that they think in a different way, or at least they think they do.
Look at how different we are from each other. Then consider that humans actually have less genetic variance than most mammal species. Now imagine meeting actual aliens whether from space or from our own AI efforts.
I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading.
The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
Not OP but I also don't think with an internal monologue most of the time. For me it's often more like mentally manipulating abstract shapes or quantities and trying to make them fit together. When I'm writing software I'm literally thinking about pointers and bytes etc, not thinking about the words "pointer" and "byte". This is highlighted by the fact that after intense programming sessions I have dreamed about code, like I am computer memory and I'm being allocated by a memory manager or something.
Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things.
When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).
Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast.
I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.
I read much faster when I can focus on reading instead of vocalizing; in this case I am no longer internally vocalizing the text. If I do vocalize what I read it goes a lot slower, but then it helps me to synthesize conplex concepts in a text.
Thanks for your comment. It just occurred to me that I have an inner voice narrating the text when I am reading in English.
This does not happen when I read in my first two languages.
This explains why I read slower when I read in English.
I don't have an internal monologue at all (I am able to speak to myself in my head if I want to, but I seldom have a reason to). When I read, the information just gets uploaded to my brain. I don't vocalize words in any way, silently or otherwise. I don't read one word at a time either. When I read something quickly I can "feel" that my understanding of the material is lagging "the cursor", sometimes by even a paragraph at a time.
The experience of thought differs from brain to brain. For example, autistics generally experience thought differently from neurotypicals.
This happens, in part, because autistics have a different distribution of synaptic connections, which are shorter on average than is neurotypical. This typically results in an experience of disorganized thought, where multiple different parts of the brain contain independent thought, because there aren't enough connections directly between them to enforce synchronization. There are enough localized connections to allow general thoughts to happen and be operated on, but they are exactly that; localized.
Detail-oriented thinking is another well-known side effect of this, because each individual detail can easily be fit somewhere without being lost in the "big picture". Autistics are usually who you'll find sweating details that most people wouldn't necessarily care about, but they're also who you'll find sometimes getting lost in those details rather than sticking to a single clear vision. Neurotypicals, on the other paw, can miss those details if the picture as a whole looks okay to them, but they also usually won't get stuck on them in the process of executing their vision.
Note that every person is different, whether autistic or non-autistic, so there are autistics who are good at thinking in terms of the big picture and neurotypicals who are good at considering every detail. The fact that the physical mode of thinking differs doesn't necessarily mean that another can't be emulated - it just means that even if two people appear to be doing or thinking the same thing, the way it's actually implemented "in hardware" (meatware?) can differ greatly depending on neurotype, even from autistic to autistic and neurotypical to neurotypical, as the brain has no single switch between fully autistic and fully neurotypical.
I've been informed that the author of the article doesn't generally do good work, but I've personally reviewed the article and believe it to still be sufficiently accurate. Additionally, this particular description of autistic disorganized thought is what originally tipped me off to the fact that the way I think is different from others. If you're not autistic and/or it doesn't describe you, please know that it perfectly describes me, which should be enough to understand how exactly the experience of thought can differ from brain to brain.
Also, psychedelics can significantly change one's mode of thinking. I use them recreationally from time to time. Somehow, they give me better executive function than my ADHD meds do.
> It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.
They must listen to a large amount of verbose drivel telling them how to weave their way through a crowd, or how to rotate a suitcase to fit it into a trunk.
There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.
A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on.
We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:
* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.
* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.
This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.
Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.
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The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.
> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.
A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.
I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.
They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
> They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).
Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]:
- 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering
- 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism
These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration:
- 柴米油盐 （Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life
- 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere
I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out.
It's also very important that others know the concept.
I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet.
So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?
These are fascinating. Anyone know a book our other source for a list of such Chinese shorthand figures of speech and the tales/aphorisms behind them about human nature? Kinda like “sour grapes” in English, or Aesop’s fables.
You are missing that to drive one-self home is a metaphor, possibly a visual metaphor in this case, for DIY self-service in the private domain, as it were.
The Mandarin word literally means "relationships" and the concept is well established in English. When you describe somebody as "connected", that's what you're saying.
It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
The mandarin guangxi encompasses a whole lot more than just your network. That would be considered a very bastardised translation, losing all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.
> There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.
If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language.
One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.
How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.
I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
I find language to be worse for abstract thought. Abstract thought to me is shapes and transformations. I then have to put words to them, "Imagine there is a ball here and another ball here and..."
I can imagine things transformating in space much faster than thinking it in words.
Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own.
So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about.
Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay
-it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason.
Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.
And I can definitely think about buying books without reading them. Firstly, coincidentally I thought about this in the morning, but I didn't need a word, but it was still linguistic. I just thought the whole sentence.
Something to keep in mind is that according to Wikipedia, Helen Keller met Anne Sullivan, her caretaker and the person who introduced her to language, at around 7, which is probably around the age many people with normal language acquisition would start to have the kinds of changes in cognition that Keller attributes to learning language.
1. The existence of “rubber duck debugging”, and a whole bunch of studies on verbally explaining a concept indicate that language is essential for thought. In rubber duck debugging, programmers tell their problem to an object and this is beneficial in finding the solution. There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better. Also the act of taking a test increases learning and memory, but why should this be if learning is secondary?
2. Everything we know about memory tells us that externality is essential for memorizing something. If there’s nothing visual, aural, or sensory then it is unlikely to be remembered. Language acts as an externality even as inner speech, meaning that thoughts can be said in language (ascribed onto the words) and remembered for short-term and long-term memory. A thought without externality seems more like a passing whim, unrooted in any more permanent mode of cognition and thus liable to be forgotten. I can imagine thinking in visuals, melodies, words, but if there is a kind of thought that isn’t occurring based off of these then it probably can’t be sophisticated.
1. This doesn’t indicate language is necessary for thought but rather that language is useful for refining thought. If anything it shows that some form of thought exists before it is articulated into language. I would assume inverse cases also exist, where articulation into language narrows a thought down into the vocabulary of a language.
2. I thought rare individuals who did not develop language abilities (e.g due to isolation) still had
memories of their time prior to thought. The most obvious example to me is Helen Keller, who writes about her time prior to meeting her teacher.
Helen Keller wrote about having memories of being something like a stimulus-response automata before language enabled her to be conscious and think. I think that example is actually in favour of language being required for thought, because she remembers a state of being before language where she wasn't really conscious and didn't really think. I don't see any particular reason why language would be required for memory formation, though.
I think you can think of rubber duck debugging and similar ideas as "forcing functions." In order to communicate an idea one must have "an idea" to communicate. The process of putting vague notions into words forces you to reason about them and clarify them.
Disclaimer: I do not know, really, what role language plays in a thought process. I just want to point why your takes are not enough to make me to believe that language is a necessary prerequisite for a thought.
1. Rubber duck maybe just help with attention issues. All the studies I heard of do not try to untangle the mechanism. People tend to use language for a multi-brain thinking, and in this mode people do not think their thoughts fully, they propose ideas allowing other to support them or dismiss them. In this way they've got combined knowledge and experience to do the work, simplifying the early rejection of bad ideas. And I'm sure this mode of thinking shapes mind and in particular attention processes. You need to track which bits of information you told already and which you didn't, and you trained for that. Rubber duck can be just a trigger for that mode of attention.
2. I didn't hear about externalities, but to my mind what really helps to remember it is a number of associated details. I believe that ideas extracted from the memory when some of these details is popped up in your thought. It serves like a key in an associative map. When you name a concept with a word, and then use this word in different combinations with other words building associations, then sometimes your mind just like LLM will suggest the first word when you used words associated with it. It seems like externalities you talk about. Language plays its role with this, but you can achieve the same result without a language but thinking about all connected concepts of a concept you are trying to remember. You can build associations this way.
Explaining things to others - imaginary or not - engages the parts of my brain imagining how they will receive and understand it.
This is primarily so I can phrase it in a way other people can understand. But that imagined model of other minds is often smart enough to imagine what they would answer.
Which I guess means my "social brain" is smarter than my "thinking" brain in some ways.
Don't know how universal that is. My brain tends to be an outlier.
>There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better.
I am convinced that teaching material to other people helps us remember concepts better. Doing it verbally just so happen to be the most common and convenient form of knowledge transmission between individuals.
These were my exact thoughts when i read the headline. But when i read the article, their strongest evidence in their defense is the fact that people with severe disabilities can still perform higher level thought.
tldr; Language is not required for thought, but on page 3 of the link, "Instead, these tasks engage other brain areas that are non-overlapping with the language
network (Fig. 1b), although they sometimes lie in close proximity
to the language areas"
I used to do rubber duck debugging, but instead i turned into listing exact step-by-step instructions in inline comments. It seems to work like rubber duck debugging, and all it took was for me to "Externalize the steps" so i can think about what needs to happen at each level of the thought heirarchy.
and section 2. you describe memory and thought as similiar in nature but those are handled in two entirely different regions of the brain.
There are many that would strongly object to this conclusion. I have heard friends describe their inner life as almost entirely verbal, that they "think in words", and are totally unable to relate to anything else.
When we say "communication", I think there is an implication that the goal is communication with others. But there is also value in communication with oneself. To verbalize is to condense ones thoughts into words, and when we hear words they get unpacked and evoke meaning. The resulting feedback loop can be amazing for refining ideas.
It should be no surprise that humans might end up relying on this internal monologue when thinking to the point that they mistake it for thought itself.
I think in words. There is always an internal dialogue. Even when doing music, or painting, I'm always anticipating what's next by some words; here comes the bridge, goes to Am now, gonna paint leaves in this shape, or maybe this other. I can visualize things and sounds, but words are always involved. That's probably why I'm not very talented at music or painting.
The thing is: I'm fairly confident my subconsciousness is the actual thinking part and my consciousness is kinda dumb if that makes sense. The part of my brain that does think in words is pretty slow and gets a lot of information from the "processor" behind without actually realizing it.
I visualize it as the 2 man start up where there one tech guy and one who sells it outwards.
I surprised my freshman-year Spanish teacher on the last day of classes when he did an AMA. I asked "do you think in Spanish"? This question was nonsense to him—another student got it, but he was baffled by what I was asking. It wasn't until years later when I found out that some people didn't have an internal monologue that his confusion made sense.
Are there really people with no internal voice at all? I understand that not everyone has this constant internal chat as I do, but it's hard to me to imagine, for example, solving math problems without "thinking" the numbers aloud.
I have an internal monologue and I struggle to imagine how someone can think without one. Yet I also wonder if bypassing the need to articulate thoughts in words is actually more efficient. Do those people have a higher thought throughput? I suspect we may never know.
I've abandoned the idea of all humans use language the same way a long time ago. However I hope everybody does not use language as a tool to drive a car and looking at the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan I'm pretty sure no language was involved before it sparked.
Jerry Fodor, who advocated an internal mental language, was seen as an old crank when I studied Linguistics in late 90s; I just looked him up and, god, he died recently in 2017. Here’s a New Yorker article from that time: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-en....
Complaint not targeted at you personally but - why does thought have to take place in language at all? I sometimes reason using physical or kinesthetic metaphors that would be impossible to capture perfectly in language.
and why does thought have to have one form? I think in both language and visual representations and i switch between them depending on the task and i even pipe the input from one representation into the other representation.
This is related but not really the same thing. The Language of Thought may or may not be closely related to human language. (Some animals may also have concepts and compositional mental representations.)
I didn't read the SEP article, but is the language of thought hypothesis perhaps already verified by our ability to do some sort of logic on neural network embeddings? E.g. queen-royal=woman.
I'm bilingual, people keep asking me what language I think 'in', and I don't think I think _in_ a language.
For lack of a better way of describing it, I rather think in concepts, sometimes the voice in my head likes to play along by imagining the words representing those concepts, sometimes in English, sometimes in Romanian, but the words are not necessary.
In dev words, I guess I think in structs and then optionally serialize those structs in En/Ro (JSON).
I'm bilingual and I can switch my permanent internal dialogue to one language or another, and It happens automatically if I'm actively using it for a few minutes. This afternoon that I've been on HN for a while I'll think in English, probably until wife comes. In dev words, I could say the same as you, but maybe the serialize phase is not optional.
I'm bilingual (having learned English relatively late - in school), and i think in both languages. I think my mind language depends on which one I'm immersed currently (work/browsing internet: English, real life meetings: my native one). I have very long internal monologues in both languages picked unconsciously/randomly, and sometimes switching.
Another fun quirk is sometimes I remember that I've read a sentence, I can "quote" it, but I'm not sure if I've read it in my native tongue or in English. I guess my mind sortes them in a language independent way sometimes?
I am not bilingual but rather can speak fluently in some foreign language. However, I constantly find myself thinking in the foreign language I know, especially for topics I learned from reading in foreign books.
Another simpler example is when I count I usually count in my native language, even in a specific dialect when I was taught very young!
I speak three languages (none of them fictional, fortunately) and I've found thinking or expressing certain concepts come easier in one of them vs. the other two.
My only interest in becoming polylingual would be to compare these "thought structures" among them, first hand.
Same here... Am also bilingual, and I seem to think in language only when I think _about_ language, e.g. when I plan what I could say or write. Otherwise, it is concepts or images.
Same here. Also bilingual, also never related with people who think in sentences. It's all abstract bytes until it needs to be formatted and output into a specific language.
False dichotomy. Of course language is for communication like in all other animals, but where would man be without the invention of the language of mathematics? Probably not in the space and nuclear age. So the linguistic tools can push the boundaries of human cognition.
Readit News
- People experience their thoughts very differently
- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).
It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.
That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?
The University of Wisconsin did a cool study that comes with a fun quiz you can do to see just how much of a wierdo you truly are: https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for hours, when presented with problems like in school or sometimes even today when someone gives me a riddle, i can also very strongly feel that i am not "thinking" actively. I am just thinking that i should think and often seem to make myself appear as if i was thinking – and that's it. It feels a lot like "fake it till you make it". Often times i have ideas other people call "brilliant" as well, or i seem to have s lot of refreshing takes on things according to others (stated to hide my weirdly self-conscious arrogance), it's not that i actively pursue it. I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain.
But maybe, i am truly just mad.
I have a huge quote "Notes" from all the books i've read. This is the first time a quote has made it into the notes that has come from a random comment on the internet. I think i'll carry this quote in the back of my minds eye for the rest of my life.
One thing that help is improv theater and pen and paper role play game, because you don't only have to thin about your idea, but how you are going to deliver it, and this is true in professional settings too. Doing that slow down my thought just enough to be clear. Hopefully this advice works for you too
[edit] You aren't mad
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-in-black-wh...
I think you're not mad, but rather demonstrate a learned behavior to a very common situation any person finds themself in. IE they don't know or aren't sure if they don't know and any case don't want to appear as if they don't know certainly so they put in the least amount of effort to obscure ascertaition with some fancy distracting magicians hoodwink.
I think getting answers to nuanced/frontier or non-frontier problems can involve different sets of brain processes and behaviors. For already solved problems with knowledge thats pervasive throughout society, the solution is simply observation and copying, OR recollection and re-execute from memory.
For other problems one can figure out through reasoning and extrapolation.
For other problems no amount of armchair reasoning and theorizing will figure out (frontier problems not yet solved by any humans or at least humans accessible ) it, and they will need to do some trial and error exploration within reality on the path to solving a problem. Thinking in language, recalling by search and retrieval isn't going to find a solution to the problem at hand in these situations, but humans will try and jam the square peg into the circular hole especially if thats easier to do (and it is) than expending a lot more trial and error energy to do reality based experiements instead of pure clean easy brain processes of keyword/descriptor search and retrieval.
Search and retrieval with or without words is a very quick and easy brain process, perhaps anything you do that solely involve those brain processes you perform excellently at. Not all problems solely rely on these process such as analyzing new unsolved puzzles put on your doorstep. Perhaps there's a habitual behavior where you're trying to over-rely on the quick processes and doing the magicians trick to obscure the lack of actual solution with the hopes of retaining social standing. Instead of slowing things down attempting the slow bog down of actually finding the problem while communicating as such OR making use of human language for its actual purpose and networking for someone who has already solved the problem and deferring to their authority.
But all and all humans collectively are driven to collect (no, hoard greedily) solutions to problems at or not at the frontier and incorporate/encode those into their brain in a way that the solutions can be searched and retrieved in an efficient reflex like manner that's conducive to your ADHD speed.
I suck at language but am good at analytical stuff and because of that I'm not going to put any more effort into reducing this lengthy TLDR literature rambling into a concise conducive to reading snippet. My apologies to those that don't skip over this and trudge through this Thesis length reading.
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Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses.
Humanity is like a big puzzle piece.
As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock.
I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but as I got my design read by someone I never met, and it matched 95% of what I already knew about myself, I had to admit that it just fits. And so it is for most people - it fits.
Whereas astrology always was a lame 50/50 "could be true or not true" kind of thing. HD is different.
For example I have open head centers - in HD this means I take in thoughts from others and get carried away with them; I also have an easy time to still my mind and have no inner dialogue. And in my life I had already observed if I am talking to someone who is genuinely really excited about something, I get excited about it too - to the point where I am joining their project or decide to buy a book etc - but when they leave and it wears off I am thinking... "wait... why was that so exciting again?"... Now I know how to watch it, and how to distinguish their emotions and thoughts from mine, very useful skill.
I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness).
But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve.
Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it.
I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head.
(One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)
The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too.
I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?
I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result.
I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.
Interesting, it's the same for me. I'm 94th and 98th percentile on the first two, but 2nd and 25th percentile for the other two. Since we're both on a (primarily) science and tech oriented website, I wonder if there's any correlation between ones occupation/hobbies/skills and their method of thinking.
Also, I'm surprised to hear that I'm an extreme outlier when it comes to the mind's eye. When I think about it, even recalling the face of my partner (who I see daily, including this morning) is not easy and comes out very fuzzy. But I have no problems with imagining complex geometry, maps, navigation, etc.
Well, the first is not exactly right. People might experience thoughts differently, but not that widely so. It's not like "anything goes", more like there are a few cases, and people fall into one or the other (e.g. some can have aphantasia).
And the second, while right, is hardly "mind melting". Why would people assume otherwise, since the only immediate empirically seen thinking they have access to is their own?
(Especially since different modes of thinking is not exactly "anything goes" as we said, so the second-hand examples of thinking they have, e.g. people describing or mimicking thinking and inner monologues in movies and books, match how the majority thinks)
I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.
Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.
To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another.
The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people.
My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.
> To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier.
I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them.
On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.
I'm the same way, my thoughts happen first, are completed and sitting in working memory with my awareness of the thought/result/whatever it is.
If I have an internal monologue, which isn't always, it's after the fact and more about re-stating the thought that already happened.
a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia.
b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue.
c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience.
My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.
Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride.
Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it.
An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording.
It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque)
Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.
In theory I could translate it to a DAW (but I'm not that great at transcribing music...it's possible, kinda, but slow), but I can't easily repeat the music in my head (not what I make up at least, proper released songs tend to be easier to repeat), so it would be difficult to recreate it enough to be worth the effort.
I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.
For example, does evolution have any pressure to produce those who think linguistically, vs healthy hair and skin?
My own thinking on this has been to consider the origins of language. In a community of hominins on the verge of developing a language, would they not need, as a prerequisite, some non-linguistic ability to consciously grasp that at least some of the vocalizations of their peers represented feelings that they recognized in themselves? But that, by itself, would not be enough for them to develop a language; in addition, I feel, it would take both a desire to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others (motivated in part, I would guess, by recognizing that it would be useful to do so) and the recognition that this might be accomplished through artificial sounds and/or gestures with arbitrarily-allocated yet specific meanings. I feel that there's a bootstrap problem in regarding language as primarily a means of thinking that was found to be useful in communicating.
Like you (and, apparently, the survey compilers) I am surprised to learn that a sizable minority of people report frequently visualizing words as text. On reflection, however, that sounds somewhat like a form of synesthesia, and I occasionally get enough of a hint of that to put it just barely in range of my personal experience - but then, I don't regard people whose experiences differ markedly from mine as wierdos.
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I always had thought this is the case too. Thinking isn't linguistic but it can be helpful as a tool while thinking, especially while thinking about communication.
It also seems obvious to me that language is a tool for communication rather than thought, although sometimes it also includes communication to yourself (in future).
In some cases, I can visualize words as text too, especially if thinking about written communication.
The quiz does not work.
I wouldn't say that. What I would rather say is that everyone starts with the expectation that they share thought with others.
There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people can tell when others think like them. Not everybody treats this indicator the same way. Some are fascinated when others think differently. Some get uncomfortable when they can't tell what another is thinking or feeling.
I'm sure not everyone understands why there can be others that don't think like them. To a simple mind, it might just seem like there's something wrong with them or that they have unaligned goals/interests; you actually can see that assumption from certain neurotypicals. (I don't know if it's truly specific to neurotypicals.)
However, it is possible not to believe, even secretly, that everyone experiences thought the same; I certainly don't. I try my best to understand exactly how thought can differ between each person, of course, but in the process of doing that research, it does become abundantly clear just how much I don't know, and just how differently others think than how I do.
Not a universal law. I don’t think I work in the same way as other people at all, as I cannot see what is obvious to others, and they cannot see what is obvious to me.
I don’t think, per se, the information and the integrated results of information are just there. People call it “intuition” but it isn’t some magical sixth sense, it’s just not using one’s language centre for compute, which is what many seem to do.
The moment I start consciously considering something, it all usually goes to hell - so a large part of how I operate is preventing myself from lapsing into “conscious thought”, and instead to keep whatever it is just below the surface until it’s cooked.
I infuriated teachers throughout my childhood by apparently paying zero attention but then inexplicably having the correct answer to whatever was posed to me, and have never quite related to other people, as it usually feels like I’m trying to bridge an immense gap of comprehension - not, to be clear, that I think other people are stupid - just more like I am running fundamentally different software, and everything has to go through an extensive translation and abstraction layer to make sense to others.
If I speak my thoughts directly, then they often emerge as allegory, as it’s the only way I can try to encapsulate the otherwise rather inchoate froth of connection which leads to a result. Sometimes others understand the allegory, but more often than not, they do not, as the symbols mean something else to them.
So yeah. I don’t think my mind works like most other people I encounter. The only other person I know who I think operates in the same way is my sibling, and people who have observed our conversations find them downright bizarre. They sound like beat poetry half the time, as with five well chosen words presenting the correct allegory we can transmit deep meaning to one another.
And before it, the time of having a raw thought in my brain it just feels like… something, it’s not sound, not light, but “a thing” which I know means the item or concept I am thinking of. And the process of thinking is kind of these “semantic things” bouncing off each other - which usually happens much faster than I can translate it into words.
When solving a problem, I usually tinker with it for a while and then let my “big subconscious coprocessor” deal with it for a while, and more often than not if not a solution but the clear idea of direction and reasoning emerges the next time I look for it.
At the same time I tend to make a fair bit of puns based purely on spelling alone - feels a bit magical to have all the omonyms kind of flash in the head all at once, and then make-pretend pick the wrong one for fun.
Is this anywhere similar ?
For me, language is primarily a tool for thought and only secondarily a tool for communication.
Also was hoping that quiz would ask about other senses; how easily people can choose to imagine tastes and smells, e.g. on their agree/disagree scales:
1. You can easily imagine the smell of freshly baked bread.
2. You can easily call to mind the taste of peanut butter.
3. You are melting chocolate and somebody suggests adding basil, you can vividly imagine how that would taste before trying it.
4. When remembering an event that happened to you, there is a strong smell memory included.
5. You can imagine feeling the weight and texture of a brick in your hands.
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During exams, where I had to cram lots of theory in a small amount of time, I recall trying to 'access' the slides via how they looked like in my mind and trying to somehow read the stored image, because that's for me easier to remember than the actual text when I'm not doing any deep understanding, but just memorization :/ I hated these kinds of exams, what's the point of repeating 500+ slides out of 14 weeks of courses word by word ?
Open book exams + internet + tricky questions were the best.
I suppose chose your own adventure.
These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.
I don't see how we could possibly know this.
I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.
Similarly I doubt others would say they have an internal monologue if they couldn't express it in words. Hence I am fairly certain that they think in a different way, or at least they think they do.
I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?
The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things.
When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).
Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast.
I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.
This explains why I read slower when I read in English.
what does this mean?
The experience of thought differs from brain to brain. For example, autistics generally experience thought differently from neurotypicals.
This happens, in part, because autistics have a different distribution of synaptic connections, which are shorter on average than is neurotypical. This typically results in an experience of disorganized thought, where multiple different parts of the brain contain independent thought, because there aren't enough connections directly between them to enforce synchronization. There are enough localized connections to allow general thoughts to happen and be operated on, but they are exactly that; localized.
Detail-oriented thinking is another well-known side effect of this, because each individual detail can easily be fit somewhere without being lost in the "big picture". Autistics are usually who you'll find sweating details that most people wouldn't necessarily care about, but they're also who you'll find sometimes getting lost in those details rather than sticking to a single clear vision. Neurotypicals, on the other paw, can miss those details if the picture as a whole looks okay to them, but they also usually won't get stuck on them in the process of executing their vision.
Note that every person is different, whether autistic or non-autistic, so there are autistics who are good at thinking in terms of the big picture and neurotypicals who are good at considering every detail. The fact that the physical mode of thinking differs doesn't necessarily mean that another can't be emulated - it just means that even if two people appear to be doing or thinking the same thing, the way it's actually implemented "in hardware" (meatware?) can differ greatly depending on neurotype, even from autistic to autistic and neurotypical to neurotypical, as the brain has no single switch between fully autistic and fully neurotypical.
Some of the statements in this comment are based on my personal experience as an autistic, some are based on anecdotes from others, and some are based on this article: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-disorganized-thoughts/
I've been informed that the author of the article doesn't generally do good work, but I've personally reviewed the article and believe it to still be sufficiently accurate. Additionally, this particular description of autistic disorganized thought is what originally tipped me off to the fact that the way I think is different from others. If you're not autistic and/or it doesn't describe you, please know that it perfectly describes me, which should be enough to understand how exactly the experience of thought can differ from brain to brain.
Also, psychedelics can significantly change one's mode of thinking. I use them recreationally from time to time. Somehow, they give me better executive function than my ADHD meds do.
They must listen to a large amount of verbose drivel telling them how to weave their way through a crowd, or how to rotate a suitcase to fit it into a trunk.
A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on.
We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:
* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.
* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.
This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.
Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.
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The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.
i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.
A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.
I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.
They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
"wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection."
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi)
My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).
Along the lines of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning#Old_English_and_other_... , english could contain "book-dragon".
Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism
These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration:
- 柴米油盐 （Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life - 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere
I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out.
It's also very important that others know the concept. I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo
I do think in American English at least there is a phrase for this: Your Network. You even used it to explain the word :)
Usually the first association to “your/the network” is social. You have to specify if you mean the technical version with computers.
It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
"Charity"
In-depth explanation by Orlando Yang: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-guanxi-vs-western-soc...
Easier-to-read one by GPT-4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/b2a76479-2950-4aad-ad8e-97e775be...
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/network : “To get a job in today's economy, it is important to have a strong network.”
If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language.
One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.
I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
I can imagine things transformating in space much faster than thinking it in words.
So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about.
Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay -it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason.
Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.
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1. The existence of “rubber duck debugging”, and a whole bunch of studies on verbally explaining a concept indicate that language is essential for thought. In rubber duck debugging, programmers tell their problem to an object and this is beneficial in finding the solution. There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better. Also the act of taking a test increases learning and memory, but why should this be if learning is secondary?
2. Everything we know about memory tells us that externality is essential for memorizing something. If there’s nothing visual, aural, or sensory then it is unlikely to be remembered. Language acts as an externality even as inner speech, meaning that thoughts can be said in language (ascribed onto the words) and remembered for short-term and long-term memory. A thought without externality seems more like a passing whim, unrooted in any more permanent mode of cognition and thus liable to be forgotten. I can imagine thinking in visuals, melodies, words, but if there is a kind of thought that isn’t occurring based off of these then it probably can’t be sophisticated.
2. I thought rare individuals who did not develop language abilities (e.g due to isolation) still had memories of their time prior to thought. The most obvious example to me is Helen Keller, who writes about her time prior to meeting her teacher.
1. Rubber duck maybe just help with attention issues. All the studies I heard of do not try to untangle the mechanism. People tend to use language for a multi-brain thinking, and in this mode people do not think their thoughts fully, they propose ideas allowing other to support them or dismiss them. In this way they've got combined knowledge and experience to do the work, simplifying the early rejection of bad ideas. And I'm sure this mode of thinking shapes mind and in particular attention processes. You need to track which bits of information you told already and which you didn't, and you trained for that. Rubber duck can be just a trigger for that mode of attention.
2. I didn't hear about externalities, but to my mind what really helps to remember it is a number of associated details. I believe that ideas extracted from the memory when some of these details is popped up in your thought. It serves like a key in an associative map. When you name a concept with a word, and then use this word in different combinations with other words building associations, then sometimes your mind just like LLM will suggest the first word when you used words associated with it. It seems like externalities you talk about. Language plays its role with this, but you can achieve the same result without a language but thinking about all connected concepts of a concept you are trying to remember. You can build associations this way.
Explaining things to others - imaginary or not - engages the parts of my brain imagining how they will receive and understand it.
This is primarily so I can phrase it in a way other people can understand. But that imagined model of other minds is often smart enough to imagine what they would answer.
Which I guess means my "social brain" is smarter than my "thinking" brain in some ways.
Don't know how universal that is. My brain tends to be an outlier.
I am convinced that teaching material to other people helps us remember concepts better. Doing it verbally just so happen to be the most common and convenient form of knowledge transmission between individuals.
tldr; Language is not required for thought, but on page 3 of the link, "Instead, these tasks engage other brain areas that are non-overlapping with the language network (Fig. 1b), although they sometimes lie in close proximity to the language areas"
I used to do rubber duck debugging, but instead i turned into listing exact step-by-step instructions in inline comments. It seems to work like rubber duck debugging, and all it took was for me to "Externalize the steps" so i can think about what needs to happen at each level of the thought heirarchy.
and section 2. you describe memory and thought as similiar in nature but those are handled in two entirely different regions of the brain.
When we say "communication", I think there is an implication that the goal is communication with others. But there is also value in communication with oneself. To verbalize is to condense ones thoughts into words, and when we hear words they get unpacked and evoke meaning. The resulting feedback loop can be amazing for refining ideas.
It should be no surprise that humans might end up relying on this internal monologue when thinking to the point that they mistake it for thought itself.
I'm not sure where the science is in that...
"Language is a virus", Laurie Anderson ♫
Jerry Fodor, who advocated an internal mental language, was seen as an old crank when I studied Linguistics in late 90s; I just looked him up and, god, he died recently in 2017. Here’s a New Yorker article from that time: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-en....
For lack of a better way of describing it, I rather think in concepts, sometimes the voice in my head likes to play along by imagining the words representing those concepts, sometimes in English, sometimes in Romanian, but the words are not necessary.
In dev words, I guess I think in structs and then optionally serialize those structs in En/Ro (JSON).
Another fun quirk is sometimes I remember that I've read a sentence, I can "quote" it, but I'm not sure if I've read it in my native tongue or in English. I guess my mind sortes them in a language independent way sometimes?
Another simpler example is when I count I usually count in my native language, even in a specific dialect when I was taught very young!
My only interest in becoming polylingual would be to compare these "thought structures" among them, first hand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia