[HN Gopher] When is it better to think without words?
___________________________________________________________________
When is it better to think without words?
Author : Curiositry
Score : 260 points
Date : 2025-10-23 21:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
| wrp wrote:
| Problem solving is a well-explored field in experimental
| psychology. TFA is a bit unfocused, making both some generally
| supported speculations and some traditional ideas that haven't
| been supported. A very good survey is the edited volume, _The
| Psychology of Problem Solving_ (Davidson 2003).
|
| Although TFA doesn't refer to it by name, "insight" problem
| solving is when you are stuck on something and then suddenly
| realize the solution. The common explanation for being stuck is
| "fixation" on the wrong things. In agreement with TFA, there is
| indication that verbalization supports fixation more than
| visualization.
| mellosouls wrote:
| It's quite frustrating when writers like the author - who seem
| quite thoughtful and potentially useful to read - appear to
| pontificate on a field without seemingly being aware of it;
| using a great mathematician's thoughts on it as a springboard
| doesn't justify it as its not his field of expertise either.
|
| The essay might be more useful grounded with references to the
| sort of thing you link to.
| supportengineer wrote:
| When a sophon is trying read your mind
| daxfohl wrote:
| Reminds me of the description of Peter Scholze as he was coming
| up with condensed mathematics. Didn't write a thing until he had
| it all worked out in his head (which is how he always works).
| Knew if he didn't get it worked out before the weekend he'd never
| be able to build it up again. Once he worked it out, he was able
| to retain it for months until finally writing it down.
|
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirm...
| stavros wrote:
| But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the
| thought. The proof is that you can stop your inner words mid-
| sentence and you still know what you were going to think, because
| the thought itself takes a few milliseconds, and happens before
| the words start.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after
| the thought
|
| That seems valid at first, but if look at that premise closely,
| you'll see that even assuming wordless thoughts always come
| first, doesn't mean that during the process of thinking they
| don't give way to words. That is to say, thoughts can be a
| precursor, but words do offer a framework which you can use
| structure thought.
|
| That's specially handy for abstract concepts, like
| individuality, the split of the self and the world, which are
| fundamental to thought as we understand it through language.
|
| Nothing prevents you from understanding a concept with the help
| of language and then using the concept by itself, detached from
| the symbols you used to arrive at it, to think. But that
| requires a certain effort and intention that maybe is what the
| article is aiming for.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "the split of the self and the world"
|
| is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an
| illusion and fundamental error
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Before right or wrong, it's a concept, it defines the
| boundaries of the body. It might well be an illusion, a
| source of unnecessary suffering, but it's a concept you can
| understand and reason about. I'm taking about frameworks of
| thought that comes before any value judgement.
| shakna wrote:
| I think a better way to show this, would be that anendophasia
| [0] is a thing.
|
| Some people have no inner voice, but aren't thoughtless
| automatons. They can still task-switch the same as everyone
| else.
|
| [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/
| daxfohl wrote:
| Or by watching rats solve mazes
| shakna wrote:
| I don't think we've attempted to study if rats have
| internal monolgues all that much, yet. It wouldn't surprise
| me if they did, or did not. I wouldn't say it is safe to
| assume they don't.
|
| About the only real animal model has shown that some
| species of monkey probably do. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S
| 01664...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| On 4chan and reddit, they actually believe that those without
| an "inner monologue" have no soul.
| missingdays wrote:
| Reddit has roughly 400 million weekly users. You think all
| of them believe the same thing?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| That's what the evidence suggests.
| shakna wrote:
| Just to underpin how wrong this comment is, I - the person
| who posted the medical explanation - have been rather
| active on both those platforms.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Or conversely, that one can be lost for words to describe what
| one is thinking!
| chrisweekly wrote:
| The question reminds me of a quote from Rilke: "There is a depth
| of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of
| formless feeling untouched by thought".
| quacked wrote:
| I don't have an "inner monologue" and don't think in words, only
| in images, but I've never experienced what this author is
| describing in terms of "nonsense words" or "hand vibrations".
|
| I was with some friends that were in a band together, and we got
| thinking about this topic, and ended up arranging ourselves from
| least verbal to most verbal. I was on one end, where all of my
| thoughts appear as emotions or images; on the other end was our
| bassist, who experienced his thoughts as fully formed sentences.
| He said when he's getting to a difficult passage in a song the
| words "better focus here, don't mess up" will ring out in his
| head. He also said he has fully dictated mental conversations
| with himself.
|
| I also read very quickly because I look at the shape of
| paragraphs and assemble the word-shapes into mental images and
| pick up meaning that way; high speed, but low comprehension. I
| struggle greatly to read philosophy because it's quite difficult
| to visualize. My wife reads slowly but hears every word in her
| head; her comprehension is much higher. I can do high
| comprehension reading by slowing down and looking at every word,
| but it feels like holding back an excitable dog.
| larrry wrote:
| A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what
| you wrote. I can think in words, but it's not my default or
| most productive.
|
| I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have
| to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as
| others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of
| writing it's much harder.
| Liftyee wrote:
| I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in
| a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow
| just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than
| my hand-wavy rationalisation.
|
| It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding
| games where you have to test for a large number of
| possibilities.
| EGreg wrote:
| Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate
| words ultimately?
| quacked wrote:
| I just learned that term today, but I guess so. I don't know
| how I generate words, they're just there. I type at about 120
| wpm and speak very quickly as well, but as it's coming out
| I'm just flashing through different images in my head, often
| partial images from my own memory, and the words come out
| without paying attention to them, like out of a lower layer
| of consciousness. I write a lot of 300+ word messages at
| work, and it's just image after image firing in my head while
| the words appear.
|
| I think I have a concept-image map in my head; to test it
| out, I'm thinking of random words, and very well-defined
| images are popping into my head. "Insurance" is the
| impression of slate grey followed by a view into a 90s
| corporate office room. "Propulsion" is the bell of one of the
| space shuttle engines firing on full, but not centered in
| frame. "Gravity" is one of the rooms in the Adler Planetarium
| in Chicago. Etc. But it's harder to go the other way; if I
| see an image or a drawing and have to describe what it is,
| there's more of a lag before I can retrieve the words to
| describe it. It's much easier to think of other related
| images.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| I first heard about "thinking in pictures" from Dr Temple
| Grandin, who is autistic and associates it with autism.
| Anyway, it's also how she thinks and appears to be a super
| power when it comes to designing feed lots.
| https://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html
|
| I imagine you also struggled with algebra? Being a non-
| visual abstraction.
| bregma wrote:
| Algebra is very visual. Picture the variables and
| parentheses and constants just moving around, like a
| choreographed dance. Same with calculus, picturing the
| curves and areas and surfaces, until you start hitting
| more than 3 dimensions.
| quacked wrote:
| Thanks for the link!
|
| Actually, I did struggle with algebra, and also calculus
| and differential equations. As with most on this site, I
| fell into an "advanced"/"gifted" cohort, but I was always
| down at the bottom of the class.
|
| I excelled (relative to my peers, not to truly gifted
| people) at linear algebra, statistics, systems
| engineering, and combinatorics.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I think in images and abstractions and algebra/math came
| very easy to me. I couldn't really describe to someone
| how it looks in my head though.
| bored wrote:
| Sounds like you think in word blobs that only get unpacked
| when you talk or write. Otherwise they move through your
| mind bundled but understandable to you.
| Austizzle wrote:
| I'm the same way, and I often feel like I don't know what
| the words that come out of my mouth will be until they
| happen.
|
| I'm thinking in abstract feelings and images, and then it
| feels like some subconscious part of my brain is actually
| figuring out the words and saying them, if that makes any
| sense.
|
| It can be spooky sometimes since it doesn't always feel
| like I'm in control of the specific words I use
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy.
| Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and
| unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it's very difficult
| to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the
| results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I
| find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving
| the words around without having internalized the idea.
| ulbu wrote:
| philosophy, i find, is one of the forms where the shapeless
| thinking described in the article does a lot of the work for
| me. especially the phase of internalization. you take a
| sentence you don't quite get, and then spend a bunch of time
| just meditating about it, rejecting the temptations to think
| elsewhere. and then, in time, it just clicks into making all
| sorts of sense.
|
| it's definitely not "purely linguistic" - one form of it is
| about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.
| agentcoops wrote:
| I'm aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner
| experience could not be more different: it's strange to
| explain, but I experience "unvocalized" language, which means
| the words are sort of just there without "hearing" them in my
| head---I don't have inner sound at all either and so the words
| don't have an accent, for example. My thought moves at a speed
| much faster than speaking and I can read fast with high
| comprehension---but it takes me incredible effort to remember
| the color of someone's eyes, for example. I more or less skip
| descriptions in novels and prefer to read philosophy.
|
| I've always found it interesting that in programming
| communities the two extremes of aphantasic and hyperphantasic
| seem to both be very overrepresented.
| quacked wrote:
| What happens when you read descriptions if you can't skip
| over them?
| riwsky wrote:
| what happens is that they're comparatively boring
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I remember them for as long as I read it and then it goes
| away.
|
| It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came
| out and people were really upset that the characters looked
| wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in
| books look like??". It turns out they do.
|
| I don't.
|
| When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the
| characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read
| thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can
| maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if
| they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
|
| I've read all 5 books of The Stormlight Archive and I
| couldn't tell you what Kaladin looks like. I have no visual
| recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or
| body type.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Yeah I never understood descriptions or who the intended
| audience of those long winded descriptive words is, but
| if other people have this magical capability of getting
| visual imagery out of it, I guess sure. It is hard to
| believe, but it must be the case. It is so hard to fathom
| that other people process things so differently, but I
| guess it can also explain a lot.
| weakfish wrote:
| I'm the same, but it can also be frustrating when I _try_
| to retain that info, it constantly shifts.
|
| I described it to my partner as one of those AI generated
| videos where the details are constantly morphing and
| shifting, even if the general idea remains the same - I
| simply can't hold onto a single still visualization for
| more than a second.
|
| So, to agree with you, I have also read all five SLA
| books, and I could imagine Kaladin right now, but in an
| amorphous, constantly shifting way, which is a bit
| unsettling - maybe like Pattern? :-)
| tartoran wrote:
| >When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the
| characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read
| thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can
| maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if
| they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
|
| Likewise. It even happens even with the people I know in
| detail such as family. If I try to project the image of
| my own son in my minds eye it is not clear and is always
| shifting, it's more of a feeling than a clear picture.
| Once, when I was a teenager, I was mugged and when at the
| police precinct they showed me a booklet with the common
| offenders in the area. After a few pages I could not
| remember what my mugger looked like. Always wondered how
| people manage to rebuild sketches of offenders not
| knowing as an aphantasiac it's nearly impossible.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| Same. And it's weird to hear someone else understand this so
| well.
| godelski wrote:
| What do you see when you close your eyes? Just light and
| colors? What about when you dream?
|
| I ask because there's done research suggesting visual
| hallucinations while sleeping helps maintain the visual
| cortex's proficiency. IIRC it was just contingent on visual
| stimuli. Sometimes as I fall asleep I see a very bright white
| light, so something like that can count.
|
| If you don't remember your dreams it might be interesting to
| keep a dream journal. It might take awhile to get your first
| entry. I kept one a decade ago and my first entry was "I
| remember but color blue" and it took a week. But even though
| I don't keep it anymore I remember most of my dreams and they
| are still quite vivid. Might be a fun experiment
| Citizen_Lame wrote:
| Not the guy you are asking, but when I close eyes there is
| only black. If try to imagine let's say apple, maybe it's
| there at opacity of 0.5% or less. But requires mental
| effort. No inner monologue as well.
|
| Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel
| like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.
| bored wrote:
| What is your experience of thinking? Sounds like it's a
| black box to you
| vidarh wrote:
| I dream in images but have only once in my life seen
| anything but darkness or vague abstract patterns with no
| connection to imagery with my eyes closed in a waking
| state.
|
| I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after
| waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.
|
| But I have a persistent inner monologue that only ever
| stops with effort when I sit down to meditate.
| godelski wrote:
| > I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds
| after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too
| slow.
|
| FWIW, this gets better after practice
| vidarh wrote:
| How? I've tried writing it down many times over the
| years, but never recalled _anything_ by the time I 've
| been able to pick up anything to write with. Not a word.
| agentcoops wrote:
| For me, it's dependent on waking up in a half-dreaming
| state. Then I'm able to sort of "translate" the dream
| into language, which I remember---and sometimes from
| there I can get back to parts of the dream I didn't think
| I remembered. It's still very rare for me and I'll go
| years without remembering a single dream---in fact,
| mentioning this to friends when I was younger was one of
| the first areas where I learned my conscious experience
| was so different. I imagine getting better at it would be
| similar to getting better at lucid dreaming.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't recall ever waking up in a "half-dreaming state".
| godelski wrote:
| Focus real hard and make it a practice. You'll need to
| try every night. Most importantly, have patience.
|
| I started like you. Basically it disappeared instantly.
| @agentcoops is right that the still sleepy state helps.
| Your last few sleep cycles have the longest REM, so that
| is likely going to be the best time. But you really need
| to _want_ to do it. By turning it into a habit your brain
| will start recognizing that it is important, so to keep
| it.
|
| I highly suggest using pen and paper. Do not write on
| your phone. It'll help with maintaining that sleepy
| state. It's okay if they are just scribbles and
| illegible. It's better to start writing illegible
| nonsense than waking up and making it readable. This is
| especially true in the beginning. It's okay, it'll come
| with time. Just write down _anything_ you can remember. A
| color, feeling, emotion, smell, taste, or anything. You
| can help the habit by writing "nothing" in it, just as a
| note to remind your mind that you're trying. I cannot
| stress the importance of the habit. The real reason the
| dream journal works is because you are teaching yourself
| that this is important to remember. Just like taking
| notes in class. Even if you never read them back, the act
| of note taking helps build that mental pathway.
|
| Honestly, it may take a month (or more if you're really
| "bad"[0]) to write your first full dream. But you should
| be able to get something in a week or two. Remember, it
| took me a week to just recall a color. That's not
| abnormal. If after a few weeks you still have nothing,
| then set two alarms in the morning an hour or two before
| you normally wake up. The alarms should be about 45-60
| minutes from the first. What you're trying to do is wake
| yourself up towards the end of REM, so trial and error
| might help. You're targeting the last or second to last
| cycle. But there's 2 reasons I suggest not starting
| there. 1) You haven't built the habit yet, so it's going
| to be less useful. 2) Disrupting REM leads you to feeling
| less rested, even if you got enough hours. You can also
| get less reliable results with a single alarm and it is
| probably better to start there, try to time it with your
| normal alarm.
|
| [0] Not that you are doing anything wrong. Just that it
| is harder for you, which might be a thing given your
| condition.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't "maintain a sleepy state". When I wake up, I wake
| up, and the dream is gone long before I'd be able to get
| a pen. _All of it_. It 's pretty much like flicking a
| switch. I'll often make notes first thing after waking
| up, and they're never unintelligible, but they'll also
| never be related to dreams, because the dreams are gone
| by the time I've picked up a pen, even if it's right next
| to my bed.
|
| I often set multiple alarms really early. It's never made
| any difference to my dreams just "switching off".
|
| To me this feels incredibly presumptuous in assuming
| peoples brains work the same, which is something I'm
| generally extremely sceptical to given how different I've
| learned we actually are.
| agentcoops wrote:
| Same--including the time I dabbled in "experience
| altering" compounds when much younger. I always find it
| so strange that many people, including in this thread,
| find the presence of language in their inner experience
| unsettling or "imperfect"---I really wouldn't trade my
| inner monologue for anything...
| yapyap wrote:
| It's odd, I experience aphantasia in the way that I am a
| words thinker, able to talk with myself, the whole 5 miles.
|
| But I am also able to have very vivid dreams, given that I
| sleep at the right time, around 22:00 - 24:00 and being
| sufficiently tired also seems to help. They seem very real
| when I am dreaming them but when I wake up I can remember
| the thoughts of imagery but can't recall any real images or
| pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to have
| had them in the moment.
| agentcoops wrote:
| It's the same for me and every other aphantasic I've
| spoken with. I go years and years without remembering
| dreams, but there are distinct periods in my life when I
| remembered them often. For me it's essentially if I wake
| up in a dreaming state and can quickly "translate" them
| into language. Strange to describe, but I do have a very
| distinct experience of dejavu sometimes, which I've come
| to believe is tied to latent dream memories--curious if
| you have anything like that?
|
| It's actually something very interesting about the
| function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case.
| That there's such insane variability in the structure of
| conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic
| quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all.
| I've read reputable studies that suggest it's crucial for
| learning, something similar to training on synthetic
| data.
| _ink_ wrote:
| If I close my eyes I see the inner of my eye lids.
| Interestingly very intense visual stimuli can trigger
| mental images for me. I remember that when I closed my eyes
| after endless hours of Counterstrike, I would still see the
| game, tho I couldn't control what I see. Same goes for
| porn. Sometimes I remember my dreams, which are visual, but
| I don't think that I experience any other sense while
| dreaming. As kid I had lucid dreams, which I was stunned
| of, because of the amount of details I remembered. I just
| looked at faces of people I knew. Lucid dreaming is still
| something which I want to try to train.
| agentcoops wrote:
| Like many other aphantasics below, just my eyelids. It's
| ironic because I've always had really good (better than
| 20:20) eyesight, but I can only remember words.
|
| The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesn't
| seem to be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly
| diverse structures of inner experience. It's clearly a
| function of the brain much older than conscious experience
| [1] and I've also read research supporting its necessary
| role in learning (roughly equivalent to reinforcement
| learning on synthetic data). There are very rare periods in
| my life when I've remembered my dreams often---which
| definitely suggests it's a skill I could refine---but
| generally I recall one or two a year.
|
| One of the interesting questions is which properties of
| inner experience are genetic, which early developmental,
| and which skills one can refine at any point in life.
| Before I knew I was aphantasic, I had a phase studying
| chess and I tried so hard to "get better" at visualizing
| games---one of the most frustrating experiences of my life!
| Knowing one's limitations, you can then refine appropriate
| techniques like algebraic representations etc.
|
| [1] GPT found some terrific papers on this question. In
| fact, dreaming (measured by two-phase REM sleep cycles)
| goes back to vertebrates -- and seems to have been
| convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish
| appear as the limit with only a single sleep phase.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 is
| fascinating.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Usually skimming fast with bursts of visualization, but I have
| to force myself into that slower, word-by-word mode for dense
| material
| larrry wrote:
| When making visual art, I don't think in words. Shapes, colors,
| shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no
| point do I translate this to words. I'm not sure what trying to
| draw by thinking in words would even look like.
|
| Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also
| feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring
| after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words
| provide a good starting point).
|
| Coding ends in "words", or at least some form of written
| language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in
| words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.
|
| Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but
| they're not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my
| nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN
| comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is
| like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely
| different context and origin.
|
| I don't deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me
| it's just one part of the whole stream of conscious.
|
| I'm curious if anyone else feels this way about words?
| liqilin1567 wrote:
| Is it like this?: It's one of those things you can't really
| describe - you just feel it
| larrry wrote:
| Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process,
| I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process
| can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good,
| did I find morels this season, does the code work as
| required)
| stephenlf wrote:
| I knew my mid-workday naps were productive...
| stephenlf wrote:
| Glad you pointed out Feynman's experience. The paper and the
| writing were the work. Oftentimes, I don't settle on a
| meaningful, elegant solution until I have tried to explain my
| thoughts many times. "Eureka!" becomes "oh wait..." and back--a
| pendulum that eventually settles on a beautiful solution.
| apricot13 wrote:
| This is one of those things that you don't really tend to think
| about (pun not intended!) until you experience a change in your
| thinking or meet someone who thinks like you do!
|
| > If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations
| directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual
| space, we can move much faster
|
| With my neurodivergent brain I've always conducted my thoughts in
| an "uncompressed format" and then eternally struggled to confine
| it all into words. Only then for people to misinterpret and
| question it. They might get caught up in the first sentence when
| the end of the paragraph is where you need to be!
|
| That's why when you meet someone who thinks like you the depth of
| conversation and thinking you can achieve together is vast and
| also incredibly liberating! Your no longer limited by words in
| same way.
|
| Since becoming ill I've suffered badly with brainfog. The cutesy
| name for a cruel experience. Sometimes there's no memories to
| draw on when your thinking, the cupboards are bare. You can't
| leap from thought to thought because they disappear before you
| get there or after like a cursed platformer. You might be able to
| grab hold of the thought but you can't reach inside or read it.
| It's all wrong somehow like when your suddenly convinced a word
| is spelt wrong even though you know it's right. You can't
| maintain focus long enough to finish your train of thought.
|
| Even that subconscious processing is affected I used to prime my
| brain with information all day and instead of waking up with the
| solution I'll wake up frustrated but not knowing why. Just the
| vague notion that I failed at something that used to come so
| easily.
| verisimi wrote:
| > That's why when you meet someone who thinks like you the
| depth of conversation and thinking you can achieve together is
| vast and also incredibly liberating! Your no longer limited by
| words in same way.
|
| Hmm.... I have to say, while I like the idea of being unlimited
| by words - the state of 'purer communion' is one I have
| frequently sought - I think it is far more likely that what is
| going on is that you mind is projecting 'likeness'. Both people
| in the conversation imagine that the other 'gets it' - a
| delusory and false assumption. After all, no one knows what
| goes on in another's mind - we simply don't have access.
|
| I think talking is our means of 'ideas exchange', and that the
| greatest connections comes _after_ lots of conversations, where
| one can (rightly) assume a shared understanding because one
| knows the terms are more-or-less lined up.
|
| Language is an unavoidable throttling valve to me. And
| additionally, it's not the brain that's actually registering
| value/meaning either for me. You can call it the subconscious
| if you like, but I prefer 'soul' as that sense of oneself that
| is always there, has innate knowing, etc. Which is to say,
| there really is no way to express the depth of experience to
| another. But this is fine.
| taneq wrote:
| If it's projection, wouldn't they get the same experience
| with anyone? Or maybe only with someone that's also
| projecting that you also "get it". The proof is in the
| pudding, though, I think. Collaboration with someone who
| matches your wavelength like this seems to be very productive
| in terms of concrete results.
| MrLeap wrote:
| > Both people in the conversation imagine that the other
| 'gets it' - a delusory and false assumption
|
| 'getting it' isn't an all or nothing thing. It would be an
| illusion to take it to an extreme.
|
| The idea of some people in your life being able to get you
| better than others, more quickly and with fewer words, is a
| fact of life. Comparative human connection bandwidth can be
| estimated by vibes, history, outcomes.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Well this is why that the non-verbal part of communication
| conveys most information. A single video call tells more than
| a million words.
| treyd wrote:
| That description really resonates with me, it feels a lot like
| what I've been experiencing on and off for several months. I
| sometimes describe it like being able to see and examine an
| idea sitting in front of me on the table but having a hard time
| picking up and being able to manipulate it enough to write it
| out. Or like your fingers are working poorly like when it's
| very cold and you're not wearing gloves.
| yapyap wrote:
| I get what you're saying, in my own way.
|
| But what I do not get is how you would convey these thoughts to
| someone else that thinks the same way as you, seeing as these
| thoughts don't neccesarily seem to be contained to words or
| sentences.
| thehyperflux wrote:
| I believe the idea is that people who think the same way will
| find it easier to interpret the true nature of the thoughts
| behind forms of words which may be less comprehensible to
| people thinking in other ways.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is easiest to recognize in the creative arts, but really
| you see this in every domain. A musician tapping a rhythm or
| humming a tune might make no sense to a layman, but another
| musician often understands what they mean right from the get
| go. Not because they necessarily know the piece, but because
| they think about music in a similar way.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I'm curious about some specific examples. Like can you
| explain a thought that came to you without words and then try
| to explain how you tried to explain it.
|
| I feel like my thoughts are entirely monologue reasoning
| based kind of.
| gryfft wrote:
| The GP comment really resonated with me so here's my best
| shot at it.
|
| When I'm searching my pockets with my hands, I might have
| just had a verbalized thought like "where did I put my
| keys?" This is followed/accompanied by the physical
| sensations of my hands searching my pockets, and if they
| don't find the keys there, I might reach out with mental
| "hands" to the places I might have left my keys, recalling
| what I've been doing, summoning the sense memory of placing
| the keys down. During the process, I might think things
| like "oh, I was in the garage earlier..." but parts of the
| thought are much less like talking and much more like
| tracing my fingers along grooves.
|
| This is true of thoughts about the physical world, but I do
| it with abstractions too. When I'm considering the
| architecture of a computer application, every memory or bit
| of reasoning might not be verbal, but more akin to feeling
| different parts of a shape or trying to call to mind a
| sensory experience. I'll then very often, when speaking
| aloud, have to wrestle my way back into English. "The thing
| that connects to the other thing with the... options.
| Sorry, no, I meant, in the body of the POST there's a field
| named..."
|
| This is partly why written communication has always been
| much better for me than talking out loud. I can edit what I
| said to more closely match what I meant. I can recognize
| and edit out extraneous thoughts that were necessary for me
| to find the right words but muddy the waters too much if I
| say them without explaining all the thought behind it.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I am much better with written too, but more so I feel
| because my monologue under pressure from scratch wouldn't
| be as focused or systematic since in social situations
| there are so many random questions, factors, and things
| to process. While on my own I can let my monologue
| systematically work in its specific tempo without being
| interrupted.
|
| Searching physical items is something I am terrible at,
| usually because my monologue doesn't care for it and
| rather would do something else or think about something
| else. So I tend to have monologue about something
| entirely other than searching and I walk randomly hoping
| I find the keys as a background process. Sometimes my
| monologue will get to a really interesting idea for me
| and then I just have to try it out and forget that I had
| to go outside in the first place.
|
| It is really, really hard for me to direct my monologue
| to everyday routine activities.
| gryfft wrote:
| > It is really, really hard for me to direct my monologue
| to everyday routine activities.
|
| +1 to that, I would say it's virtually impossible for me,
| and I really entirely on nonverbal/muscle memory for said
| things, and that's the only reason I'm able to function
| at a "bathes and eats" level, much less gainful
| employment. It might not be neurologically accurate, but
| it sure feels like I have a verbal hemisphere and a
| nonverbal hemisphere.
| jononor wrote:
| All language is referential. Even in everyday speech the
| meaning is not in the words themselves, in so much as they
| are pointers to concepts that (hopefully) exists already in
| the brains of the people we are conversing with. So when
| someone is very well aligned, one can convey ideas that go
| much further than conventionally expressed in the "general"
| language which is mutually intellible with most speakers of
| the same language. It is a rare experience though, at least
| for deep or personal topics.
| Xemplolo wrote:
| I don't think its the same thing as whats described in the
| article.
|
| When i talk with someone very aligned with my thinking and
| knowledge (fellow it collegues/friends with simiiliar skill
| level) we do not a lot of words to be aligned and convey
| complex thoughts.
|
| We reference and use words which we both know, we read and
| reference similiar news stories etc.
|
| But the way they describe it with colors, vibrations etc. is
| probably somethig you can't just convey.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Finding someone who thinks like you can feel like unlocking a
| second processor
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| often times the answer is instantaneous but the articulation
| takes ages to show people how to get from a to z
|
| insight often lives in the ability to skip a b c d, then post
| processing is to allow mortals to understand
|
| sometimes my verbal skills fail me and the steps are missing
|
| this is why i disagree that if you can't write it, you don't
| know it
|
| in another words, i may know the note to sing but not have the
| voice to sing it
| stantonius wrote:
| > I've always conducted my thoughts in an "uncompressed format"
| and then eternally struggled to confine it all into words. Only
| then for people to misinterpret and question it.
|
| This resonates so much with me. To a point where I don't
| write/contribute in public forums out of fear for this
| misinterpretation.
|
| Strangely, your post has made me push through that exact fear
| to write this, so any perceived misinterpretation has
| positively impacted at least one stranger. This is a good
| reminder for me that focusing only on negative consequences
| misses the unintended positive ones of still putting something
| out there, even if its not a perfect representation of the
| "uncompressed format".
|
| Thank you for sharing, and I wish you a speedy recovery.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| I've too often made the experience of having something that
| feels significant and whole in my head, and in the process of
| trying to articulate it to another person, it becomes almost
| completely lost. What comes out is a two-dimensional, crippled
| shadow of the original idea, and it (this is the worst part)
| cuts off my connection to the complex form.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| This is why writing is important. it gives you the time to
| actually thinking about the best words to represent what is
| in your head. you may still fail, but it will usually be
| better than whatever comes dribbling out of your mouth.
|
| unfortunately, if knowledge isnt written down in some form,
| (code, english etc) then it doesnt really exist in a
| civilization sense, so you need to get good at writing.
|
| see all Paul Grahams essays on writing.
| ericschn wrote:
| I fully agree. I think of it as exercising the muscle in
| the mind that acts as the "translation layer" between
| abstract concepts and human language. It is tough to convey
| complex ideas in word, but you can grow that skill with
| practice.
| amirmi78 wrote:
| Would you tell what illness it is if you don't mind?
| mathattack wrote:
| In athletics words can be a hindrance, as they add time to the
| thinking/doing gap.
| cnees wrote:
| I've certainly noticed a bit of a pattern where programmers who
| can listen to podcasts or lyrics while they code (I can't; I rely
| too much on my verbal center for coding) can operate much faster
| and solve more complex problems than your average bear. They're
| rare, so I don't have enough data to feel certain, but I have a
| suspicion that sometimes they're forced into it by living in
| noisy environments where tuning out the words or thinking without
| them makes more sense.
| Liftyee wrote:
| Been thinking a lot recently about what my thoughts look like.
| They definitely aren't words (though as I type this, I can
| imagine hearing myself think ahead to the end of the sentence).
| The best I can describe it is visualisations - whether that's
| images of maths notation, 3D rotating models, or a flow/map/block
| diagram.
|
| One pattern is that I'm a very prolific connection-forming
| machine.
|
| Exhibit A: The first thing that enters my mind for each word.
| (OnePlus One) (android pattern unlock) (Islamic State) (unit
| vector named t) (ich bin) (emoji-blood-type-A) (Latin etymology
| word root with verily) (https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times
| Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal
| stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)
| 1659447091 wrote:
| > (ich bin)
|
| Are you a native German speaker? or additional language? (it's
| an interesting/seemingly-random association)
|
| The rest is similar to my (dyslexic) reading process. From what
| I can tell, I coped by memorizing the "shape" or image of words
| and associated them other things/images/sounds/dictionary-
| definition/feeling/emotions/experiences or some other abstract
| things I don't know how to describe -- attached metadata, if
| you will. The biggest issue is words like (is, that, a, etc)
| since the associations are weak at best, leading to them being
| disappeared/changed/hallucinated/moved or replaced by others in
| the same sentence/paragraph. Sometime when it's really messed
| up, leads to rereading a sentence or paragraph multiple times
| until the sequence of all of that makes sense.
|
| But sounding out words is an absolute disaster no matter how
| much I try and fell behind in early grade school until my
| overwhelming need to not disappoint family, who were getting
| frustrated with me, kicked in and I developed my coping
| methods. It takes longer to read and learn new words but the
| associating and pattern matching resulted in my comprehension
| and language scores in school being so high no one picked up on
| how slow I read (or the disaster that reading aloud is) and how
| poorly I spell as being something off.
| Aargau wrote:
| My wife was confounded when I told her I don't think in words.
| For her, it's a one to one correlation.
|
| She had assumed that all people think in this mode. I had assumed
| that all people think in "thoughts" and went through a separate
| step to articulate them.
|
| Made both of us aware of a difference in people.
|
| I don't feel vibrations or sensations though, and I definitely
| don't think in images. I only have a thought level, and it's very
| independent of any external presentation.
| shitter wrote:
| You sound a little like me. I wasn't aware people thought like
| that until my partner told me her thoughts took the form of a
| constant stream of well-formed English. My default mode of
| thinking isn't natural language (though I can force myself to
| think this way, it's laborious, as the article mentions), nor
| images (I struggle with visualization), but more like abstract
| sequences of both logical connections and intuitive feelings.
| v7n wrote:
| Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone
| researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the
| above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get
| what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that
| from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed
| did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling
| thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a
| challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving
| more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat
| visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This
| extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a
| dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-
| existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually
| seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting
| and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and
| "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual
| moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in
| something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone
| and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory
| formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble
| remembering for example number sequences.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Anecdotally, the degree to which one does certain types of
| thinking can change over time, too.
|
| Around 2020, I decided to try to learn as much as I could about
| "higher" mathematics in earnest, having basically no background
| in the subject. Five years later, I have finally read and
| suffered enough to be able to pick up texts in any of the
| abstract branches of mathematics and at least understand most of
| what's being shown/said at a basic level.
|
| More fascinating to me, though, is that this shift in focus has
| lead to a definite shift in my thinking. My thinking used to be
| almost _hyper_ linguistic. Words were my medium of choice, and I
| had a strong stream of inner linguistic thought running through
| my head. Now, that inner voice is mostly quiet. I also find that
| I tend to think about certain situations in terms of abstract
| "relationship pictures" rather than a descriptive sentence.
|
| I actually kind of miss the old linguistic tendencies I had at
| times. I'm hoping a shift back into literature helps reestablish
| some of that.
|
| And yeah, as with all general proclamations that sound nice
| because they allow us to seemingly boil complexities down to a
| singular thing, the whole "wiring is thinking" idea isn't true.
| The truth in that statement is more akin to "human thought is
| often tool assisted"--and a manner of tools can aid in
| elaborating thought. Thought and action are not as severed as we
| tend to think.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist
| (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large
| entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He
| usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write
| them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the
| time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and
| maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or
| walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes
| was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another
| person at the company would write books and take credit for his
| creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had
| no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used
| didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla
| designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only
| for purpose of communication.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I would say that this is the intuitive, naive way of starting
| coding if no one has taught you coding or you haven't had to
| care about maintainability or other people reading your code.
| karmakaze wrote:
| We could today give it to an AI and tell it to name the
| variables after manually renaming the input and output ones.
| geoffbp wrote:
| I've been spending time learning meditation, which is essentially
| not thinking :)
| est wrote:
| > they didn't think in words
|
| Does this suggest most people think in words? Really?
| petethomas wrote:
| This reminded me of Hans Keller's wordless functional musical
| analysis. I came across it listening to his documentary on
| Schoenberg, available here:
| https://archive.org/download/miscellaneous_plays_1983-02-07_...
|
| "Keller would construct an analysis in the form of an analytic
| score written for the same forces as the work under consideration
| and structured as a succession of 'analytic interludes' designed
| to be played between its movements."[1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Wordless_functional_ana...
| ethersteeds wrote:
| On that note! I am an intensely verbal person, with words and
| narrative as my primary mode of thought. This essay and
| discussion reminds me of a desire I've felt before to develop the
| muscles, so to speak, of thinking without words.
|
| Does anyone have any advice or techniques to that end?
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Perhaps do activities like manipulating physical objects
| (carpentry?, Lego, Rubiks cube), games like Tetris, or complex
| body movements where verbalization won't be of much use. Or
| standard Quantitative Reasoning problems from entrance exams. A
| few years back, the wordcel vs shape rotator debate/binary was
| being discussed online: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-
| shapes-and-words?r=53sw
|
| I'd come across this book "Visual Thinking in Mathematics"
| (https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-
| Gia...) which goes into some of this.
| blubber wrote:
| Isn't it already too late, when you ask yourself that question?
| noduerme wrote:
| Like, that's funny. But asking yourself that question might
| just be a step toward answering it. I grew up around a lot of
| autistic kids who had to train themselves to verbalize
| anything, but also to restrain themselves from verbalizing
| random thoughts. Then you reach an age where you start to spew
| out everything in words, and you have to learn that putting
| something into language too soon can strip it of its actual
| meaning and ossify it before you have a chance to fully examine
| it.
| noduerme wrote:
| >> the moment when the solution to a problem emerges "in the
| shower" unexpectedly after a long period of unconscious
| incubation.
|
| A lot of responses here seem to place this chain-of-thought on a
| spectrum between verbal and "vibe". I don't think that solving
| problems pre-verbally is actually at odds with verbal
| intelligence, or that a person must by definition be better at
| one than another. The pregnant, mathematical, nonverbal thought
| in the shower is only really useful if it can be organized and
| stated rationally at some point later. Likewise, the wordy
| explanation is useless without a well-reasoned theory it's
| explaining.
|
| For me, I find that dreams help bridge this gap. Oftentimes I'll
| be struggling with a difficult mental model of a problem, and
| thinking of a lot of _math_ in my head in the shower. But when I
| sleep, I 'll have some dream that acts as a metaphor for the
| problem. Say, e.g. I'm thinking about how to time two independent
| processes to deconflict some data. I might have a dream about
| missing a flight because the plane already arrived but was
| announced at the wrong gate, and I'm running across the airport.
| Then I wake up and see the answer to the problem. Moreover, I
| then see _how to explain the problem I just solved, using a
| metaphor that most people can understand._
|
| As far as actually explaining it formally in writing, I usually
| test the code a zillion ways first and then write the
| documentation.
| helloworld4728 wrote:
| A way that can be walked is not The Way
|
| A name that can be named is not The Name
|
| Tao is both Named and Nameless As Nameless, it is the origin of
| all things As Named, it is the mother of all things
|
| A mind free of thought, merged within itself, beholds the essence
| of Tao
|
| A mind filled with thought, identified with its own perceptions,
| beholds the mere forms of this world
| EigenLord wrote:
| I've always felt that you can't think in anything besides
| thought. Words, images, symbols, etc, are all side-effects. They
| absolutely bend back and influence the thought process, but they
| are always secondary and indirect. Thought itself is ineffable.
| boje wrote:
| I'm not sure if I understand correctly about "thinking in
| concrete English sentences or words" as other comments have
| mentioned, so here's a description of what happens to me:
|
| I can visualize things in my mind, and it's almost as if I was
| playing a video or rotating 3D models in Blender, but they happen
| as if they were at a 70-80% brightness level. I can verbalize my
| thoughts or words I am reading from some text as if someone were
| speaking into my head, but that's not how I "comprehend" them,
| especially if they have more than a negligible amount of
| complexity. They have to be converted into a set of
| visualizations, however vague or abstract, somewhat resembling
| what GenAI does. This has a noticeable delay and I almost always
| lose track of, say, what a lecturer is saying in real time.
| Because of this, I almost always prefer having text or a
| prerecorded video being available.
|
| I can "render" text in my head too, as if they were being written
| down in a word processor or like a screenshot of a blogpost, but
| it's still an image.
|
| I find difficulty trying to manipulate any symbols in my head.
| Mental math or algebra with more than a miniscule amount of rigor
| is hard for me to do and I always require pen and paper as a
| support. Trying to do this requires me to "graphically" move
| symbols around a written equation, and because of my usual
| scatterbrained-ness, the context quickly breaks down and
| evaporates. I have to maintain that context with paper. I find it
| easier, however, to visualize an algorithm or similar things in
| my head as a video-animation "playback".
|
| Here's an example:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animat... -
| This is exactly what occurs in my brain when I think of tree
| rotations (extended to larger tree heights), and was the only,
| singular useful thing for me in the entire wikipedia article on
| tree rotations.
|
| As an aside, the imagery that video GenAI generates, with
| spontaneous, random pop-ins of objects is eerily similar to what
| happens in my dreams and in my mental imagery. Second, I'm not
| particularly fond of reading books, literature or poetry, but I
| do find myself semi-regularly reading long blogposts or texts if
| they interest me, and watching long-form videos or podcasts.
| boje wrote:
| Another aside - I do end up spending a lot of time working on
| the presentation of a thing like trying to polish things like
| user interfaces, vector or raster graphics, typesetting, CSS
| and other visual-ish stuff. It's something I've tried to
| suppress to actually get functional aspects of a work done.
| Admittedly, this is the more fun part of a work for me.
| bnferguson wrote:
| The book "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity"
| has a large thread exploring this among both historical and
| contemporary mathematicians. How people who seem to have an
| almost supernatural gift for math are often just able to "see"
| more clearly. Not in equations or words, but images.
|
| Also discussing the development of the ability/discipline and the
| difficulties in transcribing what you now intuitively know but
| need to describe to other mathematicians so they can understand
| (notation/equations).
|
| It's a book that's stuck in my head since reading it and
| wondering how to apply some of this to other problem spaces.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| The way I think about it is that words constrain a problem.
| Constraining a problem makes it easier to understand, remember,
| and convey. But it makes it harder to have, well, unconstrained,
| creative thoughts about it. Structure can be both good and bad.
|
| This is true of any abstraction.
| arkensaw wrote:
| !
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Thinking without words has 2 main problems imo:
|
| - You are unable to verify that your ideas are logical and not
| just feelings (i.e. the feeling of something being logical, the
| feeling of x and y being related, etc). The confusion between
| fact, logic and feelings is all so common in ASC
|
| - You are unable to get a third party view on those ideas
| (language is the only form of telepathy we are capable of)
| a5c11 wrote:
| You definitely should read the whole article. The author says
| that wrapping ideas in words at later stages is important to
| complete the process of inventing. It's all about the initial
| processing, to free your mind from language's constraints,
| because language is indeed constraining. It feels like
| multiplexing numerous parallel streams of thoughts into a
| single spoken channel. You have to do it at some point, but
| only when you are confident you know what those parallel
| streams carry. Otherwise you will get mess.
| fjfaase wrote:
| In the family of my maternal grandfather there are many
| individuals who are much better at science but have difficulty
| with language (often in combination with dyslexia) in school. I
| have some evidence that those individuals (myself included) have
| a significant higher non-verbal IQ (20 to 30 points) than verbal
| IQ as categorized by the WISC-V intelligence tests. I often
| struggle to express my ideas with words. When I think about
| algorithms it is often in 'abstract' visual images. While
| developing software, I find myself searching for
| functions/methods a lot, because I often forget their names or
| the order of the parameters.
|
| Academic performance is strongly correlated with the verbal
| components of intelligence. I wonder if there are other people
| who know that their non-verbal IQ is measurable higher than their
| verbal IQ.
| blueflow wrote:
| IQ is the measurement, not the real thing, so don't focus too
| much on it.
|
| The vocabulary is limited by what the recipients will
| understand, while your thoughts are not. My favourite example:
| Complex thoughts can have many forms of negative results, but
| there isn't widespread vocabulary other than "i don't know" to
| express it.
| giva wrote:
| I can relate. May ask you how your relation with AI tools is? I
| tend to find myself translating my mental model into natural
| language, to have a machine convert it into code, then reading
| that code back to mental model. It's unnerving. It feels much
| more natural writing my mental model directly into code.
| fjfaase wrote:
| I am not using AI tools for code generation. I have only used
| it for 'querying' information, for example, when I started to
| work with Device Trees and Yocto for embedded Linux
| development. I am happy with IntelliSense. Yes, AI tools can
| very quickly generate some simple app, but I do not believe
| it will work for more complex problems.
| bored wrote:
| I think I can relate with you. It's unnerving for me to see
| how poorly written my initial natural language interpretation
| appears. AI reassures me it's not also incoherent by
| generating code that does what I expect.
| cttet wrote:
| I rarely think with words, when I think with words it is like 20x
| slower, it is more robust, but in that case I would use pen and
| paper for that.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, after a lot of thinking and visualization and brain-
| storming, a lot of which was the sort of formless void of the
| wordless prayers of St. John of the Cross and what I would reach
| for in Buddhist meditation (but never managed to hold on to for
| long if I even reached it --- given that I was regularly hit with
| a bamboo can before being told to go sweep up in the bookbinding
| shop, probably not....) I've managed to make a bit of progress on
| a project to the point of an actual concept realized in 3D in my
| head --- the problem has been that getting from mental image to
| 3D model to files which will can actually be cut on a CNC has
| been nightmarish --- the 3D CAM tools which I can afford either
| won't use the tooling which I wish to use in the way I need to
| use it, or one which did converted a 1" x 1" x 2" test section
| into a ~140MB file after churning for ~18 minutes (I'll need for
| this to exist in multiples and to be as much as 48 inches long).
|
| Since then, I've been working on a personal project to cut this,
| but I've been running into issues with the complexity of CSG
| objects.... tried using linear/rotate_extrude but they rotate the
| 2D tool representation as if it were being used w/ a 5-axis CNC,
| but most people (incl. me) use a 3-axis....
| KolibriFly wrote:
| For most of us, writing remains the training ground. But it's
| also humbling to realize that the moment we try to articulate
| something, we're already losing a ton of nuance
| habosa wrote:
| On this topic I strongly recommend "The World I Live In" by
| Hellen Keller.
|
| In some of the essays she describes how before she was taught to
| communicate she had no inner monologue and didn't even recognize
| herself as human. She was surprised to learn that the dog was not
| able to understand her. Language essentially gave her her mind,
| although the book does go into great detail about the things she
| perceived about the world through touch and exploration that few
| others would.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| People find out that we actually think in different ways.
|
| Five minutes later: Someone writes an article about why his way
| of thinking is superior.
| vict7 wrote:
| Yep, as someone whose brain is biased towards a higher verbal
| IQ and thinks primarily in words, a lot of the replies to this
| post are amusing.
|
| I have genuine curiosity about those that claim to think in
| "pure abstract thoughts" or whatever. I don't believe my way of
| thinking is superior. I'm certain that my constant internal
| monologue is strongly correlated to my tendency to ruminate.
| Or, I struggle with concepts that do not translate well into a
| verbal format.
|
| People apparently can't pass up the opportunity to disparage
| those with a different thinking style.
| Marshferm wrote:
| Words are the illusion, they neither exist nor are they directly
| linked to thoughts. Words are "sportscasting."
|
| All thinking is done without words. This is empirical both from
| the new neurosciences of dynamics/oscillations (see Buzsaki) and
| neurobiological linguistics (see MIT Language Lab quote below).
| This is very likely how LLMs have nothing to do with intelligence
| or thinking. Thoughts are wordless processes built from Sharp
| Wave Ripples that flow across the entirety of the brain and
| probably interact ecologically with the outside. Where they are
| formed, how they interact and integrate with the senses,
| emotions, memories, motor, simulations and in what order to make
| action-syntax is still unknown.
|
| Words have nothing to do with them.
|
| "We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use
| linguistic representations to think." Ev Fedorenko Language Lab
| MIT 2024
| dapperdrake wrote:
| > When is it better to think without words?
|
| Claim: Lambda almost always.
| DaveZale wrote:
| try the nyt connections puzzle for a couple of weeks. When you
| get better at it, you're associating sets of words without
| thinking in words. The answers just pop up.
| 7402 wrote:
| Am I the only one like this?
|
| In my long programming career I feel I did most of my programming
| nonverbally - large programs always felt I was sculpting a big
| chunk of stone rather than writing an essay.
|
| Once it was done, I had no problem describing it, discussing it,
| documenting it, etc. But the actual task of programming felt like
| it was going on the non-verbal part of my brain.
|
| These were mostly big programs, by the way: hard-real-time, or
| machine control, or threaded C++, or scientific data processing.
|
| I found my style to be generally incompatible with pair-
| programming - except for pair debugging once my or someone else's
| code was written, _that_ I did find useful.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| "My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally
| a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it
| has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its
| human host; that is to say, the Word Virus ... has established
| itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that
| it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them
| in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the
| single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no
| internal function other than to replicate itself."
|
| -- William S. Burroughs
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