This affects the philosophy of mind and theories of consciousness. As someone who has relatively little internal talk and is visual thinker, it was always really perplexing to read how some people are so convinced that without language there can't be consciousness, or that you need a language to be intelligent.
>A horse trainer once said to me, "Animals don't think, they just make associations." I responded to that by saying, "If making associations is not thinking, then I would have to conclude that I do not think." People with autism and animals both think by making visual associations. These associations are like snapshots of events and tend to be very specific. For example, a horse might fear bearded me n when it sees one in the barn, but bearded men might be tolerated in the riding arena. In this situation the horse may only fear bearded men in the barn because he may have had a bad past experience in the barn with a bearded man.
I have the same mental style and that has always perplexed me too.
Language to me is a kind of slow and inexact medium that we use to try to describe the stuff of thought.
It probably makes us capable of thinking things that we otherwise might not. For example, it would take a big imaginative leap to conceptualize “the universe” for the first time. But since we have that word now it’s trivial for any of us.
But in my own head I don’t think of the words “the universe”, I think of something like an image or representation of the concept of the universe that usually just arises without an accompanying word.
Animals think like this too, I’m sure. Tell your dog “you wanna go for a ride in the car?”. He knows the car, he knows rides, and this knowledge is what comes up in his mind, not the word “the car”. And he’s probably thinking of stuff like this all the time without being triggered to do so by a word.
Related: NLP models this as VAKOG (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory). The first three are said to be the most common with regard to mental processing. There is an additional concept of an individual's 'preferred representational system' also.
Lots of folk say that NLP is pseudoscience, and, perhaps arguably, this is probably true to some degree. But some of it is certainly useful as a model, sometimes. Some amount of the various aspects of NLP does seem to accord with psychological research though.
Not that I'm here to argue any of that - just figured someone might find NLP's model of this interesting.
Personally, my 'dominant mode' (preferred representational system) is auditory - I have an inner dialogue, pretty much all of the time (sometimes music) - and I am quite poor at visualising things.
Interesting topic! (in general - not specifically NLP)
(This Wikipedia page is far from the best resource on this - at least not when compared with some of the books - it's just an easily found reference/summary)
Part of me wonders whether the thinking of those who don't has been affected by movie and television's portrayal as anyone who thinks as having an internal narrative. Granted, it's hard to convey an abstract thought through the idiot box, so I don't entirely think media producers are evil for having done this. Just curious.
> "WHAT? I thought everyone heard what they wanted to say before saying it. Maybe that’s what determines speaking speeds. I think people that hear what they’re about to say can speak faster than people who can’t."
Don't they have to wait for the voice in their head to finish talking first?
I can't even figure out which type I am. I wouldn't say I understand things visually. I do imagine myself verbalizing a lot of my thoughts as if I was talking to someone - but that obviously comes after having the thought itself. I have no idea what form the thought itself takes.
I do constantly imagine myself having conversations with people (usually people I know irl). I try to explain something to them and they ask me questions and point out problems with what I'm saying. That's how I figure stuff out. Luckily I know a lot of clever people I can use for this.
My internal narrative is there but it keeps arranging concepts with only few labels attached to them. When something interesting/important comes out of that I may think about it in words but then I subvocalize it, there's no independent inner voice.
If someone has never learned a language, what do they think in their head? Is it like the sound effects in cartoons, like "arrgh!" and "huh." and "mmmmm!" ???
My most interesting thinking is about associations between nameless (or as yet unidentified) things. They have a topology but other than that it's hard to say what they are. There's some feelings of familiarity/novelty or desirable/undesirable that have yet to be connected to any reasoning. The thing that's not obvious is how to share such thoughts using a shared language language, math or physics are usually good areas to borrow from.
