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.
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.