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HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML When is it better to think without words?
rufus_foreman wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
"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
7402 wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
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.
DaveZale wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
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.
dapperdrake wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
> When is it better to think without words?
Claim: Lambda almost always.
Marshferm wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
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.
âWe refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use
linguistic representations to think.â Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT
2024
Viliam1234 wrote 9 hours 24 min ago:
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 6 hours 17 min ago:
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 âpure
abstract thoughtsâ or whatever. I donât believe my way of
thinking is superior. Iâm 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 canât pass up the opportunity to disparage those
with a different thinking style.
habosa wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
On this topic I strongly recommend âThe World I Live Inâ by Hellen
Keller.
In some of the essays she describes how before she was taught to
communicate she had no inner monologue and didnât 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.
KolibriFly wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
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
WillAdams wrote 13 hours 36 min ago:
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....
cttet wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
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.
fjfaase wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
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.
giva wrote 11 hours 57 min ago:
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.
bored wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
I think I can relate with you. Itâs unnerving for me to see how
poorly written my initial natural language interpretation appears.
AI reassures me itâs not also incoherent by generating code that
does what I expect.
fjfaase wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
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.
blueflow wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
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.
netdevphoenix wrote 15 hours 5 min ago:
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 14 hours 10 min ago:
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.
arkensaw wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
!
Ozzie_osman wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
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.
bnferguson wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
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.
boje wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
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: [1] - 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.
HTML [1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animatio...
boje wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
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.
EigenLord wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
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.
helloworld4728 wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
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
noduerme wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
>> the moment when the solution to a problem emerges âin the
showerâ 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.
blubber wrote 19 hours 47 min ago:
Isn't it already too late, when you ask yourself that question?
noduerme wrote 19 hours 38 min ago:
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.
ethersteeds wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
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 13 hours 57 min ago:
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: [1] I'd
come across this book "Visual Thinking in Mathematics" ( [2] ) which
goes into some of this.
HTML [1]: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?r=53sw
HTML [2]: https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-Gia...
petethomas wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
This reminded me of Hans Keller's wordless functional musical analysis.
I came across it listening to his documentary on Schoenberg, available
here: [1] "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]
HTML [1]: https://archive.org/download/miscellaneous_plays_1983-02-07_wh...
HTML [2]: https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Wordless_functional_analy...
est wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
> they didnât think in words
Does this suggest most people think in words? Really?
geoffbp wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
Iâve been spending time learning meditation, which is essentially not
thinking :)
karmakaze wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
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 12 hours 17 min ago:
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 11 hours 9 min ago:
We could today give it to an AI and tell it to name the variables
after manually renaming the input and output ones.
voidhorse wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
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
hyperlinguistic. 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"âand
a manner of tools can aid in elaborating thought. Thought and action
are not as severed as we tend to think.
Aargau wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
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 23 hours 4 min ago:
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 18 hours 58 min ago:
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.
Liftyee wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
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) ( [1] ) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow
moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)
HTML [1]: https://prolificusa.com/
1659447091 wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
> (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/experienc
es 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.
cnees wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mathattack wrote 1 day ago:
In athletics words can be a hindrance, as they add time to the
thinking/doing gap.
apricot13 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
amirmi78 wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
Would you tell what illness it is if you don't mind?
Dilettante_ wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
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 7 hours 28 min ago:
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.
Dilettante_ wrote 18 min ago:
>Paul Grahams essays on writing
Wow, thanks for the recommendation. I sat down and read a handful
over the past couple of hours and really got a lot out of them.
ericschn wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
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.
stantonius wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
> 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.
throwaway98797 wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
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 canât write it, you donât know
it
in another words, i may know the note to sing but not have the voice
to sing it
KolibriFly wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
Finding someone who thinks like you can feel like unlocking a second
processor
Xemplolo wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
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.
yapyap wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
I get what youâre 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 donât neccesarily seem to be contained to words or
sentences.
jononor wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
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.
mewpmewp2 wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
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 12 hours 23 min ago:
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 12 hours 10 min ago:
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 12 hours 2 min ago:
> 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.
Etheryte wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
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.
thehyperflux wrote 14 hours 10 min ago:
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.
treyd wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
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.
verisimi wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
> 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.
nuancebydefault wrote 14 hours 3 min ago:
Well this is why that the non-verbal part of communication conveys
most information. A single video call tells more than a million
words.
MrLeap wrote 14 hours 13 min ago:
> 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.
taneq wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
If itâs projection, wouldnât they get the same experience with
anyone? Or maybe only with someone thatâs also projecting that
you also âget itâ. 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.
stephenlf wrote 1 day ago:
Glad you pointed out Feynmanâs experience. The paper and the writing
were the work. Oftentimes, I donât settle on a meaningful, elegant
solution until I have tried to explain my thoughts many times.
âEureka!â becomes âoh waitâ¦â and backâa pendulum that
eventually settles on a beautiful solution.
stephenlf wrote 1 day ago:
I knew my mid-workday naps were productiveâ¦
larrry wrote 1 day ago:
When making visual art, I donât think in words. Shapes, colors,
shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do
I translate this to words. Iâm 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 âwordsâ, 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
theyâre 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 donât deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me
itâs just one part of the whole stream of conscious.
Iâm curious if anyone else feels this way about words?
liqilin1567 wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
Is it like this?: It's one of those things you can't really describe
- you just feel it
larrry wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
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)
quacked wrote 1 day ago:
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.
KolibriFly wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Usually skimming fast with bursts of visualization, but I have to
force myself into that slower, word-by-word mode for dense material
agentcoops wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
Iâm aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner experience
could not be more different: itâs strange to explain, but I
experience âunvocalizedâ language, which means the words are sort
of just there without âhearingâ them in my headâ-I donât have
inner sound at all either and so the words donât have an accent,
for example. My thought moves at a speed much faster than speaking
and I can read fast with high comprehensionâ-but it takes me
incredible effort to remember the color of someoneâs eyes, for
example. I more or less skip descriptions in novels and prefer to
read philosophy.
Iâve always found it interesting that in programming communities
the two extremes of aphantasic and hyperphantasic seem to both be
very overrepresented.
godelski wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
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
agentcoops wrote 10 hours 18 min ago:
Like many other aphantasics below, just my eyelids. Itâs ironic
because Iâve always had really good (better than 20:20)
eyesight, but I can only remember words.
The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesnât seem to
be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly diverse
structures of inner experience. Itâs clearly a function of the
brain much older than conscious experience [1] and Iâve 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 Iâve remembered my dreams
oftenâ-which definitely suggests itâs a skill I could
refineâ-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
âget betterâ at visualizing gamesâ-one of the most
frustrating experiences of my life! Knowing oneâs 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 â and seems to have been
convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish appear
as the limit with only a single sleep phase. [1] is fascinating.
HTML [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4
_ink_ wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
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.
yapyap wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
Itâs 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 canât recall any real
images or pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to
have had them in the moment.
agentcoops wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
Itâs the same for me and every other aphantasic Iâve 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 itâs essentially if I wake up in a dreaming
state and can quickly âtranslateâ them into language.
Strange to describe, but I do have a very distinct experience
of dejavu sometimes, which Iâve come to believe is tied to
latent dream memoriesâcurious if you have anything like that?
Itâs actually something very interesting about the function
of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That thereâs
such insane variability in the structure of conscious
experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming
fulfills a necessary role for all. Iâve read reputable
studies that suggest itâs crucial for learning, something
similar to training on synthetic data.
vidarh wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
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.
agentcoops wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
Sameâincluding the time I dabbled in âexperience
alteringâ 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
âimperfectââ-I really wouldnât trade my inner monologue
for anythingâ¦
godelski wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
> 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 10 hours 58 min ago:
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.
godelski wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
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 3 hours 51 min ago:
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 10 hours 38 min ago:
For me, itâs dependent on waking up in a half-dreaming
state. Then Iâm able to sort of âtranslateâ the dream
into language, which I rememberâ-and sometimes from there
I can get back to parts of the dream I didnât think I
remembered. Itâs still very rare for me and Iâll go
years without remembering a single dreamâ-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 3 hours 50 min ago:
I don't recall ever waking up in a "half-dreaming state".
Citizen_Lame wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
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 11 hours 4 min ago:
What is your experience of thinking? Sounds like itâs a black
box to you
not_a_bot_4sho wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
Same. And it's weird to hear someone else understand this so well.
quacked wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
What happens when you read descriptions if you can't skip over
them?
theshrike79 wrote 18 hours 13 min ago:
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.
tartoran wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
>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.
weakfish wrote 10 hours 20 min ago:
Iâm 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 canât
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? :-)
mewpmewp2 wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
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.
riwsky wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
what happens is that they're comparatively boring
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
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 itâs 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 17 hours 15 min ago:
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
donât 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.
itâs definitely not âpurely linguisticâ â one form of it is
about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.
EGreg wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words
ultimately?
quacked wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
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.
Austizzle wrote 14 hours 17 min ago:
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
bored wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
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.
lll-o-lll wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
I first heard about âthinking in picturesâ from Dr Temple
Grandin, who is autistic and associates it with autism. Anyway,
itâs also how she thinks and appears to be a super power when
it comes to designing feed lots. [1] I imagine you also struggled
with algebra? Being a non-visual abstraction.
HTML [1]: https://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html
JohnMakin wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
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.
quacked wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
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.
bregma wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
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.
Liftyee wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
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.
larrry wrote 1 day ago:
A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you
wrote. I can think in words, but itâs 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 itâs much
harder.
chrisweekly wrote 1 day ago:
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".
stavros wrote 1 day ago:
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.
danparsonson wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
Or conversely, that one can be lost for words to describe what one is
thinking!
shakna wrote 1 day ago:
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]
HTML [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 19 hours 5 min ago:
On 4chan and reddit, they actually believe that those without an
"inner monologue" have no soul.
shakna wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
Just to underpin how wrong this comment is, I - the person who
posted the medical explanation - have been rather active on both
those platforms.
missingdays wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
Reddit has roughly 400 million weekly users. You think all of
them believe the same thing?
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
That's what the evidence suggests.
daxfohl wrote 1 day ago:
Or by watching rats solve mazes
shakna wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
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]
HTML [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0...
gchamonlive wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
"the split of the self and the world"
is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an illusion
and fundamental error
gchamonlive wrote 1 day ago:
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.
daxfohl wrote 1 day ago:
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.
HTML [1]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirms-...
supportengineer wrote 1 day ago:
When a sophon is trying read your mind
wrp wrote 1 day ago:
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 12 hours 18 min ago:
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.
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