Several times in my life I have been infuriated by people contradicting something I said that I knew was true. (“You can’t cross the border between Georgia and North Carolina. They don’t border each other”. I have only done it about fifteen times.)
One of the most annoying are the people who tell me I can’t think without words. This seems to be the opinion mostly of logicians and computer scientists (but I think only a minority of them). When I am concentrating on math or on a physical repair job I USUALLY think without words. And in many other situations as well. The result is that when someone asks me what I am doing I am literally at a loss for words. I have to deconcentrate and come up with a verbal explanation of the nonverbal thinking I was doing. Which makes me look as if I don’t “know” what I am doing.
When I need to memorize the sequence 6785 (part of our car’s license number) I visualize the numbers 5678 with the five leapfrogging over the other numbers to end up on the right. I don’t say the numbers, I picture them. This has enabled me to write down the license number on the motel application without having to drop my bags and dash out the door to look at the car, which is usually parked the wrong way for me to see the back end.
When I stare at a chain of gears to see which way one of them goes when I turn another one, I visualize the turning of each intermediate one, one at a time. I don’t say or think “clockwise, counterclockwise” and so on, I see them turning and I feel kinetically the top of one going clockwise moving to the right – I sort of feel MY top (shoulders and arms) moving to the right.
When I see a pullback diagram I feel the upper left corner being pushed down and to the right so as to be the last corner of all the squares with the same bottom and right edge. I don’t think the words “pullback square” unless I am in the process of trying to formulate a claim about it.
I learned that I do this from reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That really wasn’t the main point of that book but it is what I remember most vividly from reading it.
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Comment from friend who wishes to remain anonymous:
And think of all the musical things you do without words. I remember my
first piano teacher insisting that I name the notes I was playing; it was
always hard to switch from “note on page of music”–>”key on piano”, which
was instantaneous, to “note on page of music”–>”name of note”, which
always took an embarrassingly long time. To arguments that playing the
piano is not really thinking, I can only answer that it certainly requires
a lot of brain activity in some rather suggestive parts of the brain.
Another anonymous friend said:
Thinking without words is an important part of my singing (especially freestyle harmonizing), and I think for many people it’s a very satisfying activity, the type of things that are “intuitive” are actually just wordless or something.
Richard Feynman, in one of his books, reports that he made this assertion to a friend when he was young. The friend asked him to picture an automobile engine, and then asked how he described it to himself.
Singing the shapes, in Sacred Harp, helps me only insofar as it allows me to sing through the tune without having to pull my eyes away from the notes the first time. The shapes themselves I find immensely valuable, but, as with anonymous friend #1, shape -> syllable is a weaker connection for me than shape -> tone; while some people indicate that they’re going shape -> syllable -> tone when singing the shapes, I’m going directly to both of the latter from the shape.
I am not sure what Richard Feynman’s point is. “Picturing” an auto engine is not what I was talking about. Understanding it without words is more like it. And if I can do that I don’t need to explain it to myself. Explaining it to someone else is another matter, but even there I could demonstrate some things and show videos of cylinders moving, etc, along with words.
Just today I stood looking in the refrigerator and Someone asked “What are you looking for?” I was picturing a plastic bag with English muffins in as I had last seen it, with three muffins and with the bag wrapped around, not tied with a tie. I had to stop what I was doing to think of the phrase “English muffins” and in fact I didn’t think of the words, I found the bag and held it up to show her.
But pictures are a sort of a language. Not even a language, but at least…a medium. Do you see? The …? That means I’m at a loss of words or even pictures, because pictures are describable. It’s simply a concept, and I can feel a concept without having to have a medium.
I hate it, too. (By the way, I was just driving home with my Mom from my Grandma’s, and my mom told me I can’t think without words. So then I looked it up on Google which is why I ended up here. :D) I’ve asked it a billion times. Sometimes you think thoughts that can’t be put into any sort of medium…not one that I know of, anyway. Everyone has totally complex thoughts. When you’re wondering about things like God or time or whatever, it’s impossible. Language is just a translation that we do subconciously of nonverbal thoughts.
If we couldn’t have thought without language, who would have invented language?
I think because humans are so verbal, we tend to name and label things subconciously (so we can express those ideas and create a village whatevs). Like, if you have an idea, you’ll label it something.
I don’t know, I think it’s dumb when people think thought is strictly verbal.
Comment from Jēkabs Kārkliņš:
I just found your blog googling “thinking without words”. Your post made me smile (;.
It’s really annoying that most of sources i’ve read says – words are the base of thoughts. That is not true. I can, for example, think 10 minutes long about the next day, and works i need to do, and how to acomplish them, without saying a word.
To express my ideas it always takes a while to transform them to appropriate words. And not always it’s going so well. Thus the very same idea explained to two different people using different words actually in one case sounds good, while on another it’s sounds messy.
I’m also in love with physics/math. Seems like it’s two different thinking mechanisms, or what?
Good article. I think without words for everything including social situations (I have fairly shit social skills I have to admit though) so I can relate all too well to having to abruptly stop what I’m thinking and come up with a verbal translation of what I was thinking then realizing people assume I don’t know what I’m doing. Its a bit condescending but I’ve gotten used to it and they rarely do it in a disrespectful way so I don’t mind. As you probably know using words to think is kinda like chaining a lead ball to your leg before going jogging. Words take a long time to word out so it must severely impede the speed at which one can think. I think in a combination of pictures, emotions, tactile sensations and something I can only really explain as sensory modulations. What I mean by modulations are the way radio waves are meaningless unless we modulate or encode messages into the signal.
Its a scary thought that some people rely solely on words for thinking because that means they can only think about that which they have words for. I think theres a severe lack of communication in society about this we need to inform people that they do not need words to think because if they think in words then their thinking can only be as complete as their vocabulary whereas if you think in your own language the only thing limiting your thinking is your human logic but 1 step at a time.