It’s an interesting study, although for me the result sounds very natural, as I don’t generally use language for thought, let alone reasoning. For me, language is primarily a tool for communication.
Same for me and it's so innate to my experience that I can't even really fathom or conceptualize the alternative
A related thing this whole topic makes me think of are the various experiments / experiences / etc that have to do with those that have had their corpus callosum severed and how reasoning and processing are affected by that and all the potential implications/questions that arise (philisophically/scientifically/etc) as a result
There's one in particular (though I have not dug deep enough to know how valid it is) that I've heard repeated where someone would have only one side of their brain be aware of an instruction to do something, and they would get up and do it and sit back down, and when asked why they did it, they would give a reason that seems false but legitimately believe it's true (it seemed that half of the brain fabricated a reasoning for 'why' and back fit it to their action), which to me is interesting, because if this actually did happen maybe it has implications for human behaviors in ways we never before considered and so on
I'm always fascinated by how anything remotely in this field of study has implications or at least raises questions regarding human behavior, free will, etc.
I can think in language, but I have to make an active effort to do so. For me, it's a much slower and less intuitive way to think unless I'm specifically thinking about language (e.g., planning how I'm going to say something), and it's not really compatible with most of the thoughts and inner experiences I have.
Most of the time, if I have some kind of inner monologue that I'm not actively forcing myself to have, it's just some lyrics or something stuck in my head. My actual thoughts are somewhere else and in a completely different format (I would describe it as visual-spatial, but mostly spatial, particularly for abstract concepts). Reciting lyrics in my head in no way inhibits my ability to think about other things.
I have a really hard time imagining what it must feel like to think in words all the time. How do you think about non-linguistic concepts or about things (e.g., complex emotions, novel sensory experiences, non-language-based puzzles) that words can't adequately describe? Or do you?
Does it force you to think in a very slow, linear way (at the speed of speech, one word after another)? Can you have multiple thoughts in your head?
How do you get new ideas or learn new concepts? What happens inside your head when you're presented with something you don't know the word for and don't understand well enough to describe?
I would say that while it's not the only aspect to my thinking it is a constant part of the thinking process. So it's not that I have to convert my thinking into words for it to happen successfully or anything like that.
Essentially, the best way I can describe it is even if I'm doing thinking that doesn't require language (solving a visual non-language puzzle, feeling emotions, having experiences) or ANY form of thinking activity at all, it is always accompanied by an inescapable narrator.
So, when it comes to new concepts or ideas or things that I don't 'have the words for' or other things- I still can have 'experiential knowledge' or grasp something but it will be narrated in some way, even if that narration is 'i get this but i have no idea how to articulate it' or whatever.
So it's not even that it's always helpful, or even desired, and it's not the only way I think, but it is an inescapable thing that rides along with all my thinking (even something as simple as making this sentence italics- my inner monologue said to itself 'i should make this italics' while i was doing it)
I can still conjure images in my brain, consider abstract concepts, solve problems- all without necessarily having to have the words be the primary way they're processed- but they will be narrated and "discussed internally with myself" via inner monologue no matter what
And sometimes, as someone with anxiety and potentially other undiagnosed mental health things, having a constant narrator that is myself in some way is sort of its own temporary hell (though most of the time it is benign). But there's this weird way where I feel it almost contributes to anxiety and contributes a weird aspect to every single thing I experience, emotion or otherwise, because I can't have a direct experience without hearing a goddamn voice in my head musing about it (though there are ways I feel like I can use this to my advantage- the whole observed/observer duality and so on plays into this and it helps me navigate feelings and my response to them)
Interestingly, I can quiet it with meditation and some forms of experience where i get into a "zone", like listening to music or performing music. There are weird ways I experience these things too (sometimes when I listen to music my mind automatically creates an image of me singing or playing said song as if I'm in the band), etc. My mind contains multitudes lol
As difficult as it is to describe my inner experience (ironically since my inner experience is constantly narrating itself lmao) feel free to ask any follow-up questions and I'll do my best to try and describe my experience
Ah, that makes sense! It sounds like we probably think in very similar ways then, except that my inner "narrator" is usually silent (or occasionally off on some unrelated musical tangent) until I call for it.
Edit: Actually, I do have one more question. What does your inner narrator do when you're listening to someone else speak?
Yeah, I would say for me even though it's one part of thinking, it feels like a necessary part- in other words, without the narration, the rest of my thinking processes would not fully function. This is probably just an assumption because of how inescapable it feels. Because I'm trying to imagine all the thinking I do- just sans the narration (as a way of imagining how it feels inside your mind with the narrator being silent mostly), but it feels like such an integral part of thinking that it'd be broken without it, like part of understanding or processing something internally needs it to be put into words in some form at some point
To answer your question variety of things really:
Immediately responding / reacting internally with it's own arguments or agreements or questions and lining them up to be fired off once they're done talking (have to actively combat this sometimes because I understand 'listening for the purpose of responding' isn't really listening)
Going off on all sorts of tangents related to what is being said
Completely going off the rails and leading me into stopping listening and thinking about something else (oops) like what's for dinner
Narrating my thoughts about what is being said (if I'm visualizing something being verbally described to me, narrating that "this is what it would look like probably" ... "or maybe like this")
Repeating what is being said, including important bits, to try and fully "listen" to what is being said and internalize it
There's one in particular (though I have not dug deep enough to know how valid it is) that I've heard repeated where someone would have only one side of their brain be aware of an instruction to do something, and they would get up and do it and sit back down, and when asked why they did it, they would give a reason that seems false but legitimately believe it's true (it seemed that half of the brain fabricated a reasoning for 'why' and back fit it to their action), which to me is interesting, because if this actually did happen maybe it has implications for human behaviors in ways we never before considered and so on
Yeah, those studies broadly replicated. It's legit. Really incredible (and a little scary) stuff, and the general finding that we maybe don't really do things for the reasons we think we do tracks across many fields.
Yeah that's wild. Really kinda has the potential to turn on its head a lot of assumptions and thoughts about how humans behave and operate (implications about morals, ethics, free will, etc being huge ones).
There's a book you may enjoy called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. As a warning, it's dense - though very readable for an academic text. The thesis statement is roughly that early humans had split brains like the ones you see in the corpus collosi studies, and that we interpreted hallucinations from the one hemisphere as the will of the gods giving direction to the other hemisphere. Around 3,000 BCE, the hemispheres unified and humans started to consciously direct themselves, concurrently no longer directly hearing the voices of the gods. Hallucinatory schizophrenia, Jaynes suggests, is a holdover from this time.
It's a little bit too pat of an explanation, if that makes sense, to the point that you end up feeling like "this just can't be true" (and the timeline doesn't make sense), but the fMRI studies he cites are reasonably compelling, and as discussed, the split-brain studies are real.
Around 3,000 BCE, the hemispheres unified and humans started to consciously direct themselves...
On the face of it this makes no sense at all. By 3,000 BCE there were many groups of humans that had no genetic contact with each other until very recently - within the last hundred years. That those groups all miraculously had their hemispheres unify at the same time and in the same way seems more than a little implausible.
There's a lot of criticism of the idea. And he uses the Homeric epic poems to demonstrate characters lacking internal agency as a description of reality vs trope of storytelling for example.
I'm not educated enough on it to do a full analysis but there's a lot of critique that's probably worth reading that's more accessible!
Same for me and it's so innate to my experience that I can't even really fathom or conceptualize the alternative
Learning other languages broke this a bit for me. Sometimes I'll think in concepts to connect English, Spanish, and Japanese in my head. Though I still think in language if I'm deeply analyzing something.
That's interesting, I've attempted to start learning other languages before, and never really thought about how my brain might act in those situations, I'll have to pay attention next time.
My hunch is that, even if I'm thinking in concepts- there's still an English narrator in the back commenting on it the entire time
And then there people like me, who internally verbalize all the time. It doesn't lead to more articulate communication however, as I tend to stop and start, trying to find the exact word and meaning I'm trying to convey.
I love empirical evidence of intuitive concepts... The linked study was paywalled though so it's hard to say how good the evidence is.
But of course it makes sense, we could no doubt reason and perform logical analysis before we developed language, most animals can reason. Some level of reasoning is a basic survival skill in complex organisms.
And now we've developed pseudo-intelligence that reasons exclusively using language (in a manner of speaking) as a shortcut around the much harder problem of developing true reasoning.
[OP] vili | a day ago
It’s an interesting study, although for me the result sounds very natural, as I don’t generally use language for thought, let alone reasoning. For me, language is primarily a tool for communication.
Minori | a day ago
I usually think in words, so I was surprised when I learned some people never do.
0x29A | a day ago
Same for me and it's so innate to my experience that I can't even really fathom or conceptualize the alternative
A related thing this whole topic makes me think of are the various experiments / experiences / etc that have to do with those that have had their corpus callosum severed and how reasoning and processing are affected by that and all the potential implications/questions that arise (philisophically/scientifically/etc) as a result
There's one in particular (though I have not dug deep enough to know how valid it is) that I've heard repeated where someone would have only one side of their brain be aware of an instruction to do something, and they would get up and do it and sit back down, and when asked why they did it, they would give a reason that seems false but legitimately believe it's true (it seemed that half of the brain fabricated a reasoning for 'why' and back fit it to their action), which to me is interesting, because if this actually did happen maybe it has implications for human behaviors in ways we never before considered and so on
I'm always fascinated by how anything remotely in this field of study has implications or at least raises questions regarding human behavior, free will, etc.
RoyalHenOil | a day ago
I can think in language, but I have to make an active effort to do so. For me, it's a much slower and less intuitive way to think unless I'm specifically thinking about language (e.g., planning how I'm going to say something), and it's not really compatible with most of the thoughts and inner experiences I have.
Most of the time, if I have some kind of inner monologue that I'm not actively forcing myself to have, it's just some lyrics or something stuck in my head. My actual thoughts are somewhere else and in a completely different format (I would describe it as visual-spatial, but mostly spatial, particularly for abstract concepts). Reciting lyrics in my head in no way inhibits my ability to think about other things.
I have a really hard time imagining what it must feel like to think in words all the time. How do you think about non-linguistic concepts or about things (e.g., complex emotions, novel sensory experiences, non-language-based puzzles) that words can't adequately describe? Or do you?
Does it force you to think in a very slow, linear way (at the speed of speech, one word after another)? Can you have multiple thoughts in your head?
How do you get new ideas or learn new concepts? What happens inside your head when you're presented with something you don't know the word for and don't understand well enough to describe?
0x29A | a day ago
I would say that while it's not the only aspect to my thinking it is a constant part of the thinking process. So it's not that I have to convert my thinking into words for it to happen successfully or anything like that.
Essentially, the best way I can describe it is even if I'm doing thinking that doesn't require language (solving a visual non-language puzzle, feeling emotions, having experiences) or ANY form of thinking activity at all, it is always accompanied by an inescapable narrator.
So, when it comes to new concepts or ideas or things that I don't 'have the words for' or other things- I still can have 'experiential knowledge' or grasp something but it will be narrated in some way, even if that narration is 'i get this but i have no idea how to articulate it' or whatever.
So it's not even that it's always helpful, or even desired, and it's not the only way I think, but it is an inescapable thing that rides along with all my thinking (even something as simple as making this sentence italics- my inner monologue said to itself 'i should make this italics' while i was doing it)
I can still conjure images in my brain, consider abstract concepts, solve problems- all without necessarily having to have the words be the primary way they're processed- but they will be narrated and "discussed internally with myself" via inner monologue no matter what
And sometimes, as someone with anxiety and potentially other undiagnosed mental health things, having a constant narrator that is myself in some way is sort of its own temporary hell (though most of the time it is benign). But there's this weird way where I feel it almost contributes to anxiety and contributes a weird aspect to every single thing I experience, emotion or otherwise, because I can't have a direct experience without hearing a goddamn voice in my head musing about it (though there are ways I feel like I can use this to my advantage- the whole observed/observer duality and so on plays into this and it helps me navigate feelings and my response to them)
Interestingly, I can quiet it with meditation and some forms of experience where i get into a "zone", like listening to music or performing music. There are weird ways I experience these things too (sometimes when I listen to music my mind automatically creates an image of me singing or playing said song as if I'm in the band), etc. My mind contains multitudes lol
As difficult as it is to describe my inner experience (ironically since my inner experience is constantly narrating itself lmao) feel free to ask any follow-up questions and I'll do my best to try and describe my experience
RoyalHenOil | a day ago
Ah, that makes sense! It sounds like we probably think in very similar ways then, except that my inner "narrator" is usually silent (or occasionally off on some unrelated musical tangent) until I call for it.
Edit: Actually, I do have one more question. What does your inner narrator do when you're listening to someone else speak?
0x29A | a day ago
Yeah, I would say for me even though it's one part of thinking, it feels like a necessary part- in other words, without the narration, the rest of my thinking processes would not fully function. This is probably just an assumption because of how inescapable it feels. Because I'm trying to imagine all the thinking I do- just sans the narration (as a way of imagining how it feels inside your mind with the narrator being silent mostly), but it feels like such an integral part of thinking that it'd be broken without it, like part of understanding or processing something internally needs it to be put into words in some form at some point
To answer your question variety of things really:
Minori | 9 hours ago
If I'm thinking deeply, it often converts the speech to subtitles which I read and analyze inside my head.
R3qn65 | 16 hours ago
Yeah, those studies broadly replicated. It's legit. Really incredible (and a little scary) stuff, and the general finding that we maybe don't really do things for the reasons we think we do tracks across many fields.
0x29A | 15 hours ago
Yeah that's wild. Really kinda has the potential to turn on its head a lot of assumptions and thoughts about how humans behave and operate (implications about morals, ethics, free will, etc being huge ones).
R3qn65 | 7 hours ago
There's a book you may enjoy called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. As a warning, it's dense - though very readable for an academic text. The thesis statement is roughly that early humans had split brains like the ones you see in the corpus collosi studies, and that we interpreted hallucinations from the one hemisphere as the will of the gods giving direction to the other hemisphere. Around 3,000 BCE, the hemispheres unified and humans started to consciously direct themselves, concurrently no longer directly hearing the voices of the gods. Hallucinatory schizophrenia, Jaynes suggests, is a holdover from this time.
It's a little bit too pat of an explanation, if that makes sense, to the point that you end up feeling like "this just can't be true" (and the timeline doesn't make sense), but the fMRI studies he cites are reasonably compelling, and as discussed, the split-brain studies are real.
lostwax | 6 hours ago
On the face of it this makes no sense at all. By 3,000 BCE there were many groups of humans that had no genetic contact with each other until very recently - within the last hundred years. That those groups all miraculously had their hemispheres unify at the same time and in the same way seems more than a little implausible.
DefinitelyNotAFae | 4 hours ago
Bicameral mentality - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
There's a lot of criticism of the idea. And he uses the Homeric epic poems to demonstrate characters lacking internal agency as a description of reality vs trope of storytelling for example.
I'm not educated enough on it to do a full analysis but there's a lot of critique that's probably worth reading that's more accessible!
0x29A | 4 hours ago
Thanks for the rec! Sounds super interesting. I will make a note of that to explore later!
Minori | 9 hours ago
Learning other languages broke this a bit for me. Sometimes I'll think in concepts to connect English, Spanish, and Japanese in my head. Though I still think in language if I'm deeply analyzing something.
0x29A | an hour ago
That's interesting, I've attempted to start learning other languages before, and never really thought about how my brain might act in those situations, I'll have to pay attention next time.
My hunch is that, even if I'm thinking in concepts- there's still an English narrator in the back commenting on it the entire time
Minori | an hour ago
At a certain level of fluency, that voice should at least switch languages in my experience.
Kerry56 | a day ago
And then there people like me, who internally verbalize all the time. It doesn't lead to more articulate communication however, as I tend to stop and start, trying to find the exact word and meaning I'm trying to convey.
post_below | a day ago
I love empirical evidence of intuitive concepts... The linked study was paywalled though so it's hard to say how good the evidence is.
But of course it makes sense, we could no doubt reason and perform logical analysis before we developed language, most animals can reason. Some level of reasoning is a basic survival skill in complex organisms.
And now we've developed pseudo-intelligence that reasons exclusively using language (in a manner of speaking) as a shortcut around the much harder problem of developing true reasoning.