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Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

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Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#151

Post by soxocx »

mrgaro wrote: post #143

Does anybody else often visualie memories as they would watch them via a movie camera? I do. I can see myself walking in places with a cinematic camera movements and angles. Haven't heard much others having the same.

How could you possibly know how you really looked like walking in those said places? You haven’t seen yourself walking there. Also, you haven’t seen all of the possible angles that this cinematic camera would capture and replay.

This is an interesting concept about memories, part of them is just made up by our brains.

Edit: So the next time you have an argument about a thing that happened or how it happened, ask yourself, do you really remember or is your brain filling the gaps?

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#152

Post by cubefox »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #137
cubefox wrote: post #125

Here is my explanation why language seems to be, while not necessary, so useful for abstract thought: Thinking thoughts with abstract concepts takes up a lot of working memory. We can't hold many of those in mind at once. But if they are expressed in words they take very little memory. So we can have long winding and abstract thoughts because language compresses the parts of the thought complex we are not currently f…

I find the opposite. The more complex a thought, the harder it is to reason about using language in my head. Speaking as someone who has a constant inner monologue.

I'm not so much talking about "reasoning using language", I mean that if you have intermediate reasoning results, you can mentally express them in language, which means you can still remember them after you have focused on something else for a minute. Otherwise you might forget them very quickly. Because we apparently can't hold a lot of thoughts in mind, while we can easily store words in memory.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#153

Post by arnorhs »

benrutter wrote: post #56

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…

I score low in all categories. I wonder if that means I'm just not very aware of how I think while I'm not doing it. I think a lot though. A little bit too much

I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#154

Post by xaphod »

benrutter wrote: post #56

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…

This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#155

Post by lloeki »

gvurrdon wrote: post #135
benrutter wrote: post #56

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…

That test was indeed interesting. But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.

> Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording

Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride.

Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it.

An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording.

It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque)

Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#158

Post by mrgaro »

soxocx wrote: post #151
mrgaro wrote: post #143

Does anybody else often visualie memories as they would watch them via a movie camera? I do. I can see myself walking in places with a cinematic camera movements and angles. Haven't heard much others having the same.

How could you possibly know how you really looked like walking in those said places? You haven’t seen yourself walking there. Also, you haven’t seen all of the possible angles that this cinematic camera would capture and replay. This is an interesting concept about memories, part of them is just made up by our brains. Edit: So the next time you have an argument about a thing that happened or how it happened, ask your…

Oh I absolutely agree that our minds are extending our memories and fabricating rest and it's next to impossible to difference what was real.

But getting back to my cinematic memories: I remember the places I've visited (and imagine places which I haven't) and then my mind constructs the cinematics. Fascinating!

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#159

Post by kebsup »

xaphod wrote: post #154
benrutter wrote: post #56

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…

This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135

Love it! I use something similar to remember long numbers. If a code or a pin has let's say 8 digits, I'm unable to remember it the normal way. So I remember the first digit in the inner voice, and the other 4 digits as a picture of the digits.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#160

Post by ulkis »

endofreach wrote: post #96
benrutter wrote: post #56

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…

Often times i can actively feel how laggy my brain is in wrapping the thoughts in language. Before i even have the words ready, my thinking is already way ahead at the next thought. Not sure if that's just ADHD. I like to think secretly it's because i am not too dumb and actually a quick thinker. On the other hand, my analytical thinking is not that good. While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for h…

I recognize this "thinking the thoughts twice", and sometimes feel that the "fast" thoughts have to wait for the slow ones (language wrapping) to catch up. Then I try to skip the second phase and let the fast ones roam at full speed, expecting brilliancy. Never succeeded yet, but not giving up.
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