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

I used to think -- until maybe ten years ago -- that I could not imagine the faces of friends and loved ones.

That is, if I try to visualise a person's face, I get an incomplete glimpse in my mind that dissolves away within an instant.

(People in my dreams do not really have detailed faces, if I can ever really look at their faces at all; it's like I don't make eye contact. Though they are not face-less horrors.)

This has been distressing, particularly when my mum died.

But then I discovered two really interesting things:

1) I can sometimes imagine a "still" face if I visualise a photograph of that person (maybe only slightly more if I took it)

2) I can bring someone's face to mind much more successfully if I associate it with an emotion or an action, and once I've done that, as long as I keep them in motion I can visualise a lot more for longer.

A quarter of a century after she died, if I want to remember my mum, it's a real challenge. She hated being in photos so there aren't many. But it's possible to start by imagining her angry (sorry mum) or the annoyed look on her face when she was trying to solve a puzzle game on the computer. Then I might be able to keep her face in my mind for long enough.

My dad passed away a couple of years back and for this loss I was ready; I have some photos, but more importantly I had spent the previous years learning his face experiencing different emotions. My favourite route to imagining my Dad's face is to imagine a situation where he might show puzzled, half-smiling amusement or fascination when presented with something he didn't understand or didn't work quite the way he expected. I will be able to recall his face in motion, just as my face starts to leak around the eye sockets :-/

So on the one hand: even now I can't visualise still faces at all! I struggle to describe faces of people I don't really know well. As soon as a face is still, it goes.

On the other hand, I have taught myself a visualisation process that can conjure up meaningful animated recollections that are filled with emotion. I have to do it deliberately, but it's lovely to do.

One final quirk: despite all this, I appear to potentially be a super-recogniser. I can't visualise a still face, but I do not "forget a face"; I can tell you with eerie accuracy whether I've seen someone before and where. And I do rather well with the "which of these faces did you see in this clip" type test, and very well at the tests like "which of these faces is this face from another angle".

But since words are not thoughts, and further they are not mental actions (such as relaxing), saying different words in your head is only useful if they help put you in a frame of mind where you can access, or discover, the right thoughts or 'mental actions'.

I conjecture that within the diversity of human minds, there are some for whom language closely bound to thoughts and mental actions, and others less so, and that talk therapy is more useful for the former than the latter. If this is true, then it is also likely to be the case that most talk therapists are of the former persuasion, since they are not likely to espouse a practice which has no effect on themselves.

Simple and wrong. Remember that thought is highly influenced by habit. If you habitually think in language, it might just possibly take more than thirty seconds of trying before you can conclude it's impossible.

Unless you're defining "thought" to be "internal mental processes that take the form of language", in which case have fun at tautology club.

I don't see how we could possibly know this.

Right. This is enormously challenging in itself. And I think because nobody talks about it, it's possible, or maybe the default, to assume that you're simply broken in an obvious, universal way, and not that there might be variation or even routes to change your outcomes with metacognition or thought experiments.

What often comes up is stuff like "oh I thought 'the mind's eye' was just a figure of speech, I had no idea people meant it in a meaningful sense"