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When is it better to think without words?

henrikkarlsson.xyz

51–60 of 144 posts

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#51
post #36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?

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 wo…

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.

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#52
post #6

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.

Or conversely, that one can be lost for words to describe what one is thinking!

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#53
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner experience could not be more different: it’s strange to explain, but I experience “unvocalized” language, which means the words are sort of just there without “hearing” them in my head—-I don’t have inner sound at all either and so the words don’t have an accent, for example. My thought moves at a speed much faster than speaking and I can read fast with high co…

What happens when you read descriptions if you can't skip over them?

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.

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner experience could not be more different: it’s strange to explain, but I experience “unvocalized” language, which means the words are sort of just there without “hearing” them in my head—-I don’t have inner sound at all either and so the words don’t have an accent, for example. My thought moves at a speed much faster than speaking and I can read fast with high co…

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 interesti…

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.

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#56
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: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animat... - 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.

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#57
post #56

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 i…

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.

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#58
post #12

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…

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 it’s 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 ide…

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 don’t 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.

it’s definitely not “purely linguistic” – one form of it is about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#59
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.

Re: When is it better to think without words?

#60
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/

On 4chan and reddit, they actually believe that those without an "inner monologue" have no soul.

Reddit has roughly 400 million weekly users. You think all of them believe the same thing?
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