Like, if a deaf person is sitting on a couch trying to decide whether or not he wants to do laundry today, what goes on internally?
With me (and I assume most people) I can “hear” the conversation going on in my head. But deaf people don’t have the advantage of knowing what words sound like. So I’m just curious how that all gets hashed out.
Thanks.
I believe that assumption is incorrect.
Some people ‘hear’ in their head, some see things in their head, and a few have other ways of thinking.
I was once told that you ciuld tell if a person was a hearing-thinker or a seeing-thinker because one will agree with you by saying “I hear what you’re saying” and the other will say “I see what you mean”.
Just a WAG, but perhaps in words and/or visualizing sign language.
A lot of deaf people can read lips and can speak too, perhaps they internalize this as well, like we do with imagining conversation. All in all, it’s probably not very different from hearing people.
I don’t think in words when I decide to do something. At least not in a way that I am consciously aware. There is no conversation going in my mind when I mentally enumerate and weight the advantages and disadvantages going in the kitchen for a snack. The thought of a cookie pops into my mind, and it either fits or does not fit into my discipline matrix.
Just to add to the above, when I was a super-bratty younger sister I used to sneak up on my oldest sister, who was born Deaf. I would sometimes catch her talking to herself in the mirror, similar (but not exactly the same) as most hearing people I know.
That’s sort of weird. I thought internal monologue was pretty nearly universal.
I might think, in words, “I’ll go see the horse.” But in my mind, I don’t see words; I see mental pictures of a particular stretch of the highway that I drive on the way to the barn and of the pasture just beyond the gate where I can see her standing under the trees. I wonder if deaf people think in picures?
What I really wonder is how do blind people think? If you have no visual memories, do you think only in words? And if you were blind and deaf, how would you think then?
I’m sure all people have it, but I’m also pretty sure it doesn’t go on 100% of the time. Have you never experienced the situation where you couldn’t find the word to express what you were thinking? Obviously in those cases thinking without (all of the) words is going on.
In my case (not deaf or blind), I sometimes think in words, sometimes images, sometimes both, sometimes neither. I guess as a programmer/engineer you also need to be able to think in certain abstractions that aren’t captured by words or images, although those often seem to come with certain mental imagery for me.
In order to do arithmetic I need to visualize numbers. I can’t do it if I just hear the numbers, although I can remember (phone) numbers as strings of words more easily than visually.
Most of my thinking is visual - I have an internal monologue that recaps it after the visual part is done, sometimes, but low percent
For example (a real current example I’m on the tail end of) - I need to develop a solution to some problem by changing the database, screens, creating new code, new processes etc. - all of that is visual, all of the objects and interactions, some are ambiguous/amorphous blobs that represent certain things, other times it can be a detailed image of a physical area where the process change is happening, or images of screens that really represent the hierarchical DB structure (only because that is where the primary interaction with the information is so it’s easily represented that way instead of thinking in terms of erd’s, in this case the screens are linked hierarchically internally) etc.
There just isn’t substantial monologue in that process, it’s very limited.
When I was in college a psych prof in an intro psych class was talking about types of memory and said “like phone numbers, everyone remembers them by saying them, nobody remembers them visually”, and I thought that was odd.
For me seeing the phone numbers visually is much more important, just a wag, maybe it’s weighted at 66% and verbal 33%. If I do both I’m better off, if I just do verbal my error rate is much higher than if I just do visual.
And the next follow on question, how do deaf people read?
:rolleyes:
Anyone with a serious interest in the topic of this thread would do well to read up on the somewhat unfortunate history of attempts to use introspection (of the sort everybody is indulging in here) to study the mind in a scientific way, and particularly the so-called “imageless thought” controversy of the early 20th century, and its fallout (see here and here).
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This seems to be a reference to the now generally discredited theory of “imagery types”. In the early 20th century, many psychologists did indeed think that people could be divided up into those who thought primarily visually, those who thought primarily auditorially, and those who thought primarily in other sensory modes, such as touch and/or kinesthetics. Few scientists today think these "type"s are psychologically real or meaningful.
Although the theory of “imagery types” was discredited about a century ago, something rather like it was revived in more recent decades within educational psychology as the theory of “learning styles”, which suggested that some children learn best via visual media, some via auditory presentation of information, etc. This was very influential in education circles for a while, but I believe it is now also largely discredited.
Even in the heyday of “imagery type” theory, I doubt whether anyone would have seriously credited the claim in your second paragraph. “I hear what you’re saying” and “I see what you mean” are not so much ways of indicating different ways in which the message has been cognitively processed by the hearer, so much as ways for the hearer to indicate how seriously he or she takes the message content. “I hear what you’re saying” generally indicates something like “I have taken note of what you say, but do not necessarily give it much credence,” whereas “I see what you mean” means “I understand what you have said, and I either agree or, at the very least, take your view seriously”. (Or, more crudely, the first implies, roughly, “You are full of shit,” and the second implies “You are talking a lot of sense”.)
Missed edit window:
Probably the “standard” (though by no means universally accepted) view amongst scientific psychologists and cognitive scientists today is that people “really” think in some sort of unconscious computational code that is used within the brain, and any “introspective” sense we may have that we think in conscious words, or visual images, or whatever, is largely illusory.
I strongly disagree with this view myself (and I am far from alone in that), and I think relatively few scientists embrace it explicitly (although quite a few philosophers of cognitive science are quite explicit about it), but it is implicit in much, probably most, contemporary work in cognitive science.
The only time I actually think in words and sentences is when I am preparing to write or say something, or thinking through a logical argument in my mind to test it for logic and sense. Otherwise, I don’t really think in words throughout the day. Interferes with singing earworms. Or sitting around reflecting on what I should have said in some unsuccessful effort in the past, or might say in a future one. In other words, imaginary conversations involving someone else (no, I do not have an imaginary friend).
Like, if I can’t think of the name of a spice I’m looking for in the cupboard, I don’t have to stop my search until I can tell myself to look for it by name, I just sort through the shelf with confidence that I’ll recognize it when I see it., while singing “Whiter Shade of Pale” to myself…
For example, I just went in the kitchen to stir a pot, then came back to my computer chair and sat down, without ever thinking any words or sentences associated with any of those actions.
Cecil answers, “In what language do deaf people think?”
There has been a thread on this topic in IMHO some years ago, and it turned out that it wasn’t at all the case.
Radiolab did a show that talks about one person who was deaf from birth and was taught sign language in his late twenties. It is an interesting show talks about how deaf people think.
It’s an interesting topic and it seems pretty challenging to try to figure out ways to determine what’s going on with the limited tools we have for analyzing how brains work.
I was just googling around and reading up on this topic and stumbled upon this that makes a completely incorrect assumption:
“Accessing information from a mental image is different in many other ways from accessing information from a visual scene. If you were to write a word on the board you could easily read the letters in any order. But you can’t do that with an image of the word.”
This is so completely wrong (for me) that I am just stunned someone actually wrote it down and tried to pass it off as if it’s fact for everyone.
That is exactly how I would read letters in any order and pretty much the only way I could do it. I’ve tried to do it without the visual and I can’t seem to turn it off.
The mental processes going on are probably not what you think they are, and are distinctly different from the kind of image processing that would occur if you were to try to imagine a word, letter, or shape rotated or otherwise visually transformed. In the case of reading letters backward the mental functions are more akin to symbolic computational ones. It’s this mapping to a computational model that makes it so much harder to “read” the letters backwards from a mental image than the otherwise perfectly straightforward and manifestly different process of reading them off a printed piece of paper. If you can do it just as easily for a long word from a mental image as from a physical one, then you are unusual.
Like, if a deaf person is sitting on a couch trying to decide whether or not he wants to do laundry today, what goes on internally?
I’m sitting on my bed and I look over at the clothes hamper and I imagine myself at the laundromat and its an unpleasant feeling and then I imagine myself putting on a shirt that smells funky because I don’t have any clean ones and that feels even more unpleasant and so I sigh and I get up and go to the laundromat.
That was last Saturday morning and deciding to do the laundry didn’t involve language or any sort of internal monologue, it was pure imagination and emotion.
I would weep for days if something happened to me and I was limited to thinking in words.
One of the things that makes fun activities be fun (for me) is total immersion in the moment and “I” am nothing but awareness and movement. I certainly don’t talk to myself about how I’m going to hit the ball with the bat. I simply stand at the plate and my total focus is on watching the ball. I’m aware of things, but I’m not talking to myself about them. An internal dialog would be distracting. I don’t have to turn it off, it just falls away naturally. I can’t imagine this doesn’t happen to everyone.