In what language do deaf people think?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Very well written article and nimbly avoids some heated topics such as oralism.

One thing I would like to point out is that recent research shows that babies learn to process visual cues earlier than audio cues. What this means is that you can teach a baby to use sign language (much) earlier than you can teach a baby to speak. This can be a boon, even to hearing parents with hearing babies - if you teach a baby (at say, 12 months old) a few basic signs like “milk”, “hot”, etc… you’d have a giant leg up on figuring out why the baby is crying.

Myself, I am deaf with a lot of residual hearing - and my wife is profoundly deaf. My two kids (twin boys) are both deaf with some residual hearing. Deafness is heridetary in my family. They are 18 months old now and can already say 2 and 3 word sentences. Just last night he woke up crying at 2 am and when I went to him to see what was wrong, he told me quite clearly “banana eat”.

I can see their language development grow daily - on Christmas day one of my kids got excited at seeing the string of lights around my xmas tree. He already knew the word “tree” (as in ordinary trees around my yard) and he knew light (as in room light). He pointed to the xmas tree and said “light tree”. Good boy.

They have been talking since about 9 months old - starting in babble signs (just imitating us moving hands around wihtout making any real words).

What I REALLY would like to know is whether or not twinspeak occurs with signing deaf babies also. My twin boys do talk with each other, a lot. Mainly they use real signs but sometimes they don’t.

2

Don’t forget the link to the column. Yes, it’s on the front page now, but soon it will be pushed off by newer columns, while your thread might still linger a while on the first page of this forum. Providing a link keeps everyone on the same page.

As I read Cecil’s column, I recalled a quote of Albert Einstein’s:

When I brought this quote up in the presence of a psychiatrist, he told me that some neuroscientists had studied the physical structure of Einstein’s brain after his death and noticed sharp differences between Einstein’s brain and those of other humans, which could account for his ability to think without words. I neglected to obtain a citation from the psychiatrist at the time.

3

I ain’t no Einstein, but I too am reasonably sure that my `heaviest’ thinking is mostly nonverbal.

4

amore ac studio wrote

It is worth mentioning here that the vast majority of high-functioning autistics (HFA) and many persons with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) are visual, not verbal, thinkers. We (people with HFA or AS) have neurologically non-typical brains – this is well-documented.

Temple Grandin, who has HFA and a PhD, writes in her book Thinking in Pictures about how puzzled she was to find that many people believed that language was necessary for sophisticated thoughts.

Grandin (as well as many other folks with HFA) is quite capable of sophisticated problem solving and design, even thought she has to “translate” verbal input into pictoral input to make it meaningful to here. At this time, one-third of the cattle and hogs in the US are handled in facitilies she has designed – and designed in such a way as to make slaughter as painless and low-stress as possible. For example, she has designed a “tub” such that young animals will freely and of their own accord walk into their anti-flea bath, with no cattle prods or force needed. She credits her visual thinking for her ability to see what the cows want to walk towards or away from.

As for me, I have Asperger’s, and I often think in movement and shapes rather than words. I honestly don’t see how calculus and chemistry, for example, can be learned with purely verbal thinking. If you can’t “feel” the shape of the curve or the structure of a molecule in your mind, how can you possibly understand it?

5

Thinking with words is nothing more than talking to yourself in your head. There obviously has to be a huge amount of thought behind that speech that isn’t speech itself. People most certainly think without words, it’s just that it’s much harder to notice “pure” thoughts, which are essentially subconscious by definition. We usually only notice their conclusions, which we end up verbalising in order to, i suspect, help us notice and remember them. Or perhaps some (maybe most? at least not me) just talk to themselves so much that they drown out “pure” thoughts completely and never even notice that they’re there. Trying to notice them can be very tricky because you have to get past the fact that the process of introspection itself usually starts off with talking.

I think Cecil made a mistake by focusing only on development (which is a wholly different issue). Although i wouldn’t know, i’d venture to postulate that deaf people do a lot more “pure” thinking, and are probably better for it. I would assume that if they really want to start getting literal, they’d start visualizing their thoughts in their heads or perhaps calling up signs to express what they’re thinking.

needless to say, this would be a lot more cumbersome than just pure thought. But guess what, talking in your head is too. The Einstein quote is interesting, and i think i’m gonna try (as a new year’s resolution, perhaps, lol) talking in my head less and train myself to think purely. What puts me in awe, however, is that he can do the same with math. I’ve always loathed the abstractual and mechanical representation of logic that it is, feeling that it cheats us out of true understanding. However, i’ve always assumed that it was a necessity because our brains are simply too small (RAM-wise) to enable such thought, and i envied those darn hyper-intelligent space aliens who could make do without math. It’s truly amazing that a human could do that too.

In responce to Jennifer Myers (whose post i didn’t read until just now), most people who learn calculus, i suspect, do it the mechanical way. They don’t truly understand it, they just plug formulas. Or at best, they follow the verbal logical statements and conclude them to be true. That is exactly what i was complaining about concerning math. Most mathematicians are very much visual thinkers (althought perhaps not on the level that you describe). However, even simply visualizing chemistry and calculus may not be the best way to go about it. I still say that “purely” (something like subconsciously) understanding them, free from the limitations of trying to fit thought into a worldly conseption, is the ultimate elusive goal.

6

I have several non connected comments.

My son, at 8 days and obviously unable to converge his eyes, appeared for a few seconds, to be more interested in figuring out who I was than in sucking on his bottle. My thought was “Oh oh, we’re in trouble. This kid’s got a brain.” At 6 months, I was holding him when the cat walked past the doorway, I said “Kitty?” and she turned toward me and meowed. He frowned and stopped wiggling for a second. I think he caught on to the idea of names. In a day or so, he began to respond to his name.

My mother’s oldest brother was deaf from birth in 1905. Wisdom of the day was a state school in Indianapolis where he was taught to sign and to read and right and enough industrial skills to become a foreman at a rubber goods factory. He never spoke but was not considered retarded. I am told that he was sent to the school alone and was heartbroken at being sent away and not knowing why. He married a woman who lost her hearing as a child, but after learning to speak. Their children were normal, but I have always windered how they learned to speak. They signed early.

I know a woman with too little residual hearing to use a telephone, but she can combine what she can hear with lip reading and hold her own in a conversation.

Advice for all readers. If you sense that a person has only partial hearing, make sure he/she can see your lips in a conversation, even if you are responding to a third person. A strong clue is if the person signs and talks with a signifigant other…

I was testing coordinator for local Mensa for a while and a totally deaf woman inquired. I called the supervisory psychologist who said have a licensed psychologist use a standard test but discount the vocabulary element element, as a deaf person could never have as rich a vocabulary as a person who had experienced small talk with the family. The person in question then qualified by digging up a score on a previously taken IQ test. (So much for professional wisdom, <G>.)

7

In my above post I forgot to say straight out the obvious implication: Cecil is wrong in some of the assumptions he makes in his response to this question. His main error is his non-critical acceptance of the old saw that sophisticated human thought requires language of some kind. This is an understandable mistake, as it has been an accepted truism for a looooong time. However, since there exist persons who can think on a sophisticated level who lack the capacity for complex verbally-based thinking, we know that language is not a necessary part of sophisticated human thought.

In fact, if language were required for human thought, wouldn’t the creation of language have required a rather improbable sort of “bootstrapping?”

For an interesting take on visual thinking, check out the essay at the following URL. (NOTE: the section on visual thinking is several screens down. Just scroll until you hit the bold heading “WHAT IS VISUAL THINKING?”)

In reply to Alex_Dubinsky:
I don’t know that I understand the idea of “pure thought.” I know people who think in pictures, sound, touch, etc., but I assume none of those meet the standards for pure thought. When I program or do circuit diagrams, I can “see” the data flow, etc., but that would not be pure. Is it possible for you to describe pure thought in words for us?

Also, while visualization may not be the most perfect way to deal with mathematics and chemistry, I think it is superior to verbal thinking alone. Mind you, I’m not putting down verbal thinking – I do it myself, and it is pretty darn useful and fun. However, I cannot imagine “grokking” chemistry, particularly understanding the sub-atomic level, without the ability to mentally see the movements of the particles.

8

I think it is pretty clear that Cecil, and the person who asked him the question, were discussing conscious thought. The thinking that goes on so that you can “talk in your head” is clearly not conscious thought, or we would all be concious of it.

I think the conversations above assume that nonverbal thinking is inherently inferior to other modes of thinking. I disagree. As a physicist, I used two modes of thinking - what I called visualization and algabraic. Visualization works fine in 3 or fewer dimensions, although it tends to be less precise. However, most people can only really picture two dimensions. (Think of a sphere. What did you see. The whole sphere, or just it’s surface? I am told that most pilots, for whom true 3-D thinking can be a matter of life or death, can only really think in two dimensions.) Riemann is the only one of whom I have heard who could easily visualize many dimensions. This limits the usefulness of such thinking. By algebraic thought, I mean the ability to manipulate mathematical equations without any more conscious thought than we use to construct sentences. This mode of thought is really handy for engineers and physicists, but not so much when studying history.

I would posit Einstein could “do physics” without verbal thought, assuming the above quote is accurate, follows from his familiarity with mathematics and physics. While I won’t deny that some understand calculus indepth, everyone who learns calculus, excepting those learning it before there was anything to learn by rote, learns calculus by rote. (Most memorize the symbolic manipulations, some memorize the meaning visually. E.g., the derivitive is the slope. Some learn the symbolic manipulations of that concept, some memorize to picture tangents to curves.) Not reducing the mathematical thoughts to rote is inefficient, after all most words we use, we use by rote. The “more rote” manipulations become, the less likely they are to appear in conscious thought. When you see a problem like 3x6 do you say to yourself “3 times 6 equals 18”, or do you just think “18”? It is easy to believe that Einstein reduced pretty sophisticated manipulations to subconcscious thought. It would be akin to an author constructing whole paragraphs at a time, without conscious thought.

9

<< His main error is his non-critical acceptance of the old saw that sophisticated human thought requires language of some kind. >>

There’s obviously all sorts of brain activity that could be considered “thinking.” Cecil was dealing with the one aspect that is rooted in language, rather than with the myriad of other types of brain activity/thoughts. And his focus was on the profound pre-literate deafness.

While there may be a few “persons who can think on a sophisticated level who lack the capacity for complex verbally-based thinking”, I think you’d need to define “sophisticated” and offer some proof or cites for this. But it’s irrelevant. Cecil wasn’t discussing non-verbal thinking, he was discussing “the level [of thought that] humans are accustomed to.” That implies a normal distribution, and (let’s say) 95% of the population.

For most humans (by an overwhelming majority), thinking is intimately connected with language. Children who are born deaf and not detected or handled with appropriate special attention, tend to have severe difficulties in later learning.

So, here’s Cecil, reminding people that early detection makes a huge difference, and you’re implying that we shouldn’t bother with special programs for deaf children because some people can manage “sophisticated thoughts” without language???

I also wonder, as a footnote, how you would know that someone is thinking sophisticated thoughts if they can’t communicate them to you because they can’t use language?

10

pure thought can be described in this way:

When you say something, you pronounce a formed idea or conclusion. Where did this idea come from? You must have been thinking in order for you to say it. This thinking was not in terms of words themselves. The thinking LED to words. It just happened in the back of your mind. Essentially subconsciously. What you must realize is: Talking is not the process of thought itself. Talking in your head is not the process of thought itself. Imaginging pictures in your head is not the proces of thought either. All these things are simply MANIFISTATIONS of thoughts which are essentially subconscious. Thought itself, ie pure thought, simply happens in the circuits of your brain. This is what Einstein was referring to.

Another way of looking at it is this:

Our brain is like a computer. It has inputs, a black box that does fancy magic, and outputs (which are those inputs altered by that fancy magic). Talking to yourself (both out-loud or in your head) or thinking visually is interrupting the black box’s work by constantly creating outputs (synthesizing sentences or images) and then plugging them continuously back into the inputs (hearing what you just said or seeing what you just imagined). This is obviously unnecessary and wasteful. The black box can do calculations on its own without having to display stuff on the screen and wait for you to type them back in. What einstein did is just let the black box do its thing, and he waited patiently for its final output and didn’t bother it meanwhile. Realize that the black box is still working, without you realizing it, as you go from one sentence in your mind to the next. These sentences don’t come from nowhere. You just have to stop trying to formulate them and let your mind just THINK. If you let it do that, it also has the added advantage of being able to function in parallel. While you can sustain only one slow train of thought in speech (you say one thing, then another in responce, etc.), your brain can rapidly explore different branching paths and arrive at a solution much more quickly.
In responce to SlowMindThinking:

What you call algebraic thinking, i call mechanical math. You train yourself to mechanically do it. It is essentially a higher version of a mouse pulling a lever when it sees a light. Although this method is the easiest way of doing math, it also destroys the logic that the abstraction represents. This doesn’t matter much to an engineer who only wants the answer, but i think it takes away from physics which is somewhat concerned with finding out some sort of conceptual, logical truth. Still, most physicists, like yourself, are more comfortable with mechanically going through equations than trying to grapple with what they represent. I suspect that this is what you meant by visual thought. “Visual thought” (as you call it, but there is considerably more to it than that) is understandably difficult, and i suspect only Einstein and other hyper-geniuses can truly do complex problems non-mechanically.
Also, you claim that the pure thought i describe is subconscious and that we should limit our discussion to conscious thoughts. I protest your idea of what consciousness is. Your idea of consciousness is the constant afforementioned inputs. If you can see and hear it, then it is in your conscious mind. That if your idea is bouncing around as words or images in your head, only then can it be conscious. This is an illusion. The inputs are meaningless. I repeat, they are not thought in itself. Thought goes on in the black box that lies between input and output and which, i would suppose you would say, lies in the subconsciousness. Therefore, you might say there is no such thing as conscious thought. There are only conscious (ie input/output) manifestations or representations of subconscious thought.

11

C K Dexter Haven, concerning Cecil’s post:

Cecil made an issue that without intellectual stimulation that is created by communication, the brain usually turns into a vegetable. I agree. However, brain development in children has little to do with the question of “does one have to talk to themselves in their head in order to think,” which is what the person was asking.

12

In response to C K Dexter Haven:

I most certainly did not intend to imply that

What I do intend to imply is that Cecil’s answer is not entirely correct because it is based on a fallacy. This does not mean that his answer is entirely incorrect. Many, many humans think in language, and language development is important in many areas.

In fact, early detection is just as vital for autism (which usually entails visual, not verbal, thinking) as it is for deafness. While language is not needed for sophisticated thinking, it is necessary for social development in a language-based society. Also, if we know which children might be more inclined to learn visually, we can gear teaching that exploits a visual learning style, regardless of why they may be more “visual” than “verbal.”

C K also wrote:

I think you misread me. Perhaps if you had read both of my posts in their entirety, you might have noticed that I am talking not about people who cannot use language, but people whose internal thought processes are visual, not language-oriented.

There is a big difference between being able to use language and using language as one’s vehicle for thought. Learning language is vital to even the simplest social interaction when one is dealing with a language-using species, which humans just happen to be.

However, there are, as I hope I stated or at least implied, people who actually “translate” their thoughts into language to speak – the thoughts themselves are not language-based. This is neither superior nor inferior overall, but suits these persons well for certain kinds of tasks.

C K again:

In my first post I discussed Temple Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures. In the second, I mention an on-line essay by Dr. Grandin in which she explains her visual thinking processes. That’s only one example, true, but over the past few decades we have learned that the vast majority of high-functioning autistic [HFA] persons think in pictures – and that studies of their families show that many of their relatives do as well. This is generally known and accepted among autistic persons and those who live/work with them. If you read books by autistic folks, you will find many references to this – but obviously, all of the visual thinkers who have written books use language to communicate.

People with HFA have a high rate of succeeding in higher education, especially in engineering, the sciences, and computer-related fields. We have degrees, careers, and quite a few of us marry. These things indicate a capacity for sophisticated thought in people who “think in pictures.”

Is this irrelevant? Obviously, I think not. One major reason that more people with autism are high-functioning today is the recognition that there are people who do not think in language. This recognition enables parents and teachers to teach differently. For example, acquiring language is a very different task for most autistic persons, and is much more likely to happen if the teachers involved have some understanding of visual thinking.

I believe and hope that those techniques which allow teachers to “reach” people on the autism spectrum can also benefit deaf children. Far too often, families wind up settling for a lesser education for a child who has difficulty acquiring language. Teaching language in a way that recognizes that it is not the only innate way of thinking can really help those chilren, regardless of the reason that they are “language impaired.”

13

Just to take my basic premise out of the nest of verbosity I’ve created above:

I say that Cecil is partly wrong because both the question “In what language do deaf people think?” and Cecil’s answer unquestioningly accept the assumption that all intelligent humans who are capable of using language to communicate also use language as a vehicle for thought.

There are intelligent humans who are capable of verbal communication whose internal thought processes do not employ any kind of language. We know this because they can say so. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting quite a few. Some have written books about it. See my 2nd post above for link to essay by one.

I do not object to all of Cecil’s response – far from it! – however, stating that sophisticated thought requires language is not correct. Communication of thought generally requires language; thought itself does not.

14

cite?

I think you’ll find that many philosophers disagree with you. How do you prove that the manifestations are not the actual thoughts? I suppose, in principle, that one could hook subjects to a brain imaging device, and ask them to think of things without picturing them or naming them or anything that would be a “manifestation” of thought, but how would anybody, including the subject, know if the subject was thinking? (Researcher “quick think of an elephant, but don’t picture it and don’t think of a the word and don’t think of the noise it makes and …” Subject "Note to self, don’t think of the word “elephant” …)

To extend your analogy, digital electronics think “1” when the voltage exceeds some threshold and “0” otherwise. The “thoughts” (ones and zeros) are there whether you sample them or not, and if you sample them, the sample values are the same as the “real” values.

Why do assume what I prefer? Or most physicists? (And what about “mechanical math” destroys the logic? To me, mathematics is logic language. The language is useful precisely because one can only express logical thoughts. Most physicists I know, BTW, value visual thought and order of magnitude estimation most highly. It has always seemed to me that we value those precisely because that is the kind of thing we are really good at. Poetry, not so much.

What I call visual thought is picturing things. Whether it is the probability function descibing the possible positions of an electron, or the directions to a friend’s house. Many people can do it. Converting pictorial thoughts to precise mathematical relations can be difficult, but going the other way is easy. Many people can do it, most of us are not geniuses.

Rational thought processes are glorifications of rat lever pulling only when the rat thinks through why he should pull the lever - the first time. If it is just a matter of “well it was there”, then they are not equivalent. I presume you really mean that I manipulate equations in a manner that is just a glorification of a rat pulling the lever to get a pellet. Yep. The real thinking was in coming up with the original equations. That requires knowing how to speak mathematics and physics. Grinding out the solution is a necessary process to get the pellet - the end result. Of course, understanding the results of the grinding and knowing that the answer makes sense also requires nonmechanical thought.

To the extent that I have an opinion, I tend to take the opposite view. Most subconscious thought is the stuff that is so rote, so mechanical, that you don’t need to be aware of it. Just like the brain activity that is our image processing. I’ll admit I have no idea what happens when we “sleep on it” or let “the problem gestate”. As to what consciousness is, I believe that is still a pretty open question.

15

In responce to SlowMindThinking:

Of course that wouldn’t work. No one would know how to do it. Thinking of an object is forcing it into your consciousness, and that almost certainly involves creating an “output” that you then “input” again. The thought i’m talking about is a process. Like figuring out an answer, or making a decision, or something like that.

How can you prove that the manifestations aren’t thoughts themselves? Easy! When someone has to make a quick decision like while driving, they don’t sit there and start talking to themselves in their head or visualizing their car crashing into a sign-post. (However, the example of a driving emergency might be somewhat rote or reflex. Still, you can imagine similar examples that require considerable thinking and decision-making but occur with the urgency that does not afford talking to oneself). They just quickly decide by means of pure thought and carry out their decision. You can quantitatively measure this by figuring out how quickly people talk to themselves in their heads (i’ve heard figures, so i guess someone must’ve tried this), and showing that the decision was made far more quickly that it would take to talk it out. If you’ve ever been in such a situtation (and i’m sure you have), you might recall that you didn’t quite know what was going on in your head. You just decided and acted, and then sat in mild shock wondering (probably by talking to yourself) how it happened.

Sure. But the constant process of sampling (especially if it involves such a complicated thing as synthesizing speech or visual images) slows down the whole process and is unnecessary. Moreover, like i said before, talking to yourself only leads you along one path. Thinking purely can allow for more parallel processing.

Perhaps calling “pure thought” subconscious is a bit too much. There are things that are utterly basic like visual processing, and this is quite definately not it. It’s subconsious in that you are not entirely aware of it, but you can only be aware of what you “input”.

In order to make a spontaneous casual speech or statement (that is, one that hasn’t been memorized or gone through beforehand but is simply generated while talking), one obviously needs to think.

When you are thus talking, you are not simultaneously talking to yourself in your head (at least when you are comfortable and know what you’re talking about and are not nervously or ponderously following other trains of thought in your head amid slow speech and pauses). Words simply come out of head while the processes that create them do not seem apparent. These processes are still obviously active, since your speech is imbued with much meaning.

These processes are what thinking really, trully is. They do not really occur in the subconscious, merely the background. And they occur silently. They constantly churn, without us giving much thought to them.

16

We don’t actually disagree too much. I just that every example of quick thinking that you will come up with involve something along the lines of rote thought, reflex thought, muscle memory, etc - situations where you can respond quickly because no sophisticated thought is required, or even desired. You have trained yourself (consciously or not) to reduce your response to a simple, quick reaction. Take the extreme example of a battlefield commander, who must quickly give a tactical order based on incomplete and complicated information (plus, he “can’t hear himself think”!). Because the information is complicated, he has had time to process the data, it is really only the decision that is quick. Decisions only take a long time when you spend time weighing alternatives, commanders are trained in making the decision quickly and not weighing all the alternatives - no real thought required.

Why? Word selection is a rote process that we don’t ponder, unless we are having trouble coming up with a word, just like walking. We have all said something “without thinking”. I suggest that thought (when speaking or verbalizing internally) is the actual construction of the sentences. It is the same as a computer generating the result of an addition problem. The “thought” is the construction of the number.

17

I think chess is an area where people routinely experience visual thought, that is, those who play it well enough to be any good at it. I noticed that when I was playing chess, I would lose track of time, and I would not be thinking about queens and rooks and such but simply thinking about the interlocking patterns formed by a combination. I often found that my ability to think in patterns exceeded my ability to verbalize – that is, I could tell that R-Kn5 was a loser move, but I couldn’t tell you exactly WHY until two or three moves ahd been played out.

18

yes, yes, thought IS the construction of the sentence. But you construct sentences without talking in your head, dont you? You don’t repeat each one in your mind before saying it. It just rolls off your tongue during conversation. The thought that forms it is clearly way in the background. Don’t you agree?

19

This forum is for comments on Cecil’s column, so let’s kindly keep this to a discussion of Cecil’s column, eh?

Discussions about what constitutes thought and similar tangents, I suggest you open a new thread in Great Debates.

20

Reading Cecil’s description of Sign, and how drastically it differs from spoken English made me wonder how deaf people are able to grasp written English so easily. Obviously you can’t teach written English the same way to a deaf person as most other children learn it (what sound does “A” make, kids?), so how do they do it? Do they learn individual letters or “phonics” like all the rest of us do, just in a different way? Or are deaf children taught written English by recognizing an entire word and connecting it to a concept?