I caught bits and pieces of a Radio Lab yesterday and language seemed to be the topic. The following question came up (and I missed the answer): For a person who never learned to speak, for whatever reason, what goes through their mind when they “think”? I think in English words, “internal speaking” as it were. How does it work for someone has always been totally deaf? Or a person, as the story referred to, who was not only deaf but never realized there was such a thing as sound until well into adulthood? Any recommended reading material?
There are late-talkers (Einstein was one), in whom it is theorized that their minds are working so fast and fluidly, that trying to apply language to the process just obstructs and sidetracks their thoughts. This would suggest that language itself gets in the way of thought processes, and a person who never thinks in language is running much faster through his cognitive and analytical life.
How would you describe it? This question is equivalent to how do I know that my processes of thought mirror yours? Or how an ant queens mirror Her Maj’s?
We know that language affects reasoning, thought and perception of the world significantly (e.g. speakers languages with more words for different colours have better colour differentiation and perception).
As the previous duder said, it is hypothesised that late-talkers can suspend their internal monologue and focus on thoughts only.
There is a book by Valentino Braitenberg called Vehicles. In it, he builds (hypothetical, although feasible) vehicles with simple brains, increasing the complexity slowly till he reaches free will. If the synthetic psychology he describes is isomorphic to real biological brains, then there would be some similarities between different brains (i.e. chain of mental concepts and images, over-activity prevention automatically lowers activity when it reaches a threshold, leading to focus on strongest linked concepts only by extinguishing weaker links).
But there would be no way to convey the differences to another person.
We know that language affects reasoning, thought and perception of the world significantly (e.g. speakers languages with more words for different colours have better colour differentiation and perception).
You’re talking about Linguistic Relativity and it’s only weakly correlated with certain cognitive processes and color perception isn’t one. This was demonstrated by Berlin and Kay in 1969.
As for the OP, try this… imagine driving home from work. You can easily “picture” yourself driving down the road without the need for language to describe the scene to yourself. You don’t need words to see it in your mind.
And just the same for the act of driving. We all sing along to the radio, or think about a million different things while driving and we don’t need to talk to ourself about what we’re doing to do it.
In fact, when one is faced with a difficult task, it is often the lack of internal dialog that allows you to be fully immersed in the moment and get the job done.
“I wasn’t thinking, I just did it.”
Typing works that way for me. I think about the words I want to say, but I’m not thinking about hitting individual keys. The thought processes required to hit the individual keys are happening independently of my internal dialog. If I can do things independently of my internal dialog, then that’s proof that it isn’t necessary for “thinking.”
My “internal monologue” often resembles putting together pieces of a puzzle more than it does a stream of words. It’s an imperfect analogy, but I’ll often have multiple concepts in my brain, and try matching them against each other in various ways to see which ones “interlock” and how.
This is a topic of huge controversy in the cognitive sciences, and one for which it is very difficult to devise meaningful meaningful experiments that will address the issue directly. That being so, the question is as much a one for philosophers as for scientists. (There have been lots of experiments, and clinical observations, that might bear on the issue, from some theoretical perspective or other, but the meaning and often the very meaningfulness of their results is going to be highly disputed. Data without an agreed theoretical framework is empty.) Theoretical opinions are all over the map: at one end of the spectrum there are those who hold that all true (define that how you will) thought, and even consciousness, depends on language; at the other are those who hold that all real thought is completely unconscious, and any awareness people might have of “inner speech” or of mental imagery, or whatever, whilst they are thinking, is about as relevant to the real thought processes as is the noise made by a car engine to the forces and mechanisms that actually make it go. One quite common version of this last view is the idea that thought is completely dependent on a language (or, at least, a language-like representational system) but not a language that anybody speaks. Rather it is “mentalese”, the (completely hypothetical and unconscious) representational code used by the brain as the medium in which it carries out its computations. (This, in turn, depends on the view that the brain functions, in some important and revealing sense, like a digital computer, another view which is highly contentious amongst cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, with some taking it for granted, and some regarding it as obviously wrong.)
I can’t, offhand, think of any decent books or articles that would be reasonably accessible to a layperson, and that tackle your question in a reasonably direct and even-handed way. However, my brain is in a bit of a fug now, and it is possible something might spring to mind later. (Now how does that work?!) If it does, I will return to the thread and let you know.
I suppose there is How the Mind Works by Pinker, but it is long, very partial and one sided (and, by now, rather dated) in its theoretical approach, and, in my personal view, about as wrong as it is possible to get. If I think of something better, or something that might provide a good counterbalance to Pinker, I will get back to the thread.
All people think without words. All people have had ideas they have trouble putting into words. People also think without words when performing tasks like choosing the best produce at a farmer’s market, or painting a picture, or changing the oil in a car. There’s a lot that goes on in your head that doesn’t require words. I would say that most of the time, thought precedes language rather than language preceding thought. You may be aware of an internal monologue that happens in your native tongue, but that doesn’t mean this monologue is thought itself.
You may find this book interesting.
surely they just think in images
Language is not required to be spoken or heard - it is just typically manifested as spoken or heard by we who hear and speak. The neural substrates of language are however just as accesssible to sign.
Language may be requisite for the human sense of self but not hearing. As I understand it just as you experience yourself internally speaking a completely deaf person experiences themselves internally signing.
I vaguely recall something about how language also underlies or scaffolds episodic memory and how the lack of its maturation is responsible for the amnesia of our earliest years or than as the briefest of images or sensations.
It would be interesting to see research on whether so-called late-talkers retain better or worse memories of their early childhood.
There are theories sort-of along those lines, but they are very far from being established facts.
What you say about signing is true, but, of course, any role that sign language might play in early thought crucially depends on a person being very extensively exposed to signing from a very early age (as hearing infants are exposed to spoken language from the very beginning), and most deaf infants simply will not be.
Is that necessarily true? Kids are exposed to gestures from early on and communicate to some degree with them even if parents are not doing “baby signs” … without greater exposure there may be a lack of language richness and complexity, but it may still develop. By the time complex language develops in hearing children I highly suspect most deaf childeren have some sense of gestures that they use to attempt to communicate even if others often fail to understand.
I think gestures, as used by hearing people, are a very long way short of the semantic richness of deaf sign language. It is not remotely comparable.
No doubt a true statement that does not necessarily bear on my comment. Is the private early gestrural language development achieved by a non-hearing toddler, primed to learn language, extremely impoverished compared to the internal spoken language of a hearing toddler? Do you need exposure to that formal semantic richness to develop internal language structure?
I would speculate not and further speculate that spoken and gestural language are just different skins on more fundamental and highly primed structure.
I heard that Radio Lab show too. A key point, and a finding of scientific research, is that certain cognitive skills correlate strongly to acquiring language skills. Sometimes science contradicts “common sense”. Sometimes we think we all know something, like you don’t need words to think, but reality is a bit more complicated than that. These are people who think about and study this stuff as their profession and they come up with very creative ways to test theories about these questions.
But I can’t recommend any material to the OP.