Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer Feature. The lost art of being reasonable. Damon Linker. How the Founding Fathers encourage political violence. Bonnie Kristian. Why banning 'harmful' online speech is a slippery slope. Cathy Young. Thus, vast portions of our everyday cognitive experiences appear to be unrelated to language per se. Turns out, patients with global aphasia can solve arithmetic problems, reason about intentions of others, and engage in complex causal reasoning tasks.
Some of them play chess in their spare time. Some even engage in creative tasks — a composer Vissarion Shebalin continued to write music even after a stroke that left him severely aphasic. Some readers might find these results surprising, given that their own thoughts seem to be tied to language so closely.
If you find yourself in that category, I have a surprise for you — research has established that not everybody has inner speech experiences. Therefore, even inner speech does not appear to be necessary for thought.
Have we solved the mystery then? Can we claim that language and thought are completely independent and Bertrand Russell was wrong? Karen R Koenig. As a nice girl, why do I need to balance my work and personal lives? Reaching a balance encourages you to throw yourself into goal-oriented tasks and feel good about acc Does just seeing myself as creator of my reality make it true?
A skeptic will protest that just seeing yourself as the creator of your reality doesn't mean you are What is perfectionism? Alice Domar. Canadian researchers Gordon L. Consider feelings that we have about experiences in our life. We can interpret feelings and emotions faster than thinking about it with structured sentences.
Rather than thinking, "I like that painting on the wall with the babbling brook" — you simply feel the pleasure, and you're done with the thought. That's much faster.
When we think with words, we are slowing ourselves down. However, language has its benefits too. There's a place for everything. So now this brings me to a point worth mentioning. Different languages allow for the expression of different ideas. In the mids, I started my career as a computer programmer.
We had various programming languages designed for different tasks. For example:. Spoken languages also have special abilities designed into them, based on the needs of the language. I'll give you a couple of examples below. There are over 40 words for camel in the Arabic language.
I've done some Google research that shows over In English, we just have one word for camel, and we include an adjective in front of it to describe the kind of camel. Male camel, female camel, old or young, and so on. Arabic breaks this down into individual words to describe camels by specific entities such as age, color, number of humps, sex, and breeding status.
This direct reference to different kinds of camels helps communicate since camels are essential for survival in the Arab World.
We have a similar example in the western world. We have many different words for various types of birds. Each word refers to a specific bird, such as bluejay, dove, robin, woodpecker, hummingbird, parakeet, sparrow, owl, hawk, etc. Remembering my High School English, I can explain this.
When a direct reference to a noun does not exist in a language, an adjective must be used as a descriptive word. English and Spanish are two examples where we use a descriptive word adjective to define the subject the noun better.
In English, the adjective comes before the noun, but this is not common among all languages. Spanish, for example, has the adjective after the noun. You might begin to see that when someone learns a new language, their thought patterns may change as well. The various methods that languages impose restrictions or include more supportive direct references can help with thinking as well as communicating. Some animals communicate with other methods that do not require structured language. I gave this a lot of thought.
Since the concept was very involved, I was putting my thoughts into sentences to try to communicate with myself. Maybe one part of my brain was communicating with another part by offering structured sentences to be diagnosed and interpreted. More importantly, I suddenly realized that I was allowing my brain to reflect on my thoughts.
I tried to catch myself reflecting on notions, without actually using words. We do think in many alternate non-linguistic ways. How often have you just considered a thought visually?
Images can replace language for communication and thinking. It's not uncommon to think with image representations. That can even help with interpretation.
Awareness or consciousness does not require words. There is still some form of thinking going on. Paying attention to what is going on around us or paying attention to our behavior does not necessarily require words. Different regions of the brain are triggered based on what is happening.
We may actually have feelings and emotions that come from this brain activity. Thoughts in the form of words may not be required to feel the feeling. Those thoughts related to feelings might have developed unconsciously in your brain.
You didn't need to use actual words or structured sentences. Words are not always required to describe pleasing or displeasing emotions. Thinking might be on a conscious level, but I wouldn't rule out unconscious brain activity influencing our thoughts.
Abstract thinking goes beyond concrete thoughts. It allows the ability to visualize ideas beyond the obvious. Child prodigies who can multiply large numbers in their heads are probably using abstract methods of thinking. Thinking with representations can be accomplished a lot quicker than actual thinking because no time is wasted putting it into words.
Maybe some people get through life with a little imaginary person on their shoulder telling them how to behave:. Two linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf had publicized an interesting theory. Known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, they state that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. One of their hypotheses is known as the Linguistic Relativity.
The words of a language determine how we think. Although I agree that most of us do that most of the time, I think it's because we had learned a language and we use it. As I mentioned previously, I think that people can think in terms of concepts. Therefore words are not always necessary. An individual can have a concept of an idea.
Benjamin Whorf indicates that words place a label on the idea, and that influences our thought about it. With that, I agree. I also like to compare the way the human brain works to the way computers work.
So the speed of thought is an interesting addition to that analysis. An intriguing article Glenn. My thoughts are it may have been a challenge to write because you processed 'thoughts' or were thinking, which became abstracts, then related those in words as I am attempting here. I dun'no. I will continue pondering this morning. Something you may be interested in and taking a peek at is the recent study and testing of the speed of thought.
Catherine Giordano - Good thoughts on the subject. But how do you know that a gorilla had those thoughts before being taught sign language? We really don't know that.
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