I have never not thought in words. How does it work? Like, how can I for example think about plans or something if not in words?
I do meditate here and now, but sooner or later the constant stream of words will 100% set in again, usually during or immediately after meditation. And these words for example tell me or discuss whether I should go shower, go to gym, do dishes, or whatever. And in the end I'll decide based on that discussion and do it. It's weird how defined I am by this inner voice.
You don't notice it, but that inner voice is only on the surface. It is generated from what's going on deeper. You may not notice it is very good at occupying your attention. Your "real" thoughts are deeper, then we have processes generating speech based on our deeper structures.
Language communication is not a true representation of what you know. It is a messy iterative process when we try to externalize in words what we know. We also end up with people having the same words who don't understand one another.
It is not that the person on the right has the same understanding as the one on the left. It is far deeper, but you end up using the same words. The knowledge behind the words is hard to express, when you try you will not end up truly conveying your internal state. The words are iteratively and messily derived from exploring your inner state, with varying success.
For better or worse, language has the attention of the people. We end up with magical tales about "true names", where knowing an entities "true name" gives you full control. Or with magic that is invoked by speaking certain phrases, and the universe obliges. Or with heated discussions about arbitrary definitions when it rarely matters, and when you really shouldn't, because if you get to the inevitably fuzzy edges of the actual concepts behind words you should just switch to other words that have the subject you are interested in discussing in the middle instead of at the edge. In reality, our internal models and thinking are hidden in our not that well understood (except in the minute details, those we know a great deal of) neural networks.
I do have an inner monologue, but I do make many decisions non-verbally. I often visualize actions and their consequences, in the context of my internal state. When I’m thirsty I consider the drinks available nearby and imagine their taste. In the morning coffee feels most tempting, unless I’ve already had a few cups - in that case drinking more would leave me feeling worse, not better. After a workout, a glass of water is the most expedient way to quench the thirst. It is similar when I write a piece of code or design a graphic. I look at the code and consider various possible transformations and additions, and prefer ones that move me closer to my goal, or at least make any sort of improvement. It’s basically a weighing of imagined possible world-states (and self-states), not a discussion.
I struggle to imagine how people can find the time to consider all of these trivial choices verbally - in my case it all happens almost instantaneously and the whole process is easy to miss. I also don’t see what the monologue adds to the process - just skip this part and make the decision!
That said, I do use an inner voice when writing, preparing what to say to someone, etc. and I feel like I struggle with this way of thinking much more.
I had this for the longest time. Very imbalanced academic performance because I could get the answer and understood a lot of things, but had huge trouble with written work. That is, converting the thought process into a linear stream of words and sentences. I suppose it's like serialization of objects in memory.
I tend to think in images without an internal dialog running. If I think about an upcoming trip I will imagine a series of images related to the trip, possible places to go, or just generally the place. After a bit a potential conclusion appears fully formed in my mind. If I think about a work problem, I might imagine the document, a coworkers face, or something like that while ruminating on it. Basically it feels like the subconscious is handling the details and the conscious self overall directs it.
Occasionally there is some snippet of a sentence I imagine, but it’s almost always cut off prior to finishing the sentence. If I imagine writing something, though, I’ll speak it to myself in my head.
Funnily enough, I’m a pretty weak mental visualiser too. I don’t have aphantasia but metal images are very transparent and dark.
It works for coding or system architecture and things like that, as well. For you, when you start thinking, a narrative voice appears? Is it debating yourself?
What about a-ha moments when you're solving a tricky problem? For me they come in a flash and I know I've solved the problem even before I've narrated the solution to myself.
Meditation is interesting because it made me able to not only separate thoughts from words, but also consciousness from thoughts.
It’s also consistent with our intuition that toddlers have consciousness and thoughts and other mammals at least consciousness (and emotions) without language.
This feels like last year when I found out I have ADHD and aphantasia...
What do you mean "think in words"? Is it like a narrator, or a discussion like Herman's Head? Are you hearing these words all the time or only when making decisions?
A beautifully written paper but I do feel it missed a major point. Vygotsky pointed out that "in ontogenesis one can discern a pre intellectual stage in the development of speech, and a pre linguistic stage in the development of thought"[Kozulin 1990 p153]. The pre intellectual nature of language can be interpreted as "performative" language (eg "ouch!" or "I pronounce you man and wife") but what does pre linguistic thinking look like? The contemporary answer I'd propose is that it looks like situated action/ radical enactivism / behaviour-based robotics.(see for example Gallagher's 2020 "Action and Interaction") In terms of LLMs, the idea is that rather than "distributed representations", LLMs are indeed using "glorified auto complete" to predict the future and hence look like they are thinking symbolically to us humans because that is how we (think we) think. Paper plug: see Https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403
Not sure how well this dovetails with the research presented in the article, but Grinder and Bandler's work -- which they named Neuro Linguistic Programing (derived I understand from analyzing the brief therapy and hypnotherapy techniques of Milton Erickson) -- postulated that people have dominant modes of thought: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. They correlated these modes with eye movements they observed in subjects when asked to recall certain events.
In my personal experience, my mind became much less busy as a result of several steps. One being abandoning the theory of mind -- in contrast to spiritual practices such as Zen and forms of Hinduism, where controlling the mind, preventing its misbehavior, or getting rid of it somehow is frequently described as a goal, the mind's activity being to blame for a loss of a person's ability to be present in the here and now.
As a teenager, I can remember trying to plan in advance what I will say to a person when faced with a situation of conflict, or maybe desire toward the opposite sex, doubting that language will reliably sprout from my feelings when facing a person, whose facial reactions (and my dependence on their good will) pulls me out of my mental emotional kinesthetic grounding.
As humans we use language, however, it seems possible to live in our experience. Some people who are alienated from their experience, or overwhelmed by others, seek refuge in language.
There is obviously a gap between research such as this, and how someone can make sense of their agency in life, finding their way forward when confronted with conflict, uncertainty, etc.
Doesn't hellen keller provide a counterexample? She seemed to imply pretty strongly that before acquisition of language she operated more on stimulus and bodily perception rather than higher-level thought.
It's clear humans have several networks working together. Some Mathematicians report they 'see' the solution, these rely on a visual network *. Others report they prefer to do math symbolically (relying on the language network?).
Perhaps there are also multiple human paths to higher-level thought, with Keller (who lost her sight) using the language facility while others don't have to.
* Given Box 1 contents, the article authors seem unaware of the research on this? e.g.
No, if i recall the section in her autobiography, specifically it was being taught the concept of "i" / "me" that did it.
Up until that point language was just an extension of what she already knew, it was the learning of being other that did the trick. Being blind and deaf would certainly make it hard to draw a distinction between the self and the world, and while languaged helped her get that concept under wraps, i dont think it's strictly speaking required. Just one of many avenues towards.
But language is also the only way to communicate this. As far as I can tell my cat has a complex consciousnesses but there is no way for me to tell if she has this capacity for introspection and self-reflexivity.
If there are other avenues other than language, how would we know?
I think language is a medium that enables this kind of structured thought. Without it, I cannot imagine reaching this level of abstraction (understanding being a "self").
Those aren't mutually exclusive, stimulus and bodily perception enable higher-level thoughts about the physical world. Once I was driving a big cheap pickup with a heavy load on an interstate, and a rear tire violently blew out, causing the truck to sway violently. I operated entirely by feel + my 3D mental model of a moving truck to discern what and where went wrong and how to safely pull over. It was too fast and too difficult for any stupid words to get in the way.
I am glad humans are meaningfully smarter than chimps, and not merely more vocal. Helen Keller herself seemed to think that learning language finally helped her understand what this weird language thing was:
I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!
It is not like she was constantly dehydrated because she didn't understand what water was. She realized even a somewhat open-ended concept like "water" could be given a name by virtue of being recognizable via stimulus and bodily perception. That in and of itself is quite a high-level thought!
She learned "language" later than most. The primary function for her was as communication with the outside world, not for cognition, which she was already doing from birth.
I don't know how Federenko squares this view with her own work which directly contradicts it [1]. In this work, they find that the language network activated for "meaningful" non-linguistic stimuli such as the sounds of someone getting ready in the morning (e.g. yawning, brushing teeth, etc.). It seems entirely contrary to her arguments in this article and she doesn't even acknowledge it.
I have no clue, have not read the PDF, and am naive and dumb on this topic. But my naive thought recently was how important language must be for our thought, or even be our thoughts, based on how well LLMs work. Needless to say I'm no expert on either topic. But my naive impression was, given that LLMs work on nothing more than words and predictors, the evidence that they almost feel like a real human makes me think that our thoughts are heavily influenced or even purely based on language and massively defined by it.
Can you replicate an algorithm just by looking at its inputs and outputs? Yes, sometimes.
Will it be a full copy of the original algorithm - the same exact implementation? Often not.
Will it be close enough to be useful? Maybe.
LLMs use human language data as inputs and outputs, and they learn (mostly) from human language. But they have non-language internals. It's those internal algorithms, trained by relations seen in language data, that give LLMs their power.
Maybe the structure and operation in LLMs is a somewhat accurate model of the structure and operation of our brains and maybe the actual representation of “thought” is different between the human brain and LLMs. Then it might be the case that what makes the LLM “feel human” depends not so much on the actual thinking stuff but how that stuff is related and how this process of thought unfolds.
I personally believe that our thinking is fundamentally grounded/embodied in abstract/generalized representations of our actions and experiences. These representations are diagrammatic in nature, because only diagrams allow us to act on general objects in (almost) the same way to how we act on real-world objects. With “diagrams” I mean not necessarily visual or static artefacts, they can be much more elusive, kinaesthetic and dynamic. Sometimes I am conscious of them when I think, sometimes they are more “hidden” underneath a symbolic/language layer.
When I was a kid a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages. Which one do you think in?"
I was bemused, and thought... "people think in words?"
Apparently people with ADHD or Autism can develop the inner voice later in life.
In my 20s, language colonized my brain. Took me years of meditation to get some peace and quiet back...
I have never not thought in words. How does it work? Like, how can I for example think about plans or something if not in words?
I do meditate here and now, but sooner or later the constant stream of words will 100% set in again, usually during or immediately after meditation. And these words for example tell me or discuss whether I should go shower, go to gym, do dishes, or whatever. And in the end I'll decide based on that discussion and do it. It's weird how defined I am by this inner voice.
> I have never not thought in words.
You don't notice it, but that inner voice is only on the surface. It is generated from what's going on deeper. You may not notice it is very good at occupying your attention. Your "real" thoughts are deeper, then we have processes generating speech based on our deeper structures.
Language communication is not a true representation of what you know. It is a messy iterative process when we try to externalize in words what we know. We also end up with people having the same words who don't understand one another.
An instance of that is the often used (at least on reddit) bell curve meme - https://i.imgur.com/cUOiP2d.jpeg
It is not that the person on the right has the same understanding as the one on the left. It is far deeper, but you end up using the same words. The knowledge behind the words is hard to express, when you try you will not end up truly conveying your internal state. The words are iteratively and messily derived from exploring your inner state, with varying success.
For better or worse, language has the attention of the people. We end up with magical tales about "true names", where knowing an entities "true name" gives you full control. Or with magic that is invoked by speaking certain phrases, and the universe obliges. Or with heated discussions about arbitrary definitions when it rarely matters, and when you really shouldn't, because if you get to the inevitably fuzzy edges of the actual concepts behind words you should just switch to other words that have the subject you are interested in discussing in the middle instead of at the edge. In reality, our internal models and thinking are hidden in our not that well understood (except in the minute details, those we know a great deal of) neural networks.
I do have an inner monologue, but I do make many decisions non-verbally. I often visualize actions and their consequences, in the context of my internal state. When I’m thirsty I consider the drinks available nearby and imagine their taste. In the morning coffee feels most tempting, unless I’ve already had a few cups - in that case drinking more would leave me feeling worse, not better. After a workout, a glass of water is the most expedient way to quench the thirst. It is similar when I write a piece of code or design a graphic. I look at the code and consider various possible transformations and additions, and prefer ones that move me closer to my goal, or at least make any sort of improvement. It’s basically a weighing of imagined possible world-states (and self-states), not a discussion.
I struggle to imagine how people can find the time to consider all of these trivial choices verbally - in my case it all happens almost instantaneously and the whole process is easy to miss. I also don’t see what the monologue adds to the process - just skip this part and make the decision!
That said, I do use an inner voice when writing, preparing what to say to someone, etc. and I feel like I struggle with this way of thinking much more.
I had this for the longest time. Very imbalanced academic performance because I could get the answer and understood a lot of things, but had huge trouble with written work. That is, converting the thought process into a linear stream of words and sentences. I suppose it's like serialization of objects in memory.
I tend to think in images without an internal dialog running. If I think about an upcoming trip I will imagine a series of images related to the trip, possible places to go, or just generally the place. After a bit a potential conclusion appears fully formed in my mind. If I think about a work problem, I might imagine the document, a coworkers face, or something like that while ruminating on it. Basically it feels like the subconscious is handling the details and the conscious self overall directs it.
Occasionally there is some snippet of a sentence I imagine, but it’s almost always cut off prior to finishing the sentence. If I imagine writing something, though, I’ll speak it to myself in my head.
Funnily enough, I’m a pretty weak mental visualiser too. I don’t have aphantasia but metal images are very transparent and dark.
Interesting. I do the same but would never refer to this as thinking. Probably something more like "visualizing" or "feeling".
It works for coding or system architecture and things like that, as well. For you, when you start thinking, a narrative voice appears? Is it debating yourself?
What about a-ha moments when you're solving a tricky problem? For me they come in a flash and I know I've solved the problem even before I've narrated the solution to myself.
For me such moments come in the form of knowing that I can verbalize it, but I have to verbalize it as quickly as possible otherwise I might loose it
Meditation is interesting because it made me able to not only separate thoughts from words, but also consciousness from thoughts.
It’s also consistent with our intuition that toddlers have consciousness and thoughts and other mammals at least consciousness (and emotions) without language.
This feels like last year when I found out I have ADHD and aphantasia...
What do you mean "think in words"? Is it like a narrator, or a discussion like Herman's Head? Are you hearing these words all the time or only when making decisions?
A beautifully written paper but I do feel it missed a major point. Vygotsky pointed out that "in ontogenesis one can discern a pre intellectual stage in the development of speech, and a pre linguistic stage in the development of thought"[Kozulin 1990 p153]. The pre intellectual nature of language can be interpreted as "performative" language (eg "ouch!" or "I pronounce you man and wife") but what does pre linguistic thinking look like? The contemporary answer I'd propose is that it looks like situated action/ radical enactivism / behaviour-based robotics.(see for example Gallagher's 2020 "Action and Interaction") In terms of LLMs, the idea is that rather than "distributed representations", LLMs are indeed using "glorified auto complete" to predict the future and hence look like they are thinking symbolically to us humans because that is how we (think we) think. Paper plug: see Https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403
Not sure how well this dovetails with the research presented in the article, but Grinder and Bandler's work -- which they named Neuro Linguistic Programing (derived I understand from analyzing the brief therapy and hypnotherapy techniques of Milton Erickson) -- postulated that people have dominant modes of thought: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. They correlated these modes with eye movements they observed in subjects when asked to recall certain events.
In my personal experience, my mind became much less busy as a result of several steps. One being abandoning the theory of mind -- in contrast to spiritual practices such as Zen and forms of Hinduism, where controlling the mind, preventing its misbehavior, or getting rid of it somehow is frequently described as a goal, the mind's activity being to blame for a loss of a person's ability to be present in the here and now.
As a teenager, I can remember trying to plan in advance what I will say to a person when faced with a situation of conflict, or maybe desire toward the opposite sex, doubting that language will reliably sprout from my feelings when facing a person, whose facial reactions (and my dependence on their good will) pulls me out of my mental emotional kinesthetic grounding.
As humans we use language, however, it seems possible to live in our experience. Some people who are alienated from their experience, or overwhelmed by others, seek refuge in language.
There is obviously a gap between research such as this, and how someone can make sense of their agency in life, finding their way forward when confronted with conflict, uncertainty, etc.
Doesn't hellen keller provide a counterexample? She seemed to imply pretty strongly that before acquisition of language she operated more on stimulus and bodily perception rather than higher-level thought.
It's clear humans have several networks working together. Some Mathematicians report they 'see' the solution, these rely on a visual network *. Others report they prefer to do math symbolically (relying on the language network?).
Perhaps there are also multiple human paths to higher-level thought, with Keller (who lost her sight) using the language facility while others don't have to.
* Given Box 1 contents, the article authors seem unaware of the research on this? e.g.
https://www.youcubed.org/resource/visual-mathematics/
https://www.hilarispublisher.com/open-access/seeing-as-under...
No, if i recall the section in her autobiography, specifically it was being taught the concept of "i" / "me" that did it.
Up until that point language was just an extension of what she already knew, it was the learning of being other that did the trick. Being blind and deaf would certainly make it hard to draw a distinction between the self and the world, and while languaged helped her get that concept under wraps, i dont think it's strictly speaking required. Just one of many avenues towards.
But language is also the only way to communicate this. As far as I can tell my cat has a complex consciousnesses but there is no way for me to tell if she has this capacity for introspection and self-reflexivity.
If there are other avenues other than language, how would we know?
I think language is a medium that enables this kind of structured thought. Without it, I cannot imagine reaching this level of abstraction (understanding being a "self").
Those aren't mutually exclusive, stimulus and bodily perception enable higher-level thoughts about the physical world. Once I was driving a big cheap pickup with a heavy load on an interstate, and a rear tire violently blew out, causing the truck to sway violently. I operated entirely by feel + my 3D mental model of a moving truck to discern what and where went wrong and how to safely pull over. It was too fast and too difficult for any stupid words to get in the way.
I am glad humans are meaningfully smarter than chimps, and not merely more vocal. Helen Keller herself seemed to think that learning language finally helped her understand what this weird language thing was:
It is not like she was constantly dehydrated because she didn't understand what water was. She realized even a somewhat open-ended concept like "water" could be given a name by virtue of being recognizable via stimulus and bodily perception. That in and of itself is quite a high-level thought!Keller's early experience of the world differed from typical in dimensions beyond language recognition.
One could make the argument that higher-level thought is not the same as awareness of higher-level thought; perhaps language only affords the latter.
She learned "language" later than most. The primary function for her was as communication with the outside world, not for cognition, which she was already doing from birth.
I don't know how Federenko squares this view with her own work which directly contradicts it [1]. In this work, they find that the language network activated for "meaningful" non-linguistic stimuli such as the sounds of someone getting ready in the morning (e.g. yawning, brushing teeth, etc.). It seems entirely contrary to her arguments in this article and she doesn't even acknowledge it.
[1] https://direct.mit.edu/nol/article/5/2/385/119141
Excellent, comprehensive, extremely thorough work behind all this. Maturana would love it!
[dead]
I have no clue, have not read the PDF, and am naive and dumb on this topic. But my naive thought recently was how important language must be for our thought, or even be our thoughts, based on how well LLMs work. Needless to say I'm no expert on either topic. But my naive impression was, given that LLMs work on nothing more than words and predictors, the evidence that they almost feel like a real human makes me think that our thoughts are heavily influenced or even purely based on language and massively defined by it.
Can you replicate an algorithm just by looking at its inputs and outputs? Yes, sometimes.
Will it be a full copy of the original algorithm - the same exact implementation? Often not.
Will it be close enough to be useful? Maybe.
LLMs use human language data as inputs and outputs, and they learn (mostly) from human language. But they have non-language internals. It's those internal algorithms, trained by relations seen in language data, that give LLMs their power.
Maybe the structure and operation in LLMs is a somewhat accurate model of the structure and operation of our brains and maybe the actual representation of “thought” is different between the human brain and LLMs. Then it might be the case that what makes the LLM “feel human” depends not so much on the actual thinking stuff but how that stuff is related and how this process of thought unfolds.
I personally believe that our thinking is fundamentally grounded/embodied in abstract/generalized representations of our actions and experiences. These representations are diagrammatic in nature, because only diagrams allow us to act on general objects in (almost) the same way to how we act on real-world objects. With “diagrams” I mean not necessarily visual or static artefacts, they can be much more elusive, kinaesthetic and dynamic. Sometimes I am conscious of them when I think, sometimes they are more “hidden” underneath a symbolic/language layer.
Seeing as there are people with no internal monologue (no inner voice), language is clearly not required for thought.
How loud and clear are these internal monologues?
It mimics the outputs of our thought. Good and useful mimicry doesn’t mean the mechanism must be the same