"My head isn’t entirely word-free; like many people, I occasionally talk to myself in an inner monologue. (Remember the milk! Ten more reps!) On the whole, though, silence reigns. Blankness, too: I see hardly any visual images, rarely picturing things, people, or places. Thinking happens as a kind of pressure behind my eyes, but I need to talk out loud in order to complete most of my thoughts. My wife, consequently, is the other half of my brain. If no interlocutor is available, I write. When that fails, I pace my empty house, muttering.... My minimalist mental theatre has shaped my life.... I’m scarcely alone in having a mental 'style,' or believing I do. Ask someone how she thinks and you might learn that she talks to herself silently, or cogitates visually, or moves through mental space by traversing physical space...."
Writes Joshua Rothman, in "How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize" (The New Yorker).
Rothman quotes questions — from psychologist Linda Silverman — that test whether you're a visual thinker (but don't seem to test whether you are a verbal thinker):
Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words?
Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?
Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?
Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?
Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?
Rothman answered "no" to almost all of that.
Is it better to be a visual thinker?
The imagistic minds in [Temple Grandin's] “Visual Thinking” can seem glamorous compared with the verbal ones depicted in “Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It,” by Ethan Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at the University of Michigan. Kross is interested in what’s known as the phonological loop—a neural system, consisting of an “inner ear” and an “inner voice,” that serves as a “clearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs around us in the present.”
If Grandin’s visual thinkers are attending Cirque du Soleil, then Kross’s verbal thinkers are stuck at an Off Broadway one-man show. It’s just one long monologue.
Ha ha. Great metaphor! Didn't Rothman need to be a somewhat of a visual thinker to picture that? Or maybe he didn't picture it. He just thought it in words... or thought nothing, but just typed those words.
Frankly, I know the feeling! I don't have much of a voice in my head or any clear pictures, but I can come up with a lot of material, quite flowingly, if I just start talking or writing. "Ideas condense out of the mental cloud" — that makes sense to me. And, again, doesn't that seem quite visual, thoughts like precipitation from the mental state that seems like a cloud?
Rothman describes research by Russell T. Hurburt, who used a beeping recording device to get people to say what was just going on in their head. Among the categories of thinkers, he found some who engaged in “unsymbolized thinking”:
They often have “an explicit, differentiated thought that does not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols.” Reading this description a few years ago, I felt at last that I had a term that described my mind: it’s not “empty”; my thoughts are just unsymbolized.
But Hurlburt’s work suggests that it’s a mistake to ascribe to oneself a definitive cast of thought. Most people, he’s found, don’t actually know how they think; asked to describe their minds pre-beeper, they are often wildly off the mark about what they’ll report post-beeper.
They’re prone to make “faux generalizations”—groundless assertions about how they think. It’s easy for me to assume that most of my thinking is unsymbolized. But how closely have I examined it?
And, Rothman recognizes, to examine "it" is to generate new thoughts. You can never really look at it at all... look at it... listen to it... unsymbolically grok it it... whatever it is you're doing.
***
"Grok" is my paraphrase. The word — which I think is perfect — does not appear in the article. I've blogged "grok" before, so I won't expatiate on it this time. I'll just make a tag for it and add it retrospectively: here. This is the 6th post with that tag, which pleases me more than makes any sense.
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30 comments:
Go with Homeric epithets.
As ye grep so shall ye grok.
Loved this line (writing about about Temple Grandin), "If her mind is an imax theatre, mine is a fax machine."
Fascinating stuff. Jordan Peterson just did a YouTube interview with Temple Grandin on styles of thinking (verbal/visual). She emphasized the problem with our society needing lots of visual thinkers but not investing in their education: the paradigm being high school shop class. Without welders and plumbers and mechanics, the symbolic demigods will be helpless when the infrastructure breaks.
I like reading maps and diagramming processes. I can rotate objects in my head. But I also love words.
Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic by Russell T. Hurlburt & Eric Schwitzgebel (2007). A must-read for anyone who is interested in thinking about thinking. Seriously. If this post and/or this New Yorker article interested you, read this book.
"Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words? Do you know things without being able to explain how or why? Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear? Can you visualize objects from different perspectives? Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?"
Hey, ChatGPT, what do you say?
"They’re prone to make “faux generalizations”—groundless assertions about how they think."
Most people are prone to make “faux generalizations” about most things.
Let us think about how we think and write stupid articles in a magazine.
It might not be as productive as repairing Air Conditioners or installing plumbing but we can sure pretend we are smarter than those schlubs.
I have recurring visual settings from the past, coming in and out of consciousness, but I can’t say what they mean, if they are meant to convey something. I think in words, of that I’m sure.
Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?
You might be an NPC.
I don't have much of a voice in my head or any clear pictures, but I can come up with a lot of material, quite flowingly, if I just start talking or writing. "Ideas condense out of the mental cloud" — that makes sense to me.
You might be an instance of ChatGPT: ideas literally condensing out of the cloud.
Wow. this is perhaps the most shocking Althouse post ever.
"Frankly, I know the feeling! I don't have much of a voice in my head or any clear pictures..."
with just a thought i can conjure up a clear image of one your sunrise pics from one of your favorite viewing points. yet you are unlikely to do that.
concord is nature's object, discord is nature's method. just goes to show that maybe the bridging algorithm twitter is considering could be useful.
Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words?
Both, and it depends on what I am thinking about, and it is usuall simultaneous. For example, I like to memorize poetry, and will recite them in my head from time to time, but when I do this, it is the soundtrack to the imagery the poem has induced in me. The same thing applies when I listen to music, both vocal and non-vocal- a movie is playing in my head at the same time.
Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?
Yes.
Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?
I am very good at remembering what I see and what I hear (music especially).
Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?
Easily.
Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?
Always prefer the map, but can follow verbal directions.
All of this orbits the various theories of consciousness. According to the late Julian Jaynes, ancient people were auditory thinkers, i.e. their actions were unconsciously directed by auditory hallucinations, commanding or admonishing voices of the gods perceived much like the voices that plague psychotics, to a right-handed person typically from behind and to the left.
In his seminal opus The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes relies heavily on evidence gleaned from the Iliad of Homer in which the characters often behave like marionettes with wires pulled by the Olympians at their whim. He draws more evidence from the religious art of the Hittites and the Mesopotamians which often portray kings and priests physically embraced by a directing and protecting god.
Shoulda' practiced more proofs in in high school geometry.
Some people are unable to visualize anything. They cannot imagine an apple as an image but know about apples with characteristics of them. Those who are extreme visualizers or extreme non-visualizers cannot even image the other's inner world.
I have started having the odd experience of hearing inner "stories" only as I start to fall asleep, but rarely any speaking during an actual dream. I have never heard of this. These short narrations are just like dream images--superficially realistic but nonsensical.
"Think about what you'd think about." -- Joe Biden
Some people are unable to visualize anything. They cannot imagine an apple as an image but know about apples with characteristics of them. Those who are extreme visualizers or extreme non-visualizers cannot even image the other's inner world.
I have started having the odd experience of hearing inner "stories" only as I start to fall asleep, but rarely any speaking during an actual dream. I have never heard of this. These short narrations are just like dream images--superficially realistic but nonsensical.
Rothman's thoughtless - just living his life.
Of course, he does. He's a Democrat.
1. Pictures or words? Both.
2. Know things w/o knowing how or why? Yes.
3. Remember/forget see/hear? Excellent memory for both.
4. Rotate objects? Easily.
5. Map or verbal? Map.
So, am I a visual or verbal thinker? Hell if I know.
Similar to Yancey.
Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words?
Both. Depends on what I am thinking of. I am not, though, going to memorize poetry. Had enough of that with Latin in HS and college. It was weird seeing my Latin prof at my 50th college reunion. Back then, he was a bare footed hippie type, who would sit cross legged in the middle of the table to discourse, and help us with our poetry. We would skip the Greek. He wouldn’t. Didn’t even have his PhD yet. Now he is maybe 80, still teaching the occasional class, and is dressed in the traditional tweeds.
One time I do think verbally is when I am writing. Even sometimes speaking. I sometimes get a couple sentences ahead of myself, and usually revise a little as I am catching up, but sometimes, in a hurry, skip some of the intervening verbiage. I also play word games with my partner. She is very literal, so it drives her crazy. Except that her father was, if anything, worse. So kinda a love/hate thing.
I do better, overall, reading than listening - which may be why my note taking and throwing out my notes worked.
Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?
Often, but then I can usually back up and fill in the blanks. Of the 5 boys in my family, 3 of us (1, 3, 5) made a lot of intuitive jumps, while the 2nd one doesn’t. He is the slow methodical one, and because of that, is the president now of the family corporation, and was the mathematical prodigy in the family (4 out of 5 of us were highly mathematical). Our father would tell of his training as a lawyer. One partner would intuitively jump to the answer, and was right most of the time. Another would slowly grind through, and was right even more often. As a starting lawyer, the latter was a better.
I have been lucky in my career, having spent much of it around people much smarter than I. And this difference in thinking style can be interesting. Those of us who make a lot of intuitive leaps find that sort of thing invigorating. And frustrating when dealing with the methodological plodders. But in a group, you often need the methodological ones to fill in the blanks. Still, chairing a meeting with forceful PhDs of both types can be hard sometimes.
Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?
Somewhat. But it very much depends, because I don’t remember many things that my partner says, but then question that she said them. I think that both of us are at fault there, because I have evidence from others on both sides.
I had a weird learning style. I would listen in class, taking notes, then never use the notes to prep for tests. Did not need them, and they rarely were that good. It was partly the third leg, the writing of the notes, that was key for me. That said, one of my best friends is much more verbal. He sends me videos, that I don’t watch, and I return to him articles, that he often doesn’t read. Yet, we both make a lot of intuitive leaps. Outsiders, including our respective SOs, are often mystified, when we appear to be talking simultaneously about guns, COVID-19, Dem corruption, our children, etc. it makes sense to us though.
Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?
Easily. If you can’t, you probably shouldn’t be a patent attorney.
Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?
Always greatly prefer maps, but can follow verbal directions, unless given by most woman. They seem to navigate by landmarks, many too subtle for me. Not my mother and daughter who handle maps just fine. Overall, they seem to have no conception of N/E/S/W, which is so intuitive to many guys. Maps are esp useful in western cities, designed on grids, like PHX. You don’t have to provide different directions when you are going different directions. In any case, I almost always know instinctively where I am on the map in my head.
This bullshit, again.
Look, dumbasses. You say that you don't "think in language". News flash, dumb f*cks: If you were only a "visual thinker", then all you'd be able to do is draw your response to this post. You wouldn't be able to articulate a damn thing, either orally or by writing.
All y'all dumbasses that come up with this bullshit need to do some damn reading and research into language and its effect on human cognition.
Good entry point into this is the work of Lera Boroditsky; she's documented copious cases where the language used by a group impacts nearly everything about how they think. There's a famous example about the way that an Australian Aboriginal language describes everything in terms of cardinal direction; no left-right based on the individual's body position, just pure location data that describes it all by cardinal direction.
This TED Talk is worth listening to, in its entirety:
https://irl.umsl.edu/oer/13/
(cont)
Transcript of the pertinent bit:
So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit." In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?"
So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction.
(Laughter)
But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn't get past "hello," if you didn't know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: "Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales." No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well.
And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast.
(Laughter)
Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don't know which way it is myself --
(Laughter)
You have not been a lot of help.
(Laughter)
So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group -- very distinguished group like you guys -- doesn't know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know.
(Laughter)
There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left.
But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? They don't use words like "left" and "right." Let me give you hint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What's the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. I'm facing this way, time goes this way -- very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time.
(cont)
All of you who say you "don't use language to think" are full of it. You do; you just don't realize that you do, because if you truly did not use English as your "language of thought", you'd stick out like a sore thumb because of the cognitive differences you would be forced to express through... Spoken English. If you're not demonstrating the vast differences in thought you'd have due to "not using language", you'd show it.
What this is isn't some vast, special gulf you're across; it's the fact that you lack the self-awareness to recognize what you're doing. If you didn't "think in English", and thought "visually", then about all you'd be able to do would be to paint your response to this, you'd be illiterate, and I suspect sitting under restraints somewhere.
Language is the handmaiden of thought; without it, you're less than human, an animal. Regardless of whether or not you're aware of it, regardless of whether or not you have an "internal monologue", you've got language, and you're thinking in it. If you weren't, then you'd be so obviously different from other people around you that you'd have been diagnosed as essentially autistic or mentally disabled, to one degree or another.
If any of this bullshit were true, then these documented cognitive differences that linguists like Lera Boroditsky have documented wouldn't exist. Whether you want to admit it or not, you're using language to think--And, the language you use influences both how and what you think about the world around you.
It must be true even for 'inner monologue' and 'visual' thinkers that the underlying process that catapults those artifacts to their notice is insensible to them. I experience both and neither, depending. Most musical composers 'hear' phrases (like writing, it's not all punch a random key and revise) but couldn't tell you where they come from.
Someone reporting how the workings of their mind tends to express itself are subject to not only a deep blindness to how that expression is decided, but also are biased by what activities and conditions tend to bring artifacts to their notice.
I think we can trust specific accounts of memorable breakthroughs/peaks but otherwise why would we expect people to self-monitor consistently?
People can't even remember and accurately report what just happened (even what they just said).
“ All of you who say you "don't use language to think" are full of it.”
Straw man.
No one is making such an extreme assertion. It’s a matter of degree.
"Straw man." And overstuffed. For my part, I think, and I don't really distinguish between the visual and the verbal while I do it. I may hum or sing while I walk and think, is that musical thinking?
I wonder how the remarkable Kuuk Thaayoore would do on direction if they were tested in a modern auditorium, after walking though hallways and up and down staircases.
For that matter, from the excerpt I might infer that their time distinction isn't landscape-oriented but sun-oriented.
Interesting theory anyway, and I'll learn some more.
I'm trying not to visualize a better-read, more grammatically correct Howard.
"that test whether you're a visual thinker (but don't seem to test whether you are a verbal thinker)"
My interpretation of this (forgive me if I'm wrong) is that you think this is a flaw. If so, I would agree. Personally, I think I am capable of thinking visually, but that I also do think about some things more verbally. This list seems to presume a sharp dichotomy of peoples' thinking capabilities, such that testing for one is testing for the lack of the other.
Of the five questions in your quote, I'm no, no, no, yes, yes.
It's amazing to me how wedded people are to these fantasy ideas they've developed about "how they think", and I don't know why there's this bias towards acknowledging language as the primary tool we use to do it.
If you weren't using language for thinking, then you'd be demonstrating all the symptoms of aphasia, and would not be participating in this discussion. You'd be institutionalized, or more likely, dead.
"Visual thinking" has to be tightly integrated in with language; if it were not, you'd be unable to describe it to anyone else. As well, there are clearly demarked effects on the patterns we visualize in, based on language. The whole thing is, and has to be, tightly integrated.
Language is a tool for thought, and like any other tool, what you pick up as a tool influences what you do with it. There is copious research out there that shows that one of the reasons most Asian nationalities have better math skills is based all the way down to how their languages count; there's none of the inconsistencies in counting you find in Western languages like English, or perhaps the worst one of the lot, French. It's all straightforward as hell, and the language of counting in Chinese even lends itself to doing basic addition and subtraction.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-math-1410304008
Note how this Chinese difference in counting leads into this:
https://yoyochinese.com/blog/Learn-Chinese-Multiplication-Rhyme-Time-Tables
Try coming up with that in English. We don't even have the idea of a rhyming mnemonic times table, just like the Chinese don't have the equivalent of an alphabet rhyme. Language influences thought; Asian superior performance in math probably has a lot to do with the language used, and there's a study out there comparing ethnic Asians without Asian languages (most of which borrow numeric structure from China) and those that still speak their native tongue. The kids who're solely English-speaking did about the same as other native English speakers...
Language influences thought immensely. Why? Because language absolutely is thought: If you don't have a word for a concept, you likely don't have that concept in the first place; if you do, it's likely nebulous as hell and difficult to express. This is one reason why English is so damn effective as a language: If there isn't a concept in English, and an English speaker hears it, that word and concept is going to be incorporated into English very quickly.
Because of this, the idea that language is somehow separate from thought itself is patently ridiculous. This goes back to Homer, and his "wine-dark sea"; ancient Greek quite literally had no word for blue.
https://www.openculture.com/2021/06/why-most-ancient-civilizations-had-no-word-for-the-color-blue.html
Even if you're the most "visual" thinker out there, language is literally coloring how you think, constraining and guiding it. You may not hear the internal monologue, but it is still there, influencing everything about your thoughts.
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