When is it better to think without words?

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/wordless-thought

by Curiositry • 9 months ago

284 140 9 months ago

wrp• 9 months ago

Problem solving is a well-explored field in experimental psychology. TFA is a bit unfocused, making both some generally supported speculations and some traditional ideas that haven't been supported. A very good survey is the edited volume, The Psychology of Problem Solving (Davidson 2003).

Although TFA doesn't refer to it by name, "insight" problem solving is when you are stuck on something and then suddenly realize the solution. The common explanation for being stuck is "fixation" on the wrong things. In agreement with TFA, there is indication that verbalization supports fixation more than visualization.

mellosouls• 9 months ago

It's quite frustrating when writers like the author - who seem quite thoughtful and potentially useful to read - appear to pontificate on a field without seemingly being aware of it; using a great mathematician's thoughts on it as a springboard doesn't justify it as its not his field of expertise either.

The essay might be more useful grounded with references to the sort of thing you link to.

supportengineer• 9 months ago

When a sophon is trying read your mind

daxfohl2• 9 months ago

Reminds me of the description of Peter Scholze as he was coming up with condensed mathematics. Didn't write a thing until he had it all worked out in his head (which is how he always works). Knew if he didn't get it worked out before the weekend he'd never be able to build it up again. Once he worked it out, he was able to retain it for months until finally writing it down.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirm...

stavros• 9 months ago

But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought. The proof is that you can stop your inner words mid-sentence and you still know what you were going to think, because the thought itself takes a few milliseconds, and happens before the words start.

gchamonlive2• 9 months ago

But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought

That seems valid at first, but if look at that premise closely, you'll see that even assuming wordless thoughts always come first, doesn't mean that during the process of thinking they don't give way to words. That is to say, thoughts can be a precursor, but words do offer a framework which you can use structure thought.

That's specially handy for abstract concepts, like individuality, the split of the self and the world, which are fundamental to thought as we understand it through language.

Nothing prevents you from understanding a concept with the help of language and then using the concept by itself, detached from the symbols you used to arrive at it, to think. But that requires a certain effort and intention that maybe is what the article is aiming for.

chrisweekly2• 9 months ago

"the split of the self and the world"

is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an illusion and fundamental error

shakna3• 9 months ago

I think a better way to show this, would be that anendophasia [0] is a thing.

Some people have no inner voice, but aren't thoughtless automatons. They can still task-switch the same as everyone else.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/

daxfohl2• 9 months ago

Or by watching rats solve mazes

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 9 months ago

On 4chan and reddit, they actually believe that those without an "inner monologue" have no soul.

danparsonson• 9 months ago

Or conversely, that one can be lost for words to describe what one is thinking!

chrisweekly2• 9 months ago

The question reminds me of a quote from Rilke: "There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought".

quacked6• 9 months ago

I don't have an "inner monologue" and don't think in words, only in images, but I've never experienced what this author is describing in terms of "nonsense words" or "hand vibrations".

I was with some friends that were in a band together, and we got thinking about this topic, and ended up arranging ourselves from least verbal to most verbal. I was on one end, where all of my thoughts appear as emotions or images; on the other end was our bassist, who experienced his thoughts as fully formed sentences. He said when he's getting to a difficult passage in a song the words "better focus here, don't mess up" will ring out in his head. He also said he has fully dictated mental conversations with himself.

I also read very quickly because I look at the shape of paragraphs and assemble the word-shapes into mental images and pick up meaning that way; high speed, but low comprehension. I struggle greatly to read philosophy because it's quite difficult to visualize. My wife reads slowly but hears every word in her head; her comprehension is much higher. I can do high comprehension reading by slowing down and looking at every word, but it feels like holding back an excitable dog.

larrry3• 9 months ago

A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.

I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.

Liftyee2• 9 months ago

I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than my hand-wavy rationalisation.

It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.

EGreg• 9 months ago

Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?

quacked6• 9 months ago

I just learned that term today, but I guess so. I don't know how I generate words, they're just there. I type at about 120 wpm and speak very quickly as well, but as it's coming out I'm just flashing through different images in my head, often partial images from my own memory, and the words come out without paying attention to them, like out of a lower layer of consciousness. I write a lot of 300+ word messages at work, and it's just image after image firing in my head while the words appear.

I think I have a concept-image map in my head; to test it out, I'm thinking of random words, and very well-defined images are popping into my head. "Insurance" is the impression of slate grey followed by a view into a 90s corporate office room. "Propulsion" is the bell of one of the space shuttle engines firing on full, but not centered in frame. "Gravity" is one of the rooms in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Etc. But it's harder to go the other way; if I see an image or a drawing and have to describe what it is, there's more of a lag before I can retrieve the words to describe it. It's much easier to think of other related images.

BriggyDwiggs42• 9 months ago

Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy. Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it’s very difficult to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving the words around without having internalized the idea.

ulbu• 9 months ago

philosophy, i find, is one of the forms where the shapeless thinking described in the article does a lot of the work for me. especially the phase of internalization. you take a sentence you don’t quite get, and then spend a bunch of time just meditating about it, rejecting the temptations to think elsewhere. and then, in time, it just clicks into making all sorts of sense.

it’s definitely not “purely linguistic” – one form of it is about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.

agentcoops5• 9 months ago

I’m aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner experience could not be more different: it’s strange to explain, but I experience “unvocalized” language, which means the words are sort of just there without “hearing” them in my head—-I don’t have inner sound at all either and so the words don’t have an accent, for example. My thought moves at a speed much faster than speaking and I can read fast with high comprehension—-but it takes me incredible effort to remember the color of someone’s eyes, for example. I more or less skip descriptions in novels and prefer to read philosophy.

I’ve always found it interesting that in programming communities the two extremes of aphantasic and hyperphantasic seem to both be very overrepresented.

quacked6• 9 months ago

What happens when you read descriptions if you can't skip over them?

not_a_bot_4sho• 9 months ago

Same. And it's weird to hear someone else understand this so well.

godelski5• 9 months ago

What do you see when you close your eyes? Just light and colors? What about when you dream?

I ask because there's done research suggesting visual hallucinations while sleeping helps maintain the visual cortex's proficiency. IIRC it was just contingent on visual stimuli. Sometimes as I fall asleep I see a very bright white light, so something like that can count.

If you don't remember your dreams it might be interesting to keep a dream journal. It might take awhile to get your first entry. I kept one a decade ago and my first entry was "I remember but color blue" and it took a week. But even though I don't keep it anymore I remember most of my dreams and they are still quite vivid. Might be a fun experiment

KolibriFly3• 9 months ago

Usually skimming fast with bursts of visualization, but I have to force myself into that slower, word-by-word mode for dense material

larrry3• 9 months ago

When making visual art, I don’t think in words. Shapes, colors, shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do I translate this to words. I’m not sure what trying to draw by thinking in words would even look like.

Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words provide a good starting point).

Coding ends in “words”, or at least some form of written language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.

Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but they’re not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely different context and origin.

I don’t deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me it’s just one part of the whole stream of conscious.

I’m curious if anyone else feels this way about words?

liqilin1567• 9 months ago

Is it like this?: It's one of those things you can't really describe - you just feel it

larrry3• 9 months ago

Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process, I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good, did I find morels this season, does the code work as required)

stephenlf2• 9 months ago

I knew my mid-workday naps were productive…

stephenlf2• 9 months ago

Glad you pointed out Feynman’s experience. The paper and the writing were the work. Oftentimes, I don’t settle on a meaningful, elegant solution until I have tried to explain my thoughts many times. “Eureka!” becomes “oh wait…” and back—a pendulum that eventually settles on a beautiful solution.

apricot13• 9 months ago

This is one of those things that you don't really tend to think about (pun not intended!) until you experience a change in your thinking or meet someone who thinks like you do!

If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster

With my neurodivergent brain I've always conducted my thoughts in an "uncompressed format" and then eternally struggled to confine it all into words. Only then for people to misinterpret and question it. They might get caught up in the first sentence when the end of the paragraph is where you need to be!

That's why when you meet someone who thinks like you the depth of conversation and thinking you can achieve together is vast and also incredibly liberating! Your no longer limited by words in same way.

Since becoming ill I've suffered badly with brainfog. The cutesy name for a cruel experience. Sometimes there's no memories to draw on when your thinking, the cupboards are bare. You can't leap from thought to thought because they disappear before you get there or after like a cursed platformer. You might be able to grab hold of the thought but you can't reach inside or read it. It's all wrong somehow like when your suddenly convinced a word is spelt wrong even though you know it's right. You can't maintain focus long enough to finish your train of thought.

Even that subconscious processing is affected I used to prime my brain with information all day and instead of waking up with the solution I'll wake up frustrated but not knowing why. Just the vague notion that I failed at something that used to come so easily.

verisimi• 9 months ago

That's why when you meet someone who thinks like you the depth of conversation and thinking you can achieve together is vast and also incredibly liberating! Your no longer limited by words in same way.

Hmm.... I have to say, while I like the idea of being unlimited by words - the state of 'purer communion' is one I have frequently sought - I think it is far more likely that what is going on is that you mind is projecting 'likeness'. Both people in the conversation imagine that the other 'gets it' - a delusory and false assumption. After all, no one knows what goes on in another's mind - we simply don't have access.

I think talking is our means of 'ideas exchange', and that the greatest connections comes after lots of conversations, where one can (rightly) assume a shared understanding because one knows the terms are more-or-less lined up.

Language is an unavoidable throttling valve to me. And additionally, it's not the brain that's actually registering value/meaning either for me. You can call it the subconscious if you like, but I prefer 'soul' as that sense of oneself that is always there, has innate knowing, etc. Which is to say, there really is no way to express the depth of experience to another. But this is fine.

taneq• 9 months ago

If it’s projection, wouldn’t they get the same experience with anyone? Or maybe only with someone that’s also projecting that you also “get it”. The proof is in the pudding, though, I think. Collaboration with someone who matches your wavelength like this seems to be very productive in terms of concrete results.

MrLeap• 9 months ago

Both people in the conversation imagine that the other 'gets it' - a delusory and false assumption

'getting it' isn't an all or nothing thing. It would be an illusion to take it to an extreme.

The idea of some people in your life being able to get you better than others, more quickly and with fewer words, is a fact of life. Comparative human connection bandwidth can be estimated by vibes, history, outcomes.

nuancebydefault• 9 months ago

Well this is why that the non-verbal part of communication conveys most information. A single video call tells more than a million words.

treyd• 9 months ago

That description really resonates with me, it feels a lot like what I've been experiencing on and off for several months. I sometimes describe it like being able to see and examine an idea sitting in front of me on the table but having a hard time picking up and being able to manipulate it enough to write it out. Or like your fingers are working poorly like when it's very cold and you're not wearing gloves.

grugagag• 9 months ago

It only takes some practice to get better at it even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. I think it’s worth working on our weakest skills, over time it compounds quite nicely.

yapyap2• 9 months ago

I get what you’re saying, in my own way.

But what I do not get is how you would convey these thoughts to someone else that thinks the same way as you, seeing as these thoughts don’t neccesarily seem to be contained to words or sentences.

thehyperflux• 9 months ago

I believe the idea is that people who think the same way will find it easier to interpret the true nature of the thoughts behind forms of words which may be less comprehensible to people thinking in other ways.

Etheryte• 9 months ago

This is easiest to recognize in the creative arts, but really you see this in every domain. A musician tapping a rhythm or humming a tune might make no sense to a layman, but another musician often understands what they mean right from the get go. Not because they necessarily know the piece, but because they think about music in a similar way.

mewpmewp26• 9 months ago

I'm curious about some specific examples. Like can you explain a thought that came to you without words and then try to explain how you tried to explain it.

I feel like my thoughts are entirely monologue reasoning based kind of.

jononor• 9 months ago

All language is referential. Even in everyday speech the meaning is not in the words themselves, in so much as they are pointers to concepts that (hopefully) exists already in the brains of the people we are conversing with. So when someone is very well aligned, one can convey ideas that go much further than conventionally expressed in the "general" language which is mutually intellible with most speakers of the same language. It is a rare experience though, at least for deep or personal topics.

Xemplolo• 9 months ago

I don't think its the same thing as whats described in the article.

When i talk with someone very aligned with my thinking and knowledge (fellow it collegues/friends with simiiliar skill level) we do not a lot of words to be aligned and convey complex thoughts.

We reference and use words which we both know, we read and reference similiar news stories etc.

But the way they describe it with colors, vibrations etc. is probably somethig you can't just convey.

KolibriFly3• 9 months ago

Finding someone who thinks like you can feel like unlocking a second processor

throwaway98797• 9 months ago

often times the answer is instantaneous but the articulation takes ages to show people how to get from a to z

insight often lives in the ability to skip a b c d, then post processing is to allow mortals to understand

sometimes my verbal skills fail me and the steps are missing

this is why i disagree that if you can’t write it, you don’t know it

in another words, i may know the note to sing but not have the voice to sing it

stantonius• 9 months ago

I've always conducted my thoughts in an "uncompressed format" and then eternally struggled to confine it all into words. Only then for people to misinterpret and question it.

This resonates so much with me. To a point where I don't write/contribute in public forums out of fear for this misinterpretation.

Strangely, your post has made me push through that exact fear to write this, so any perceived misinterpretation has positively impacted at least one stranger. This is a good reminder for me that focusing only on negative consequences misses the unintended positive ones of still putting something out there, even if its not a perfect representation of the "uncompressed format".

Thank you for sharing, and I wish you a speedy recovery.

Dilettante_2• 9 months ago

I've too often made the experience of having something that feels significant and whole in my head, and in the process of trying to articulate it to another person, it becomes almost completely lost. What comes out is a two-dimensional, crippled shadow of the original idea, and it (this is the worst part) cuts off my connection to the complex form.

anthonypasq• 9 months ago

This is why writing is important. it gives you the time to actually thinking about the best words to represent what is in your head. you may still fail, but it will usually be better than whatever comes dribbling out of your mouth.

unfortunately, if knowledge isnt written down in some form, (code, english etc) then it doesnt really exist in a civilization sense, so you need to get good at writing.

see all Paul Grahams essays on writing.

amirmi78• 9 months ago

Would you tell what illness it is if you don't mind?

mathattack• 9 months ago

In athletics words can be a hindrance, as they add time to the thinking/doing gap.

cnees• 9 months ago

I've certainly noticed a bit of a pattern where programmers who can listen to podcasts or lyrics while they code (I can't; I rely too much on my verbal center for coding) can operate much faster and solve more complex problems than your average bear. They're rare, so I don't have enough data to feel certain, but I have a suspicion that sometimes they're forced into it by living in noisy environments where tuning out the words or thinking without them makes more sense.

stOneskull• 9 months ago

do you find music without lyrics helps? i do for sure. a bit of bach or beethoven, or some dub kinda music.

Liftyee2• 9 months ago

Been thinking a lot recently about what my thoughts look like. They definitely aren't words (though as I type this, I can imagine hearing myself think ahead to the end of the sentence). The best I can describe it is visualisations - whether that's images of maths notation, 3D rotating models, or a flow/map/block diagram.

One pattern is that I'm a very prolific connection-forming machine.

Exhibit A: The first thing that enters my mind for each word. (OnePlus One) (android pattern unlock) (Islamic State) (unit vector named t) (ich bin) (emoji-blood-type-A) (Latin etymology word root with verily) (https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)

1659447091• 9 months ago

(ich bin)

Are you a native German speaker? or additional language? (it's an interesting/seemingly-random association)

The rest is similar to my (dyslexic) reading process. From what I can tell, I coped by memorizing the "shape" or image of words and associated them other things/images/sounds/dictionary-definition/feeling/emotions/experiences or some other abstract things I don't know how to describe -- attached metadata, if you will. The biggest issue is words like (is, that, a, etc) since the associations are weak at best, leading to them being disappeared/changed/hallucinated/moved or replaced by others in the same sentence/paragraph. Sometime when it's really messed up, leads to rereading a sentence or paragraph multiple times until the sequence of all of that makes sense.

But sounding out words is an absolute disaster no matter how much I try and fell behind in early grade school until my overwhelming need to not disappoint family, who were getting frustrated with me, kicked in and I developed my coping methods. It takes longer to read and learn new words but the associating and pattern matching resulted in my comprehension and language scores in school being so high no one picked up on how slow I read (or the disaster that reading aloud is) and how poorly I spell as being something off.

Aargau• 9 months ago

My wife was confounded when I told her I don't think in words. For her, it's a one to one correlation.

She had assumed that all people think in this mode. I had assumed that all people think in "thoughts" and went through a separate step to articulate them.

Made both of us aware of a difference in people.

I don't feel vibrations or sensations though, and I definitely don't think in images. I only have a thought level, and it's very independent of any external presentation.

shitter• 9 months ago

You sound a little like me. I wasn't aware people thought like that until my partner told me her thoughts took the form of a constant stream of well-formed English. My default mode of thinking isn't natural language (though I can force myself to think this way, it's laborious, as the article mentions), nor images (I struggle with visualization), but more like abstract sequences of both logical connections and intuitive feelings.

v7n• 9 months ago

Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble remembering for example number sequences.

voidhorse• 9 months ago

Anecdotally, the degree to which one does certain types of thinking can change over time, too.

Around 2020, I decided to try to learn as much as I could about "higher" mathematics in earnest, having basically no background in the subject. Five years later, I have finally read and suffered enough to be able to pick up texts in any of the abstract branches of mathematics and at least understand most of what's being shown/said at a basic level.

More fascinating to me, though, is that this shift in focus has lead to a definite shift in my thinking. My thinking used to be almost hyperlinguistic. Words were my medium of choice, and I had a strong stream of inner linguistic thought running through my head. Now, that inner voice is mostly quiet. I also find that I tend to think about certain situations in terms of abstract "relationship pictures" rather than a descriptive sentence.

I actually kind of miss the old linguistic tendencies I had at times. I'm hoping a shift back into literature helps reestablish some of that.

And yeah, as with all general proclamations that sound nice because they allow us to seemingly boil complexities down to a singular thing, the whole "wiring is thinking" idea isn't true. The truth in that statement is more akin to "human thought is often tool assisted"—and a manner of tools can aid in elaborating thought. Thought and action are not as severed as we tend to think.

karmakaze3• 9 months ago

I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another person at the company would write books and take credit for his creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only for purpose of communication.

mewpmewp26• 9 months ago

I would say that this is the intuitive, naive way of starting coding if no one has taught you coding or you haven't had to care about maintainability or other people reading your code.

karmakaze3• 9 months ago

We could today give it to an AI and tell it to name the variables after manually renaming the input and output ones.

karmakaze3• 9 months ago

Here's an example of a recent HN post for illustration[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777

geoffbp• 9 months ago

I’ve been spending time learning meditation, which is essentially not thinking :)

est• 9 months ago

they didn’t think in words

Does this suggest most people think in words? Really?

petethomas• 9 months ago

This reminded me of Hans Keller's wordless functional musical analysis. I came across it listening to his documentary on Schoenberg, available here: https://archive.org/download/miscellaneous_plays_1983-02-07_...

"Keller would construct an analysis in the form of an analytic score written for the same forces as the work under consideration and structured as a succession of 'analytic interludes' designed to be played between its movements."[1]

[1] https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Wordless_functional_ana...

ethersteeds• 9 months ago

On that note! I am an intensely verbal person, with words and narrative as my primary mode of thought. This essay and discussion reminds me of a desire I've felt before to develop the muscles, so to speak, of thinking without words.

Does anyone have any advice or techniques to that end?

pramodbiligiri• 9 months ago

Perhaps do activities like manipulating physical objects (carpentry?, Lego, Rubiks cube), games like Tetris, or complex body movements where verbalization won't be of much use. Or standard Quantitative Reasoning problems from entrance exams. A few years back, the wordcel vs shape rotator debate/binary was being discussed online: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?r=53sw

I'd come across this book "Visual Thinking in Mathematics" (https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-Gia...) which goes into some of this.

blubber• 9 months ago

Isn't it already too late, when you ask yourself that question?

noduerme2• 9 months ago

Like, that's funny. But asking yourself that question might just be a step toward answering it. I grew up around a lot of autistic kids who had to train themselves to verbalize anything, but also to restrain themselves from verbalizing random thoughts. Then you reach an age where you start to spew out everything in words, and you have to learn that putting something into language too soon can strip it of its actual meaning and ossify it before you have a chance to fully examine it.

noduerme2• 9 months ago

> the moment when the solution to a problem emerges “in the shower” unexpectedly after a long period of unconscious incubation.

A lot of responses here seem to place this chain-of-thought on a spectrum between verbal and "vibe". I don't think that solving problems pre-verbally is actually at odds with verbal intelligence, or that a person must by definition be better at one than another. The pregnant, mathematical, nonverbal thought in the shower is only really useful if it can be organized and stated rationally at some point later. Likewise, the wordy explanation is useless without a well-reasoned theory it's explaining.

For me, I find that dreams help bridge this gap. Oftentimes I'll be struggling with a difficult mental model of a problem, and thinking of a lot of math in my head in the shower. But when I sleep, I'll have some dream that acts as a metaphor for the problem. Say, e.g. I'm thinking about how to time two independent processes to deconflict some data. I might have a dream about missing a flight because the plane already arrived but was announced at the wrong gate, and I'm running across the airport. Then I wake up and see the answer to the problem. Moreover, I then see how to explain the problem I just solved, using a metaphor that most people can understand.

As far as actually explaining it formally in writing, I usually test the code a zillion ways first and then write the documentation.

helloworld4728• 9 months ago

A way that can be walked is not The Way

A name that can be named is not The Name

Tao is both Named and Nameless As Nameless, it is the origin of all things As Named, it is the mother of all things

A mind free of thought, merged within itself, beholds the essence of Tao

A mind filled with thought, identified with its own perceptions, beholds the mere forms of this world

EigenLord• 9 months ago

I've always felt that you can't think in anything besides thought. Words, images, symbols, etc, are all side-effects. They absolutely bend back and influence the thought process, but they are always secondary and indirect. Thought itself is ineffable.

boje2• 9 months ago

I'm not sure if I understand correctly about "thinking in concrete English sentences or words" as other comments have mentioned, so here's a description of what happens to me:

I can visualize things in my mind, and it's almost as if I was playing a video or rotating 3D models in Blender, but they happen as if they were at a 70-80% brightness level. I can verbalize my thoughts or words I am reading from some text as if someone were speaking into my head, but that's not how I "comprehend" them, especially if they have more than a negligible amount of complexity. They have to be converted into a set of visualizations, however vague or abstract, somewhat resembling what GenAI does. This has a noticeable delay and I almost always lose track of, say, what a lecturer is saying in real time. Because of this, I almost always prefer having text or a prerecorded video being available.

I can "render" text in my head too, as if they were being written down in a word processor or like a screenshot of a blogpost, but it's still an image.

I find difficulty trying to manipulate any symbols in my head. Mental math or algebra with more than a miniscule amount of rigor is hard for me to do and I always require pen and paper as a support. Trying to do this requires me to "graphically" move symbols around a written equation, and because of my usual scatterbrained-ness, the context quickly breaks down and evaporates. I have to maintain that context with paper. I find it easier, however, to visualize an algorithm or similar things in my head as a video-animation "playback".

Here's an example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animat... - This is exactly what occurs in my brain when I think of tree rotations (extended to larger tree heights), and was the only, singular useful thing for me in the entire wikipedia article on tree rotations.

As an aside, the imagery that video GenAI generates, with spontaneous, random pop-ins of objects is eerily similar to what happens in my dreams and in my mental imagery. Second, I'm not particularly fond of reading books, literature or poetry, but I do find myself semi-regularly reading long blogposts or texts if they interest me, and watching long-form videos or podcasts.

boje2• 9 months ago

Another aside - I do end up spending a lot of time working on the presentation of a thing like trying to polish things like user interfaces, vector or raster graphics, typesetting, CSS and other visual-ish stuff. It's something I've tried to suppress to actually get functional aspects of a work done. Admittedly, this is the more fun part of a work for me.

bnferguson• 9 months ago

The book "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity" has a large thread exploring this among both historical and contemporary mathematicians. How people who seem to have an almost supernatural gift for math are often just able to "see" more clearly. Not in equations or words, but images.

Also discussing the development of the ability/discipline and the difficulties in transcribing what you now intuitively know but need to describe to other mathematicians so they can understand (notation/equations).

It's a book that's stuck in my head since reading it and wondering how to apply some of this to other problem spaces.

Ozzie_osman• 9 months ago

The way I think about it is that words constrain a problem. Constraining a problem makes it easier to understand, remember, and convey. But it makes it harder to have, well, unconstrained, creative thoughts about it. Structure can be both good and bad.

This is true of any abstraction.

arkensaw• 9 months ago

netdevphoenix• 9 months ago

Thinking without words has 2 main problems imo:

- You are unable to verify that your ideas are logical and not just feelings (i.e. the feeling of something being logical, the feeling of x and y being related, etc). The confusion between fact, logic and feelings is all so common in ASC

- You are unable to get a third party view on those ideas (language is the only form of telepathy we are capable of)

a5c11• 9 months ago

You definitely should read the whole article. The author says that wrapping ideas in words at later stages is important to complete the process of inventing. It's all about the initial processing, to free your mind from language's constraints, because language is indeed constraining. It feels like multiplexing numerous parallel streams of thoughts into a single spoken channel. You have to do it at some point, but only when you are confident you know what those parallel streams carry. Otherwise you will get mess.

fjfaase2• 9 months ago

In the family of my maternal grandfather there are many individuals who are much better at science but have difficulty with language (often in combination with dyslexia) in school. I have some evidence that those individuals (myself included) have a significant higher non-verbal IQ (20 to 30 points) than verbal IQ as categorized by the WISC-V intelligence tests. I often struggle to express my ideas with words. When I think about algorithms it is often in 'abstract' visual images. While developing software, I find myself searching for functions/methods a lot, because I often forget their names or the order of the parameters.

Academic performance is strongly correlated with the verbal components of intelligence. I wonder if there are other people who know that their non-verbal IQ is measurable higher than their verbal IQ.

blueflow• 9 months ago

IQ is the measurement, not the real thing, so don't focus too much on it.

The vocabulary is limited by what the recipients will understand, while your thoughts are not. My favourite example: Complex thoughts can have many forms of negative results, but there isn't widespread vocabulary other than "i don't know" to express it.

giva• 9 months ago

I can relate. May ask you how your relation with AI tools is? I tend to find myself translating my mental model into natural language, to have a machine convert it into code, then reading that code back to mental model. It's unnerving. It feels much more natural writing my mental model directly into code.

fjfaase2• 9 months ago

I am not using AI tools for code generation. I have only used it for 'querying' information, for example, when I started to work with Device Trees and Yocto for embedded Linux development. I am happy with IntelliSense. Yes, AI tools can very quickly generate some simple app, but I do not believe it will work for more complex problems.

bored3• 9 months ago

I think I can relate with you. It’s unnerving for me to see how poorly written my initial natural language interpretation appears. AI reassures me it’s not also incoherent by generating code that does what I expect.

cttet• 9 months ago

I rarely think with words, when I think with words it is like 20x slower, it is more robust, but in that case I would use pen and paper for that.

WillAdams• 9 months ago

Yeah, after a lot of thinking and visualization and brain-storming, a lot of which was the sort of formless void of the wordless prayers of St. John of the Cross and what I would reach for in Buddhist meditation (but never managed to hold on to for long if I even reached it --- given that I was regularly hit with a bamboo can before being told to go sweep up in the bookbinding shop, probably not....) I've managed to make a bit of progress on a project to the point of an actual concept realized in 3D in my head --- the problem has been that getting from mental image to 3D model to files which will can actually be cut on a CNC has been nightmarish --- the 3D CAM tools which I can afford either won't use the tooling which I wish to use in the way I need to use it, or one which did converted a 1" x 1" x 2" test section into a ~140MB file after churning for ~18 minutes (I'll need for this to exist in multiples and to be as much as 48 inches long).

Since then, I've been working on a personal project to cut this, but I've been running into issues with the complexity of CSG objects.... tried using linear/rotate_extrude but they rotate the 2D tool representation as if it were being used w/ a 5-axis CNC, but most people (incl. me) use a 3-axis....

KolibriFly3• 9 months ago

For most of us, writing remains the training ground. But it's also humbling to realize that the moment we try to articulate something, we're already losing a ton of nuance

habosa• 9 months ago

On this topic I strongly recommend “The World I Live In” by Hellen Keller.

In some of the essays she describes how before she was taught to communicate she had no inner monologue and didn’t even recognize herself as human. She was surprised to learn that the dog was not able to understand her. Language essentially gave her her mind, although the book does go into great detail about the things she perceived about the world through touch and exploration that few others would.

Viliam1234• 9 months ago

People find out that we actually think in different ways.

Five minutes later: Someone writes an article about why his way of thinking is superior.

vict72• 9 months ago

Yep, as someone whose brain is biased towards a higher verbal IQ and thinks primarily in words, a lot of the replies to this post are amusing.

I have genuine curiosity about those that claim to think in “pure abstract thoughts” or whatever. I don’t believe my way of thinking is superior. I’m certain that my constant internal monologue is strongly correlated to my tendency to ruminate. Or, I struggle with concepts that do not translate well into a verbal format.

People apparently can’t pass up the opportunity to disparage those with a different thinking style.

saltcured2• 9 months ago

FWIW, I have no inner monologue, and think I ruminate the same ways I think. It only has verbal content if I am remembering a recent conversation or "simulating" an anticipated one.

Marshferm• 9 months ago

Words are the illusion, they neither exist nor are they directly linked to thoughts. Words are "sportscasting."

All thinking is done without words. This is empirical both from the new neurosciences of dynamics/oscillations (see Buzsaki) and neurobiological linguistics (see MIT Language Lab quote below). This is very likely how LLMs have nothing to do with intelligence or thinking. Thoughts are wordless processes built from Sharp Wave Ripples that flow across the entirety of the brain and probably interact ecologically with the outside. Where they are formed, how they interact and integrate with the senses, emotions, memories, motor, simulations and in what order to make action-syntax is still unknown.

Words have nothing to do with them.

“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024

dapperdrake• 9 months ago

When is it better to think without words?

Claim: Lambda almost always.

DaveZale• 9 months ago

try the nyt connections puzzle for a couple of weeks. When you get better at it, you're associating sets of words without thinking in words. The answers just pop up.

7402• 9 months ago

Am I the only one like this?

In my long programming career I feel I did most of my programming nonverbally - large programs always felt I was sculpting a big chunk of stone rather than writing an essay.

Once it was done, I had no problem describing it, discussing it, documenting it, etc. But the actual task of programming felt like it was going on the non-verbal part of my brain.

These were mostly big programs, by the way: hard-real-time, or machine control, or threaded C++, or scientific data processing.

I found my style to be generally incompatible with pair-programming - except for pair debugging once my or someone else's code was written, that I did find useful.

rufus_foreman• 9 months ago

"My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself."

-- William S. Burroughs

Rileyen• 9 months ago

Sometimes my mind feels the clearest when it’s quiet. Ideas just keep coming when I’m in the shower, zoning out, or about to fall asleep. But the moment I sit down at my computer to write them down, they vanish. Does this happen to anyone else? Or do you need to speak or write things out to get your thoughts moving?

When is it better to think without words?

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