Honestly I often get the feeling that wordlessness is my primary mode of thought (though I do also have an active internal monologue), and explaining a lot of my thoughts requires translation that is hopelessly paraphrased and incomplete.
One mundane example I can remember oddly well is when I was at the gym with a friend and she complained that the handles/bars on one of the exercise machines felt weirdly far apart today. I looked at them and immediately realized they were tubes bent in a shallow, elongated Z-shape, and therefore rotating them in place around their cylindrical axis would bring the handles closer together or further apart, but absolutely could not express that visual image in words (I'm struggling with it right now in fact, but in the moment even a simple description like, "they're twisted around" was entirely out of reach). So I just reached down and flipped one over to demonstrate.
Strangely enough I am also a translator as a side gig, in a language very unrelated to English, and basically feel like everything goes through a layer of visual imagery or synesthesia first. The words "push" and "pull" on each other like they're weights connected by strings, in a way that corresponds to subject-object relations or temporal expressions, and then I find English words that add enough weight and pull in the right place. It's weird.
It's something I'm absolutely struggling with when trying to write more blog content because each idea pulls on five other ones like hauling up a big tangled fishnet out of my brain, and simply cutting the extraneous ones out leaves what feels like gaping holes in the net. Or blog post, as it were.
I think it could be because knowing multiple languages broadens the semantic networks of the brain, requiring more energy than the network responsible for visual processing and/or intuition and the network responsible for taking some sort of action like speech or movement chooses the most efficient path appropriate for the context. But the brain is still semantically processing the problem to find a succinct description. So when you revisit the idea, like when you wrote this, your brain sorted out the description and now when describing the situation you're able to retrieve "it's twisted". And it almost seems so obvious in hindsight you wonder why it didn't occur to you in the first place.
Tl;dr inefficient brain networks, the more you know and the more paths to arrive at meaning create latency
I think it could be because knowing multiple languages broadens the semantic networks of the brain, requiring more energy than the network responsible for visual processing and/or intuition and the network responsible for taking some sort of action like speech or movement chooses the most efficient path appropriate for the context. But the brain is still semantically processing the problem to find a succinct description. So when you revisit the idea, like when you wrote this, your brain sorted out the description and now when describing the situation you're able to retrieve "it's twisted". And it almost seems so obvious in hindsight you wonder why it didn't occur to you in the first place.
It could also be some sort of bias introduced into the visual processing network, but this is interesting to think about. Unfortunately my understanding of the different networks in the brain are leading to possible imaginative nonsense right now 🥲
Tl;dr inefficient brain networks, the more you know and the more paths to arrive at meaning create latency in those networks
I believe this mode of non-verbal thinking is in everyone, and in animals, too. We all have the capacity for it, but as humans, sometimes we have to de-program ourselves in order to even notice it and make use of it, probably because the neural link from perception to language is so strong that it makes us believe it's the only path.
I would call this mode of thinking "instincts" or "beliefs", an expectation of what's going to happen. You see a ball floating in the air, and you can foresee its trajectory falling down. It's a simulation in mind. You have a feel for it. I think what those mathematicians did was that they had these kinds of instincts for how mathematical objects behave, so they could run simulations in their heads. Think about how you write the letter "a". It's easy to imagine it, but hard to describe it. The key is not what they mean or anything rational, but how they feel.
I think that's how everyone acts to some extent, on instincts, not logic, like I don't think anyone would carry a big philosophy book all over the place just to justify their every decision to act morally.
Have you ever learned how to draw, from real life, not like kids' drawing? The most important skill that I acquired from learning how to draw was how to "see past abstractions", not seeing an apple as "an apple" but just a blob of colors organized in a certain shape. Without that, I would be just drawing the abstraction of an apple in my mind, not the actual apple in the real world. This is not easy, because the brain will tell you so hard to see the apple as "an apple".
And I think that's exactly what you get by thinking without words. It's not just the efficiency, but that verbal abstractions and logic sometimes don't serve us, and they blind us from seeing, from observing, from feeling, from paying attention to reality, to how the abstractions, expectations in our mind differ from the reality.
A tricky thing with words is that they encode not only a description of something but also feelings and emotions. We have the euphemisms for "death", like "pass away", "gone". They feel different in a subtle way, but they describe the same thing. We also have words like "fascism" that feels like something terribly bad, but doesn't really describe anything to many people. There are also non-obvious words like "power" and "freedom" that they both refer to the capacity to turn what you want to happen, your expectations, into reality, but "pursuing power" feels evil, yet "pursuing freedom" feels justified. That's probably why the pursuit of freedom is extremely prone to overshooting to cause catastrophe in history. It's hard to draw the line.
To some extent, the words we use to think, to tell ourselves stories, have the power to alter the subjective reality of how we feel, but it can also blind us to observing how we really feel and pay attention to the outside reality, if what we express in words really conveys what we feel.
It's definitely a complex interaction because how we think affects how we perceive, especially when it comes to feelings, and I can only accept that I will make mistakes.
I wonder then if other ways of registering ideas lead to less premature precision, like voice notes or doodles. Writing is a late human development, after all.
If you take music, visual arts, dance, then the concept of precision or logic become a bit fuzzier. You still go from blurry thinking onto the final work, nailing down what you wanna convey. Maybe in these fields you can afford to register sooner, if it involves less intellectualization than writing. You can even find solutions accidentally, which seems less likely in writing – e.g. unintended brushstrokes, chords. Then, maybe mathematics resemble these arts in that the problems can be very abstract. But very different in that you can't register it without heavy intellectualization (algebra).
I work as a board-game designer and this description of the wordless mode is extremely well matched to my experience. Often I'm considering incentive structures ("Does this encourage the kinds of behavior I'm seeking? Does this have other knock-on effects that work with or against other systems in interesting or uninteresting ways?"), usability ("Is this easy to learn? How does it take up space at the table? Does it rhyme with other concepts in the game? Does it re-use existing pieces?"), ludonarrative fit ("Does this fit the thematics of what I want to get across? Does it feel at home in this specific game world?"), and various other considerations from abstract to concrete.
My mental state when doing this work is much as described in the post: I don't ask myself these questions in a checklist, nor do I visualize images. (In fact I am aphantasic.) It forms a conceptual whirl that includes felt shapes, trends, clouds, and other hard-to-describe abstractions. When I'm working on specific problems in a game that's playable but flawed already (like 98% of the development process), I basically never write things down until I have something that I feel is a candidate solution.
Notably, when I'm designing a totally new game from scratch at the very very beginning of a project, I need to cycle much more often between writing and this wordless thinking mode in order to sharpen my vision of what I even want in the first place. The basic model simply isn't built up yet. But this first attempt, as any game designer will tell you, is always god-awful, just terrible.
This is one of the most interesting and complex things I've ever read on Substack. It feels like a continuous interplay of material and immaterial, effort and pause, that feed off each other. If we don't have enough material, precise concepts and don't do the logical "prep" work, the subconscious immaterial part doesn't have the raw material to work with and to combine. But I'd we try to push immaterial thought into form too soon, it might come out as artificial and possibly lead to incorrect putcomes. A bit like AI when it hallucinates. So it seems that we need both, concentrated sustained effort AND then periods of rest. Lots of prep work AND allowing creative juices to flow. Thinking wordlessly AND then confronting the concepts in the material world to see if they hold up. Fascinating
I recently completed a pilot study with the Vervaeke Foundation on this exact topic!!!
Your mind is structured geometrically, and information processing occurs via the expansion and collapse of low/high dimensional object systems.
We tested to see if teaching people to think using an innate visual-geometry system could enhance problem solving capacities, and have had very positive initial results!
It sounds to me like what is described here is the difference between left and right brain processing. The right brain is generally nonverbal, holistic, timeless, intuitive, and understanding of shapes, colors, patterns, etc.
The verbal left brain tends to be linear and dominant. As a visual artist, I've learned how to lose myself in my right brain and snap back occasionally to let my left brain access what I've been doing, if that makes sense? It's a deliberate technique.
When lost in the right brain's process, I lose time, sometimes hours, and am surprised when I realize it's midafternoon and I am still working in my pajamas. Once you learn the switch, it's not hard to do, but it's annoying when I'm concentrating on right brain tasks and someone talks to me. I have to switch back and ask them to repeat what they said. My left brain has to take the verbal tasks.
Reading about the mathematicians zoning out and becoming lost in sort of dreamy contemplation that is wordless sounds very familiar to my creative process.
As someone who thinks about thinking a lot, I've never thought about the importance of modality in thinking much. How you were talking about the dimensionality reduction that's required for any thought to be broken down to words gives me so much room to understand why thoughts overwhelm and words ground. And the whole essay was an epiphanic realisation of how thoughts behind the thoughts work, carefully walked through by you, Henrik. This is honestly one of the most refreshing and thought-through essays I've come across that deal with words and thinking so beautifully.
Also, I checked your footnote on the AI analogy, which you had used to support the working of thinking without words claim, and honestly, I would love a detailed essay on that if you're ever planning to work on it. Or, maybe I'll research and work on it with your words on structure in mind :)
I actually pondered over this when I was in my teenage. Like, Can we think without language? Language is a carrier of thought, or rather the very ingredient of it. Finally, I got to read some thing like this which is written after putting in so much serious thought. This analogy you made regarding how language is a lower dimensional projection of the original space of ideas which is orders of magnitude higher in dimensionality sounded so apt to me. It is almost like a latent representation of idea space where to do the projection you need to remove a lot of noise, and only curate the absolute essential features from which original thought can be reconstructed. Thanks for writing it. I am thankful that there still are corners like this on Internet.
How might you distinguish the space of “wordless thought” from the subconscious realm of imagery and symbolism, are we still thinking, or entering a different dimension of awareness altogether?
Honestly I often get the feeling that wordlessness is my primary mode of thought (though I do also have an active internal monologue), and explaining a lot of my thoughts requires translation that is hopelessly paraphrased and incomplete.
One mundane example I can remember oddly well is when I was at the gym with a friend and she complained that the handles/bars on one of the exercise machines felt weirdly far apart today. I looked at them and immediately realized they were tubes bent in a shallow, elongated Z-shape, and therefore rotating them in place around their cylindrical axis would bring the handles closer together or further apart, but absolutely could not express that visual image in words (I'm struggling with it right now in fact, but in the moment even a simple description like, "they're twisted around" was entirely out of reach). So I just reached down and flipped one over to demonstrate.
Strangely enough I am also a translator as a side gig, in a language very unrelated to English, and basically feel like everything goes through a layer of visual imagery or synesthesia first. The words "push" and "pull" on each other like they're weights connected by strings, in a way that corresponds to subject-object relations or temporal expressions, and then I find English words that add enough weight and pull in the right place. It's weird.
It's something I'm absolutely struggling with when trying to write more blog content because each idea pulls on five other ones like hauling up a big tangled fishnet out of my brain, and simply cutting the extraneous ones out leaves what feels like gaping holes in the net. Or blog post, as it were.
I think it could be because knowing multiple languages broadens the semantic networks of the brain, requiring more energy than the network responsible for visual processing and/or intuition and the network responsible for taking some sort of action like speech or movement chooses the most efficient path appropriate for the context. But the brain is still semantically processing the problem to find a succinct description. So when you revisit the idea, like when you wrote this, your brain sorted out the description and now when describing the situation you're able to retrieve "it's twisted". And it almost seems so obvious in hindsight you wonder why it didn't occur to you in the first place.
Tl;dr inefficient brain networks, the more you know and the more paths to arrive at meaning create latency
I think it could be because knowing multiple languages broadens the semantic networks of the brain, requiring more energy than the network responsible for visual processing and/or intuition and the network responsible for taking some sort of action like speech or movement chooses the most efficient path appropriate for the context. But the brain is still semantically processing the problem to find a succinct description. So when you revisit the idea, like when you wrote this, your brain sorted out the description and now when describing the situation you're able to retrieve "it's twisted". And it almost seems so obvious in hindsight you wonder why it didn't occur to you in the first place.
It could also be some sort of bias introduced into the visual processing network, but this is interesting to think about. Unfortunately my understanding of the different networks in the brain are leading to possible imaginative nonsense right now 🥲
Tl;dr inefficient brain networks, the more you know and the more paths to arrive at meaning create latency in those networks
I believe this mode of non-verbal thinking is in everyone, and in animals, too. We all have the capacity for it, but as humans, sometimes we have to de-program ourselves in order to even notice it and make use of it, probably because the neural link from perception to language is so strong that it makes us believe it's the only path.
I would call this mode of thinking "instincts" or "beliefs", an expectation of what's going to happen. You see a ball floating in the air, and you can foresee its trajectory falling down. It's a simulation in mind. You have a feel for it. I think what those mathematicians did was that they had these kinds of instincts for how mathematical objects behave, so they could run simulations in their heads. Think about how you write the letter "a". It's easy to imagine it, but hard to describe it. The key is not what they mean or anything rational, but how they feel.
I think that's how everyone acts to some extent, on instincts, not logic, like I don't think anyone would carry a big philosophy book all over the place just to justify their every decision to act morally.
Have you ever learned how to draw, from real life, not like kids' drawing? The most important skill that I acquired from learning how to draw was how to "see past abstractions", not seeing an apple as "an apple" but just a blob of colors organized in a certain shape. Without that, I would be just drawing the abstraction of an apple in my mind, not the actual apple in the real world. This is not easy, because the brain will tell you so hard to see the apple as "an apple".
And I think that's exactly what you get by thinking without words. It's not just the efficiency, but that verbal abstractions and logic sometimes don't serve us, and they blind us from seeing, from observing, from feeling, from paying attention to reality, to how the abstractions, expectations in our mind differ from the reality.
A tricky thing with words is that they encode not only a description of something but also feelings and emotions. We have the euphemisms for "death", like "pass away", "gone". They feel different in a subtle way, but they describe the same thing. We also have words like "fascism" that feels like something terribly bad, but doesn't really describe anything to many people. There are also non-obvious words like "power" and "freedom" that they both refer to the capacity to turn what you want to happen, your expectations, into reality, but "pursuing power" feels evil, yet "pursuing freedom" feels justified. That's probably why the pursuit of freedom is extremely prone to overshooting to cause catastrophe in history. It's hard to draw the line.
To some extent, the words we use to think, to tell ourselves stories, have the power to alter the subjective reality of how we feel, but it can also blind us to observing how we really feel and pay attention to the outside reality, if what we express in words really conveys what we feel.
It's definitely a complex interaction because how we think affects how we perceive, especially when it comes to feelings, and I can only accept that I will make mistakes.
I wonder then if other ways of registering ideas lead to less premature precision, like voice notes or doodles. Writing is a late human development, after all.
If you take music, visual arts, dance, then the concept of precision or logic become a bit fuzzier. You still go from blurry thinking onto the final work, nailing down what you wanna convey. Maybe in these fields you can afford to register sooner, if it involves less intellectualization than writing. You can even find solutions accidentally, which seems less likely in writing – e.g. unintended brushstrokes, chords. Then, maybe mathematics resemble these arts in that the problems can be very abstract. But very different in that you can't register it without heavy intellectualization (algebra).
I work as a board-game designer and this description of the wordless mode is extremely well matched to my experience. Often I'm considering incentive structures ("Does this encourage the kinds of behavior I'm seeking? Does this have other knock-on effects that work with or against other systems in interesting or uninteresting ways?"), usability ("Is this easy to learn? How does it take up space at the table? Does it rhyme with other concepts in the game? Does it re-use existing pieces?"), ludonarrative fit ("Does this fit the thematics of what I want to get across? Does it feel at home in this specific game world?"), and various other considerations from abstract to concrete.
My mental state when doing this work is much as described in the post: I don't ask myself these questions in a checklist, nor do I visualize images. (In fact I am aphantasic.) It forms a conceptual whirl that includes felt shapes, trends, clouds, and other hard-to-describe abstractions. When I'm working on specific problems in a game that's playable but flawed already (like 98% of the development process), I basically never write things down until I have something that I feel is a candidate solution.
Notably, when I'm designing a totally new game from scratch at the very very beginning of a project, I need to cycle much more often between writing and this wordless thinking mode in order to sharpen my vision of what I even want in the first place. The basic model simply isn't built up yet. But this first attempt, as any game designer will tell you, is always god-awful, just terrible.
This is one of the most interesting and complex things I've ever read on Substack. It feels like a continuous interplay of material and immaterial, effort and pause, that feed off each other. If we don't have enough material, precise concepts and don't do the logical "prep" work, the subconscious immaterial part doesn't have the raw material to work with and to combine. But I'd we try to push immaterial thought into form too soon, it might come out as artificial and possibly lead to incorrect putcomes. A bit like AI when it hallucinates. So it seems that we need both, concentrated sustained effort AND then periods of rest. Lots of prep work AND allowing creative juices to flow. Thinking wordlessly AND then confronting the concepts in the material world to see if they hold up. Fascinating
I recently completed a pilot study with the Vervaeke Foundation on this exact topic!!!
Your mind is structured geometrically, and information processing occurs via the expansion and collapse of low/high dimensional object systems.
We tested to see if teaching people to think using an innate visual-geometry system could enhance problem solving capacities, and have had very positive initial results!
It sounds to me like what is described here is the difference between left and right brain processing. The right brain is generally nonverbal, holistic, timeless, intuitive, and understanding of shapes, colors, patterns, etc.
The verbal left brain tends to be linear and dominant. As a visual artist, I've learned how to lose myself in my right brain and snap back occasionally to let my left brain access what I've been doing, if that makes sense? It's a deliberate technique.
When lost in the right brain's process, I lose time, sometimes hours, and am surprised when I realize it's midafternoon and I am still working in my pajamas. Once you learn the switch, it's not hard to do, but it's annoying when I'm concentrating on right brain tasks and someone talks to me. I have to switch back and ask them to repeat what they said. My left brain has to take the verbal tasks.
Reading about the mathematicians zoning out and becoming lost in sort of dreamy contemplation that is wordless sounds very familiar to my creative process.
As someone who thinks about thinking a lot, I've never thought about the importance of modality in thinking much. How you were talking about the dimensionality reduction that's required for any thought to be broken down to words gives me so much room to understand why thoughts overwhelm and words ground. And the whole essay was an epiphanic realisation of how thoughts behind the thoughts work, carefully walked through by you, Henrik. This is honestly one of the most refreshing and thought-through essays I've come across that deal with words and thinking so beautifully.
Also, I checked your footnote on the AI analogy, which you had used to support the working of thinking without words claim, and honestly, I would love a detailed essay on that if you're ever planning to work on it. Or, maybe I'll research and work on it with your words on structure in mind :)
Niels Bohr: "Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
I think it’s David Lynch who calls language a traitor.
Leaving my thoughts from earlier on this :
https://substack.com/@flowminded/note/c-136262977?r=4s3qfv
I actually pondered over this when I was in my teenage. Like, Can we think without language? Language is a carrier of thought, or rather the very ingredient of it. Finally, I got to read some thing like this which is written after putting in so much serious thought. This analogy you made regarding how language is a lower dimensional projection of the original space of ideas which is orders of magnitude higher in dimensionality sounded so apt to me. It is almost like a latent representation of idea space where to do the projection you need to remove a lot of noise, and only curate the absolute essential features from which original thought can be reconstructed. Thanks for writing it. I am thankful that there still are corners like this on Internet.
The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Nørretranders is an interesting read for anyone who liked this
Reminds me of the distinction between having fluid discourse and not https://open.substack.com/pub/rivalvoices/p/what-even-is-focusing-and-why-eugene?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4h5uw9
some people have no inner dialogue. you don’t need words to think, just ask the animals and newborn babies.
How might you distinguish the space of “wordless thought” from the subconscious realm of imagery and symbolism, are we still thinking, or entering a different dimension of awareness altogether?
Is it possible to visualize a ribbon without the presence of the word "ribbon"? I wonder what Wittgenstein would say.