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 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
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 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