When Is It Better to Think Without Words?

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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)

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.

Does anyone have any advice or techniques to that end?

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.

- 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)

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.

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

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.

"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...

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

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....

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

This is true of any abstraction.

Does this suggest most people think in words? Really?

-- William S. Burroughs

Claim: Lambda almost always.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.