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Comment by kazagistar | Hacker News Reader

I'm... halfway. When I try, I can generate images, but I only do so occasionally. Most of the time, my thinking is exactly like the author describes. Facts, ideas, connections, hunches, intuitions, etc. The images are kinda like a serialization of this, no more: they have exactly the data I put into them, and not really any more "detail".

But what really blew my mind was when I realized that people think with words. Its always "have an idea, then attempt to serialize it into some approximation in the form of linear sentence or words". I mean, I can chose to speak a sentence in my head, but it is strange and artificial. But from what I hear from others, apparently people actually think about things with words, and which words they have both enable and limit their thinking. I still don't exactly know how that works, but apparently its common?

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I can imagine an image in my head (sort of) but I can't not think in words. It's hard for me to even understand what people mean when they say they are thinking but they don't have an internal monologue going on in their head. Brains are weird.

Do you know more then one language? I grew up bilingual from a young age, and I suspect that has something to do with the disconnect between ideas and words.

The simplest proof I have for the fact that I don't think in words is that I quite often forget a word, and can't complete a sentence. I know exactly what I want to express and have thought it through in my mind, but I can't tell it to someone else because I don't remember the serialization of that idea, and am forced to try to work around it by describing the word and hoping someone fills it in for me.

Wow, that example is really perfect -- I definitely think in a similar way, but I've had a really hard time explaining that to people. Hopefully this helps.

Do you ever get frustrated trying to explain this? I've had people refuse to believe me, and I end up feeling like I'm not thinking "as well" or "as rigorously" as I might be.

I'm bilingual. My thought process is a mixture of words, ideas, and other things that are relevant. The words nowadays are in English, even though English is my second language (Polish is my first). And it definitely does happen sometimes I do forget a word.

Exactly. I also grew up to be bilingual from a young age, and I didn't learn my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting foreign words with the words you already know from your first language, but in a way a toddler would, just by listening to it and maybe some reading.

After I began to think in English (my second language), I found that I wasn't speaking my first language anymore, I was just translating to it from my second one. And because the two weren't connected in my brain, I started frequently forgeting words and having trouble with phrasing.

> I didn't learn my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting foreign words with the words you already know from your first language

Mildly off-topic, but I never realised until recently how much of a difference this can make. I've used French numbers far more, and for far longer, than I have Japanese numbers [0], but learning that way still results in me going "8 - that's eight, so its huit". Because I learnt the Japanese numbers through usage and without the deliberate English comparison, I go straight to "8 - hachi" without the intermediate step.

It's also weird to me that I can count backwards (say 10 to 1) far easier in Japanese than in French, probably for similar reasons.

[0] Note I'm a long way from fluent in either. I studied French at school, and have picked up a very small amount of Japanese through usage.

I'm a native English-speaker, and I don't speak anything else fluently, but I speak enough of a few languages to have basic conversations in them (that is, enough to go beyond just using phrases that I learned from a book).

Every now and then, I'll forget a word in English but remember it in another language. My internal monologue tends to be English-ish (especially right now, when I'm composing a post), but if the sounds for a word are missing, the concept will fill its place...or sometimes the closest equivalent of whichever language I've been thinking about lately. I can also think almost completely in wordless concept-strings, but that sometimes feels forced.

Maybe I should mention that I learned a few words in French, German, and Spanish before I was 8, but the first time that I really studied a language in the usual sense was when I was about 12.

I'm not fluent in any language apart from English and your description fits me exactly. I temporarily forget words, meaning I need to circle around and find another way to describe a concept.

I have a feeling that forgetting words isn't particularly unusual even for native speakers though.

This describes issues I have to a tee. I know a few basic words in multiple languages, mostly I use English, but I have noticed I tend to get worse after a long coding session - it's like my English cart gets taken out and replaced with something else.

What is quite scary is that my colleagues now understand from tone and context exactly which "thingy" I am referring to...

There's kind of two layers to how I think - if I'm actively thinking about something (such as writing this post, or imagine a specific event/occurrence), then it is a very defined internal monologue, and is essentially how I would speak about the topic.

If its a more passive thing (such as pondering something whilst actually working on something else), or my language 'skills' for lack of a better word are doing something else (e.g. listening to music with lyrics), then the thoughts are more abstract ideas and images, and the monologue only returns when I come to some sort of conclusion. It's interesting to note that this happens more frequently when I've been using languages other than English.

Brains definitely are weird.

> But from what I hear from others, apparently people actually think about things with words, and which words they have both enable and limit their thinking. I still don't exactly know how that works, but apparently its common?

This isn't common at all, but the belief that it's happening is common.

What's actually happening is that people's thoughts automatically trigger language production, and they hear the words, the output of that process, in their head. But the thought comes first and the mental words are a side effect. Imagine your brain having an internal narrator who constantly reads your thoughts and shouts them out as formed sentences.

I'm not blind, but I think like you do. My thoughts aren't linear and I feel that words only appear when they are already leaving my mouth or the tips of my fingers.

I can formulate sentences in my mind, but it feels really slow and cumbersome.

Same here. Makes writing actually quite difficult -- I tell people it's like trying to put a whirlwind down the end of a pen.

This is actually one situation in which being able to touch type accurately and quickly is extremely useful. I can sit down with an empty buffer and my hands more or less keep up with my thoughts. Still wish I could go faster of course, but it's orders of magnitude less frustrating than trying to write by hand.

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