Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don't
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> Let's try:
Thoughts as words 58.9%
Thoughts as concepts 14.3%
Both 18.8%
No idea what these mean 8%
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Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding by Temple Brandin. https://grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html
>A horse trainer once said to me, "Animals don't think, they just make associations." I responded to that by saying, "If making associations is not thinking, then I would have to conclude that I do not think." People with autism and animals both think by making visual associations. These associations are like snapshots of events and tend to be very specific. For example, a horse might fear bearded me n when it sees one in the barn, but bearded men might be tolerated in the riding arena. In this situation the horse may only fear bearded men in the barn because he may have had a bad past experience in the barn with a bearded man.
Language to me is a kind of slow and inexact medium that we use to try to describe the stuff of thought.
It probably makes us capable of thinking things that we otherwise might not. For example, it would take a big imaginative leap to conceptualize “the universe” for the first time. But since we have that word now it’s trivial for any of us.
But in my own head I don’t think of the words “the universe”, I think of something like an image or representation of the concept of the universe that usually just arises without an accompanying word.
Animals think like this too, I’m sure. Tell your dog “you wanna go for a ride in the car?”. He knows the car, he knows rides, and this knowledge is what comes up in his mind, not the word “the car”. And he’s probably thinking of stuff like this all the time without being triggered to do so by a word.
Lots of folk say that NLP is pseudoscience, and, perhaps arguably, this is probably true to some degree. But some of it is certainly useful as a model, sometimes. Some amount of the various aspects of NLP does seem to accord with psychological research though.
Not that I'm here to argue any of that - just figured someone might find NLP's model of this interesting.
Personally, my 'dominant mode' (preferred representational system) is auditory - I have an inner dialogue, pretty much all of the time (sometimes music) - and I am quite poor at visualising things.
Interesting topic! (in general - not specifically NLP)
(This Wikipedia page is far from the best resource on this - at least not when compared with some of the books - it's just an easily found reference/summary)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_systems_(NLP)
Don't they have to wait for the voice in their head to finish talking first?
I can't even figure out which type I am. I wouldn't say I understand things visually. I do imagine myself verbalizing a lot of my thoughts as if I was talking to someone - but that obviously comes after having the thought itself. I have no idea what form the thought itself takes.
I do constantly imagine myself having conversations with people (usually people I know irl). I try to explain something to them and they ask me questions and point out problems with what I'm saying. That's how I figure stuff out. Luckily I know a lot of clever people I can use for this.
I only mentally “verbalize” it when I’m trying to be really careful in my thinking, or in certain other situations.
The first way is much faster and more efficient to me.