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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

When you try to catch a ball playing some sport are you thinking "I need to catch this ball", or are you imagining its path and yourself moving to catch it? I'm usually talking to myself in my mind, but I can't imagine doing it when speed is important, thinking with words takes like 10 times longer.

Or when you look at a photo and think which person is taller - are you thinking in words? Cause I'm imagining cutting and pasting one person next to the other and comparing them visually.

When you try to remember a song melody you probably don't use words to describe the sounds (it was c, g, e, d, ..) you probably imagine the melody in your head, right?

I think most (all?) people use both language and other modes of thinking, just the proportions are person-specific.

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I agree. There's a lot of things we do which doesn't require language.

It's often there for me though, like a default. I don't think "left leg, right leg" when I'm walking, and I don't think "geez, I'm walking now", but when I'm walking my go-to thinking defaults to some internal monologue: "gonna buy some food", "can I cross the road?", etc.

When I go to bed this is more evident. It's silent, dark, and all senses are numb. This is when the internal voice gets more noticeable. I just can't get rid of it, until the very moment I go to sleep.

I default to monologue too and it has some serious disadvantages. I always had problems remembering to do stuff I "told myself" to do with some delay.

Later in life I learnt a trick from my wife who uses visualization for this. For example I need to buy something tomorrow after work - so I'll imagine myself stepping out of the bus, turning to shop instead of going directly home, and then I'll imagine myself passing by the shelf in the mall where the thing is and taking it to the basket. And like magic - I get an "internal notification" with this fake future memory when I step out of the bus, and then another when I pass by that shelf in the shop.

It's like magic :) Makes remembering stuff so much easier.

What happens to that internal monologue when it is obstructed? Like talking on the phone while walking?

"Got it!" is indeed a very common expression in this situation. It does not exclude locomotion in parallel. We also here a lot of "ugh"s and "ah"s in Tennis or Martial Arts.

This is a slippery slope where some will say this is no real word and that's not syntax unless you define language in fivethousand words on normed paper all while catching the damn ball. That's just them crying look at me.

The difference is what you imagine when someone says “catch the ball”. In my language, there is a single common word for catch, hold and grab.

(Catch the ball, hold the rope, grab the stick).

So if someone said “catch the ball” to me in English, I’d imagine a ball coming at me that I need to catch. But if someone said the same sentence in my native language I’d imagine holding on to a ball that was handed to me

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