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Nobody thinks in English or any language.

That's a pretty bold statement that many eminent linguists and psychologists would disagree with.

From my limited knowledge of linguistics what I've gathered is that current thoughts are that people think in symbols, which are often words, and that our abilities to think in many types of abstract thought are directly connected to the language faculty of the brain. Modern linguistics is driving towards there being a fundamental underlying universal grammar in which human languages can be seen as specializations of.

The unification of cognitive psychology and linguistics seems to be one of the goals at the moment, and there is the notion that abstract thought and language aren't fundamentally different things.

Alright, what about a child who sees cars everyday, but has never been told what a car is. He can still manipulate the car concept as easily as if he knew the word for it.

Or some people have very small vocabularies, simply because they have been exposed to a small number of words - does that affect their cognitive skills?

Abstract though and language may not be fundamental different things, I don't have enough information to say. But what I am saying in my post is that first you think in a concept, then you translate it into a word. You don't think in the word first. So you can think without needing to translate it into words. The relationship between the words and the concepts is of course strong, because we use words to vocalize the concepts we have.

Think about it - what is a word actually? It's just a series of sounds we create in the air. So the sound of a word is quite irrelevant to the concept behind it - the construction of the word is not relevant. Imagine we did not have mouths but instead we communicated by flashing a series of pictures in the air. The part of us that creates these pictures is just a sensory IO appliance like our eyes or mouth. Would that change us in any fundamental way? No - we would construct a similar grammar and communication method with pictures as we would with words.

What this implies is that the words themselves are unimportant, they are just representations of concepts we are dealing with. This representation can take many forms - but because we are used to vocalising our thoughts, when we do indeed think, we automatically prepare the things we are dealing with for vocalisation, leading to the illusion that words are actually involved.

What happens this is that this vocalisation becomes a sort of feedback loop for your thoughts - you think of concepts, convert them into words, then reabsorb the words to be reprocessed as if someone told you them. That is, they come back in as if you were listening to them from other people. You can observe this sometimes with people when they mutter to themselves. When we rehear our own thoughts, we can sometimes process them better (for reasons I don't know). But this step is optional, one can also do it without reprocessing, though this will fail with very abstract things that actually need concepts alien to us.

You might find this interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_language#Pirah.C3.A3_and...

A lot of what you're saying is intuitive, but modern research suggests that it's wrong.

That could be, but if everybody always stuck with what the current scientific dogma is, we would still think the earth were flat.

Well, but the way that people proved that the world was round was with evidence, not anecdotes. I'm willing to admit that current theories could be wrong, but not based on a thought experiment.

All snarkiness aside, I see you're in Berlin, so you're welcome to drop in for dinner on Wednesday. I'm slightly less bull-headed in person. :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388042

Likewise, if people ignored scientific evidence in favor of their intuition we would still think the earth was flat.

It turns out we're all better off if we first understand the "current scientific dogma" and then challenge it with scientific evidence.

Alright, what about a child who sees cars everyday, but has never been told what a car is.

If a child can see cars but there's no one there to name them for the child, the child is being neglected... and perhaps even in physical danger.

And haven't you observed children name things ad hoc by the sounds they make?

So I don't buy the idea that a child "can still manipulate the car concept as easily as if he knew the word for it".

Also, yes, people with "very small vocabularies... because they have been exposed to a small number of words" do have their cognitive skills affected, usually for the worse.

Haven't ever happen to you that you have the concept in your mind but you are not able to remember or even know the word for it? And nevertheless you are able to think about it!

How can you not attach a picture to a word or concept? And if you do not attach a picture to something - what do you see?

Tennis.

So, did you see a racket, people playing tennis or something else as you read the word? And if not, what did happen as you skimmed from paragraph to paragraph?

edit:

Hmm. I just realized that when I read a list of words [ball, car, frisbee] I don't visualize anything, but when I think of any of the words individually I do visualize. Even when just writing down a simple list. That's peculiar.

edit 2:

It can only mean one thing - that when reading you don't think at all about the nouns. Obvious in retrospect. This also explains why you immediately forget a list when just reading over it, but recall perfectly when you visualize each item for an instant.

edit 3:

> Just go through a list of interconnected things

For most people this should be really difficult when listening to music with lyrics, and really easy in a quiet environment. "proving" that you're still using the linguistic part of your brain, even when you're painting a mental picture.

When a word or concept 'ends', you will translate it. Before it ends, you can can deal with it without converting it into a picture or a word.

For example, the sentence: "there is a lion coming". How do you deal with the sentence. Do you imagine a lion coming? If so, where is the lion coming to? To me or to you? What's the context?

There are too many variables, so it's difficult to convert that sentence directly into a picture - but you still understand what it means. It's just a fragment, but it represents some type of mental concept, and this mental concept could be related to danger. As soon as I can complete the fragment:

"There is a lion coming up behind your desk", you can immediately convert it away from a a mental concept into pictures or words.

That's remarkable. This is exactly the sort of information I hoped I would be fortunate enough to receive. I want to say "write more", but I'm not sure there is anything left to say. But you should definitely write a blog post about this, if you're interested.

I find it interesting that you discovered this at such a young age. Maybe that's one reason it's so natural for you not to think in a language.

By the way, roughly how fast do you read? (Extremely fast, average, very slow, etc.)