When is it better to think without words? | Hacker News Reader

When is it better to think without words?

henrikkarlsson.xyz

284 pointsCuriositry140 comments

This is one of those things that you don't really tend to think about (pun not intended!) until you experience a change in your thinking or meet someone who thinks like you do!

> 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.

> 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.

Hmm.... I have to say, while I like the idea of being unlimited by words - the state of 'purer communion' is one I have frequently sought - I think it is far more likely that what is going on is that you mind is projecting 'likeness'. Both people in the conversation imagine that the other 'gets it' - a delusory and false assumption. After all, no one knows what goes on in another's mind - we simply don't have access.

I think talking is our means of 'ideas exchange', and that the greatest connections comes after lots of conversations, where one can (rightly) assume a shared understanding because one knows the terms are more-or-less lined up.

Language is an unavoidable throttling valve to me. And additionally, it's not the brain that's actually registering value/meaning either for me. You can call it the subconscious if you like, but I prefer 'soul' as that sense of oneself that is always there, has innate knowing, etc. Which is to say, there really is no way to express the depth of experience to another. But this is fine.

If it’s projection, wouldn’t they get the same experience with anyone? Or maybe only with someone that’s also projecting that you also “get it”. The proof is in the pudding, though, I think. Collaboration with someone who matches your wavelength like this seems to be very productive in terms of concrete results.

> Both people in the conversation imagine that the other 'gets it' - a delusory and false assumption

'getting it' isn't an all or nothing thing. It would be an illusion to take it to an extreme.

The idea of some people in your life being able to get you better than others, more quickly and with fewer words, is a fact of life. Comparative human connection bandwidth can be estimated by vibes, history, outcomes.

Well this is why that the non-verbal part of communication conveys most information. A single video call tells more than a million words.

That description really resonates with me, it feels a lot like what I've been experiencing on and off for several months. I sometimes describe it like being able to see and examine an idea sitting in front of me on the table but having a hard time picking up and being able to manipulate it enough to write it out. Or like your fingers are working poorly like when it's very cold and you're not wearing gloves.

It only takes some practice to get better at it even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. I think it’s worth working on our weakest skills, over time it compounds quite nicely.

I get what you’re saying, in my own way.

But what I do not get is how you would convey these thoughts to someone else that thinks the same way as you, seeing as these thoughts don’t neccesarily seem to be contained to words or sentences.

I believe the idea is that people who think the same way will find it easier to interpret the true nature of the thoughts behind forms of words which may be less comprehensible to people thinking in other ways.

This is easiest to recognize in the creative arts, but really you see this in every domain. A musician tapping a rhythm or humming a tune might make no sense to a layman, but another musician often understands what they mean right from the get go. Not because they necessarily know the piece, but because they think about music in a similar way.

I'm curious about some specific examples. Like can you explain a thought that came to you without words and then try to explain how you tried to explain it.

I feel like my thoughts are entirely monologue reasoning based kind of.

The GP comment really resonated with me so here's my best shot at it.

When I'm searching my pockets with my hands, I might have just had a verbalized thought like "where did I put my keys?" This is followed/accompanied by the physical sensations of my hands searching my pockets, and if they don't find the keys there, I might reach out with mental "hands" to the places I might have left my keys, recalling what I've been doing, summoning the sense memory of placing the keys down. During the process, I might think things like "oh, I was in the garage earlier..." but parts of the thought are much less like talking and much more like tracing my fingers along grooves.

This is true of thoughts about the physical world, but I do it with abstractions too. When I'm considering the architecture of a computer application, every memory or bit of reasoning might not be verbal, but more akin to feeling different parts of a shape or trying to call to mind a sensory experience. I'll then very often, when speaking aloud, have to wrestle my way back into English. "The thing that connects to the other thing with the... options. Sorry, no, I meant, in the body of the POST there's a field named..."

This is partly why written communication has always been much better for me than talking out loud. I can edit what I said to more closely match what I meant. I can recognize and edit out extraneous thoughts that were necessary for me to find the right words but muddy the waters too much if I say them without explaining all the thought behind it.

I am much better with written too, but more so I feel because my monologue under pressure from scratch wouldn't be as focused or systematic since in social situations there are so many random questions, factors, and things to process. While on my own I can let my monologue systematically work in its specific tempo without being interrupted.

Searching physical items is something I am terrible at, usually because my monologue doesn't care for it and rather would do something else or think about something else. So I tend to have monologue about something entirely other than searching and I walk randomly hoping I find the keys as a background process. Sometimes my monologue will get to a really interesting idea for me and then I just have to try it out and forget that I had to go outside in the first place.

It is really, really hard for me to direct my monologue to everyday routine activities.

> It is really, really hard for me to direct my monologue to everyday routine activities.

+1 to that, I would say it's virtually impossible for me, and I really entirely on nonverbal/muscle memory for said things, and that's the only reason I'm able to function at a "bathes and eats" level, much less gainful employment. It might not be neurologically accurate, but it sure feels like I have a verbal hemisphere and a nonverbal hemisphere.

Yeah, I'm a huge mess at home, I'm pretty sure I must be 99th percentile in terms of messiness and organization at home. It kind of causes me constant feeling of shame, but I'm not sure how to handle it either. Of course I've tried various ADHD medication etc. I'm getting mid 30s and still don't have a solution for this. I have done rushes of clean up/organization of 4+ hours, but I can never keep it up daily or weekly. In a way I feel like I'm an impostor of a functioning adult, trying to get things organized at last minute when it's truly required, I've tried to embrace it, but there must be a limit to what people are willing to accept. I'm kind of like a slave observer to what I'm interested in.

All language is referential. Even in everyday speech the meaning is not in the words themselves, in so much as they are pointers to concepts that (hopefully) exists already in the brains of the people we are conversing with. So when someone is very well aligned, one can convey ideas that go much further than conventionally expressed in the "general" language which is mutually intellible with most speakers of the same language. It is a rare experience though, at least for deep or personal topics.

I don't think its the same thing as whats described in the article.

When i talk with someone very aligned with my thinking and knowledge (fellow it collegues/friends with simiiliar skill level) we do not a lot of words to be aligned and convey complex thoughts.

We reference and use words which we both know, we read and reference similiar news stories etc.

But the way they describe it with colors, vibrations etc. is probably somethig you can't just convey.

Finding someone who thinks like you can feel like unlocking a second processor

often times the answer is instantaneous but the articulation takes ages to show people how to get from a to z

insight often lives in the ability to skip a b c d, then post processing is to allow mortals to understand

sometimes my verbal skills fail me and the steps are missing

this is why i disagree that if you can’t write it, you don’t know it

in another words, i may know the note to sing but not have the voice to sing it

> 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.

This resonates so much with me. To a point where I don't write/contribute in public forums out of fear for this misinterpretation.

Strangely, your post has made me push through that exact fear to write this, so any perceived misinterpretation has positively impacted at least one stranger. This is a good reminder for me that focusing only on negative consequences misses the unintended positive ones of still putting something out there, even if its not a perfect representation of the "uncompressed format".

Thank you for sharing, and I wish you a speedy recovery.

I've too often made the experience of having something that feels significant and whole in my head, and in the process of trying to articulate it to another person, it becomes almost completely lost. What comes out is a two-dimensional, crippled shadow of the original idea, and it (this is the worst part) cuts off my connection to the complex form.

This is why writing is important. it gives you the time to actually thinking about the best words to represent what is in your head. you may still fail, but it will usually be better than whatever comes dribbling out of your mouth.

unfortunately, if knowledge isnt written down in some form, (code, english etc) then it doesnt really exist in a civilization sense, so you need to get good at writing.

see all Paul Grahams essays on writing.

I fully agree. I think of it as exercising the muscle in the mind that acts as the "translation layer" between abstract concepts and human language. It is tough to convey complex ideas in word, but you can grow that skill with practice.

>Paul Grahams essays on writing

Wow, thanks for the recommendation. I sat down and read a handful over the past couple of hours and really got a lot out of them.

Would you tell what illness it is if you don't mind?

I don't have an "inner monologue" and don't think in words, only in images, but I've never experienced what this author is describing in terms of "nonsense words" or "hand vibrations".

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.

A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.

I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.

I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than my hand-wavy rationalisation.

It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.

Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?

I just learned that term today, but I guess so. I don't know how I generate words, they're just there. I type at about 120 wpm and speak very quickly as well, but as it's coming out I'm just flashing through different images in my head, often partial images from my own memory, and the words come out without paying attention to them, like out of a lower layer of consciousness. I write a lot of 300+ word messages at work, and it's just image after image firing in my head while the words appear.

I think I have a concept-image map in my head; to test it out, I'm thinking of random words, and very well-defined images are popping into my head. "Insurance" is the impression of slate grey followed by a view into a 90s corporate office room. "Propulsion" is the bell of one of the space shuttle engines firing on full, but not centered in frame. "Gravity" is one of the rooms in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Etc. But it's harder to go the other way; if I see an image or a drawing and have to describe what it is, there's more of a lag before I can retrieve the words to describe it. It's much easier to think of other related images.

I first heard about “thinking in pictures” from Dr Temple Grandin, who is autistic and associates it with autism. Anyway, it’s also how she thinks and appears to be a super power when it comes to designing feed lots. https://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html

I imagine you also struggled with algebra? Being a non-visual abstraction.

Algebra is very visual. Picture the variables and parentheses and constants just moving around, like a choreographed dance. Same with calculus, picturing the curves and areas and surfaces, until you start hitting more than 3 dimensions.

Thanks for the link!

Actually, I did struggle with algebra, and also calculus and differential equations. As with most on this site, I fell into an "advanced"/"gifted" cohort, but I was always down at the bottom of the class.

I excelled (relative to my peers, not to truly gifted people) at linear algebra, statistics, systems engineering, and combinatorics.

I think in images and abstractions and algebra/math came very easy to me. I couldn't really describe to someone how it looks in my head though.

Sounds like you think in word blobs that only get unpacked when you talk or write. Otherwise they move through your mind bundled but understandable to you.

I'm the same way, and I often feel like I don't know what the words that come out of my mouth will be until they happen.

I'm thinking in abstract feelings and images, and then it feels like some subconscious part of my brain is actually figuring out the words and saying them, if that makes any sense.

It can be spooky sometimes since it doesn't always feel like I'm in control of the specific words I use

Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy. Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it’s very difficult to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving the words around without having internalized the idea.

philosophy, i find, is one of the forms where the shapeless thinking described in the article does a lot of the work for me. especially the phase of internalization. you take a sentence you don’t quite get, and then spend a bunch of time just meditating about it, rejecting the temptations to think elsewhere. and then, in time, it just clicks into making all sorts of sense.

it’s definitely not “purely linguistic” – one form of it is about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.

I’m aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner experience could not be more different: it’s strange to explain, but I experience “unvocalized” language, which means the words are sort of just there without “hearing” them in my head—-I don’t have inner sound at all either and so the words don’t have an accent, for example. My thought moves at a speed much faster than speaking and I can read fast with high comprehension—-but it takes me incredible effort to remember the color of someone’s eyes, for example. I more or less skip descriptions in novels and prefer to read philosophy.

I’ve always found it interesting that in programming communities the two extremes of aphantasic and hyperphantasic seem to both be very overrepresented.

What happens when you read descriptions if you can't skip over them?

what happens is that they're comparatively boring

I remember them for as long as I read it and then it goes away.

It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.

I don't.

When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.

I've read all 5 books of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.

Yeah I never understood descriptions or who the intended audience of those long winded descriptive words is, but if other people have this magical capability of getting visual imagery out of it, I guess sure. It is hard to believe, but it must be the case. It is so hard to fathom that other people process things so differently, but I guess it can also explain a lot.

Original commenter for this chain here--my mental imagery for books is so strong that I can read books two decades later and call up close to the original visual memories that I had when I first read the books. My favorite books are the Lord of the Rings volumes, and I can remember different imagery I had from each successive generation of reading the book (from before I saw the movies and the Tolkien art to after).

Well... that definitely makes me envious. But also in a way it gives me relief, because during school times I always felt some sort of personal failure or laziness that I found some of the things so boring to read, but it makes sense if there's just a processing difference that doesn't give me that no matter how I try. But it must be wonderful then for you, because there's so many different books to read vs amount of high quality films/shows on any topic you desire.

Without discussing this and understanding how processing can truly differ like that I could go a lifetime wondering how people can read fiction etc, and how is it possible that I don't get what they are getting. I wonder if some drugs might allow me to get the same out of fiction books.

Another discouraging note from school times was that whenever I tried myself to read the mandatory literature fully myself, and formed my own conclusions I got bad grades and no one understood what I was getting at or what my conclusions were about, but when I just read summaries and conclusions on the Internet it was easy to get perfect grades. Too many of those things during school which made me feel delusional/crazy. Oh well. The rant went off-topic, but I just have I guess "vivid" memories of how school affected me emotionally in terms of self esteem and confidence. I remember just having my own thoughts, conclusions punished, while not understanding others, but still having to learn and memorize those facts even when I didn't understand how they came to be.

I’m the same, but it can also be frustrating when I _try_ to retain that info, it constantly shifts.

I described it to my partner as one of those AI generated videos where the details are constantly morphing and shifting, even if the general idea remains the same - I simply can’t hold onto a single still visualization for more than a second.

So, to agree with you, I have also read all five SLA books, and I could imagine Kaladin right now, but in an amorphous, constantly shifting way, which is a bit unsettling - maybe like Pattern? :-)

>When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.

Likewise. It even happens even with the people I know in detail such as family. If I try to project the image of my own son in my minds eye it is not clear and is always shifting, it's more of a feeling than a clear picture. Once, when I was a teenager, I was mugged and when at the police precinct they showed me a booklet with the common offenders in the area. After a few pages I could not remember what my mugger looked like. Always wondered how people manage to rebuild sketches of offenders not knowing as an aphantasiac it's nearly impossible.

Same. And it's weird to hear someone else understand this so well.

What do you see when you close your eyes? Just light and colors? What about when you dream?

I ask because there's done research suggesting visual hallucinations while sleeping helps maintain the visual cortex's proficiency. IIRC it was just contingent on visual stimuli. Sometimes as I fall asleep I see a very bright white light, so something like that can count.

If you don't remember your dreams it might be interesting to keep a dream journal. It might take awhile to get your first entry. I kept one a decade ago and my first entry was "I remember but color blue" and it took a week. But even though I don't keep it anymore I remember most of my dreams and they are still quite vivid. Might be a fun experiment

Not the guy you are asking, but when I close eyes there is only black. If try to imagine let's say apple, maybe it's there at opacity of 0.5% or less. But requires mental effort. No inner monologue as well.

Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.

What is your experience of thinking? Sounds like it’s a black box to you

I dream in images but have only once in my life seen anything but darkness or vague abstract patterns with no connection to imagery with my eyes closed in a waking state.

I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.

But I have a persistent inner monologue that only ever stops with effort when I sit down to meditate.

  > I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.

FWIW, this gets better after practice

How? I've tried writing it down many times over the years, but never recalled anything by the time I've been able to pick up anything to write with. Not a word.

For me, it’s dependent on waking up in a half-dreaming state. Then I’m able to sort of “translate” the dream into language, which I remember—-and sometimes from there I can get back to parts of the dream I didn’t think I remembered. It’s still very rare for me and I’ll go years without remembering a single dream—-in fact, mentioning this to friends when I was younger was one of the first areas where I learned my conscious experience was so different. I imagine getting better at it would be similar to getting better at lucid dreaming.

I don't recall ever waking up in a "half-dreaming state".

Focus real hard and make it a practice. You'll need to try every night. Most importantly, have patience.

I started like you. Basically it disappeared instantly. @agentcoops is right that the still sleepy state helps. Your last few sleep cycles have the longest REM, so that is likely going to be the best time. But you really need to want to do it. By turning it into a habit your brain will start recognizing that it is important, so to keep it.

I highly suggest using pen and paper. Do not write on your phone. It'll help with maintaining that sleepy state. It's okay if they are just scribbles and illegible. It's better to start writing illegible nonsense than waking up and making it readable. This is especially true in the beginning. It's okay, it'll come with time. Just write down anything you can remember. A color, feeling, emotion, smell, taste, or anything. You can help the habit by writing "nothing" in it, just as a note to remind your mind that you're trying. I cannot stress the importance of the habit. The real reason the dream journal works is because you are teaching yourself that this is important to remember. Just like taking notes in class. Even if you never read them back, the act of note taking helps build that mental pathway.

Honestly, it may take a month (or more if you're really "bad"[0]) to write your first full dream. But you should be able to get something in a week or two. Remember, it took me a week to just recall a color. That's not abnormal. If after a few weeks you still have nothing, then set two alarms in the morning an hour or two before you normally wake up. The alarms should be about 45-60 minutes from the first. What you're trying to do is wake yourself up towards the end of REM, so trial and error might help. You're targeting the last or second to last cycle. But there's 2 reasons I suggest not starting there. 1) You haven't built the habit yet, so it's going to be less useful. 2) Disrupting REM leads you to feeling less rested, even if you got enough hours. You can also get less reliable results with a single alarm and it is probably better to start there, try to time it with your normal alarm.

[0] Not that you are doing anything wrong. Just that it is harder for you, which might be a thing given your condition.

I don't "maintain a sleepy state". When I wake up, I wake up, and the dream is gone long before I'd be able to get a pen. All of it. It's pretty much like flicking a switch. I'll often make notes first thing after waking up, and they're never unintelligible, but they'll also never be related to dreams, because the dreams are gone by the time I've picked up a pen, even if it's right next to my bed.

I often set multiple alarms really early. It's never made any difference to my dreams just "switching off".

To me this feels incredibly presumptuous in assuming peoples brains work the same, which is something I'm generally extremely sceptical to given how different I've learned we actually are.

I'm not sure I understand.

How do you know you dream then? If it's like a switch. What are you writing down? How do you know it is unrelated.

Btw, I kept pen and paper under my pillow so I could grab it right away. Even before I opened my eyes. Early on I would keep them closed for as long as I could, fighting to hold onto the memories.

  > I often set multiple alarms really early.

The timing is really important. If you do the "normal" thing of seeing them 30 minutes apart then thats not going to work. A sleep cycle is 90-120 minutes and REM is the last stage. There's variance day to day, so you'll really have to iterate on what it right. Luckily the REM stage is a good portion of that time, so it gives you a decent window to hit. Try to aim for 3/4 of the way through. More than half so the intensity of the dream is high but not too close to the end because you'll be naturally winding down.

It can also help to try things that help people lucid dream. Even if you don't get control of the dream I've found that being lucid typically helps with remembering. But I never found that easy, though it was easier when I started dreaming more. My usual trigger is when I read something a second time I'll notice it says something different. My friend has a weird one, their teeth fall out lol.

  > To me this feels incredibly presumptuous in assuming peoples brains work the same

I think you're misinterpreting. By the nature of the conversation I know for a fact your brain works differently. *The entire premise of the conversation is based on this fact.*

But the advice I can give you is based on my experience. It's not an instruction set that gives guaranteed results, it is a guide. It is guess work. I have to distill what worked for me and try to target based on the little information you've provided. What are you expecting? That's a typical way to share advice and try to help.

Ultimately it'll have to be up to you to fill in the details and adapt. No perfect instruction set exists unless you make the assumption you accuse me of. I'm not sure why you're suddenly dismissive. I didn't say you're doing anything wrong or accuse you of anything.

You asked for help, I'm just trying my best.

> How do you know you dream then? If it's like a switch.

Because the switch doesn't flick until a second or two after I've woken up. Too short that I've ever been able to even grab a pen, long enough for me to be left with a memory of having briefly remembered dreaming, but never the slightest hint of what. Of course, that also means I can't be 100% certain to know whether that memory is true.

> What are you writing down? How do you know it is unrelated.

Notes on what I'm planning to do for the day. I can't of course know 100% for certain it is unrelated, but I have no reason to believe it is related either.

> If you do the "normal" thing of seeing them 30 minutes apart then thats not going to work.

That's never been what I've done. I've at times worked in weird patterns because I've found I work best at night, and so when that's fit in with my family life, I've often gone to sleep for 2-4 hours before then getting up to work, and timing that to REM is critical exactly because I will certainly be extra tired if I wake up at the wrong stage. I experiemented a lot with timing to get that right, and it's never affected my recollection of dreams at all.

> You asked for help, I'm just trying my best.

I didn't ask for help. I asked a mostly rhetorical question based on what to me seems like a flawed assumption about how trainable this is. Your clarification here is much more reasonable. If you interpreted it as a request for help, there's our disconnect, and why I'm being dismissive. Sorry for our miscommunication on that.

  > Because the switch doesn't flick until a second or two after I've woken up.

That sounds a lot like the "half-asleep state" being discussed before.

  > I didn't ask for help.
  > If you interpreted it as a request for help

You did right here[0]. You have to understand that I, cannot, read your mind. Nor can I hear any inflections in your voice. If you ask someone "how" you should expect them to answer. It is a reasonable and standard interpretation of such a question, especially as you continue. Getting upset at them is an extremely unreasonable thing to do.

It is not our miscommunication, it is yours.

You can take responsibility for yourself, no need to include others. I had more to write, but you clarified you didn't want help.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694744

Same—including the time I dabbled in “experience altering” compounds when much younger. I always find it so strange that many people, including in this thread, find the presence of language in their inner experience unsettling or “imperfect”—-I really wouldn’t trade my inner monologue for anything…

Can you type out some of your inner monologue? I don't have one. I can't imagine what it would even say.

It’s odd, I experience aphantasia in the way that I am a words thinker, able to talk with myself, the whole 5 miles.

But I am also able to have very vivid dreams, given that I sleep at the right time, around 22:00 - 24:00 and being sufficiently tired also seems to help. They seem very real when I am dreaming them but when I wake up I can remember the thoughts of imagery but can’t recall any real images or pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to have had them in the moment.

It’s the same for me and every other aphantasic I’ve spoken with. I go years and years without remembering dreams, but there are distinct periods in my life when I remembered them often. For me it’s essentially if I wake up in a dreaming state and can quickly “translate” them into language. Strange to describe, but I do have a very distinct experience of dejavu sometimes, which I’ve come to believe is tied to latent dream memories—curious if you have anything like that?

It’s actually something very interesting about the function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That there’s such insane variability in the structure of conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all. I’ve read reputable studies that suggest it’s crucial for learning, something similar to training on synthetic data.

If I close my eyes I see the inner of my eye lids. Interestingly very intense visual stimuli can trigger mental images for me. I remember that when I closed my eyes after endless hours of Counterstrike, I would still see the game, tho I couldn't control what I see. Same goes for porn. Sometimes I remember my dreams, which are visual, but I don't think that I experience any other sense while dreaming. As kid I had lucid dreams, which I was stunned of, because of the amount of details I remembered. I just looked at faces of people I knew. Lucid dreaming is still something which I want to try to train.

Like many other aphantasics below, just my eyelids. It’s ironic because I’ve always had really good (better than 20:20) eyesight, but I can only remember words.

The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesn’t seem to be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly diverse structures of inner experience. It’s clearly a function of the brain much older than conscious experience [1] and I’ve also read research supporting its necessary role in learning (roughly equivalent to reinforcement learning on synthetic data). There are very rare periods in my life when I’ve remembered my dreams often—-which definitely suggests it’s a skill I could refine—-but generally I recall one or two a year.

One of the interesting questions is which properties of inner experience are genetic, which early developmental, and which skills one can refine at any point in life. Before I knew I was aphantasic, I had a phase studying chess and I tried so hard to “get better” at visualizing games—-one of the most frustrating experiences of my life! Knowing one’s limitations, you can then refine appropriate techniques like algebraic representations etc.

[1] GPT found some terrific papers on this question. In fact, dreaming (measured by two-phase REM sleep cycles) goes back to vertebrates — and seems to have been convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish appear as the limit with only a single sleep phase. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 is fascinating.

Usually skimming fast with bursts of visualization, but I have to force myself into that slower, word-by-word mode for dense material

Problem solving is a well-explored field in experimental psychology. TFA is a bit unfocused, making both some generally supported speculations and some traditional ideas that haven't been supported. A very good survey is the edited volume, The Psychology of Problem Solving (Davidson 2003).

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.

It's quite frustrating when writers like the author - who seem quite thoughtful and potentially useful to read - appear to pontificate on a field without seemingly being aware of it; using a great mathematician's thoughts on it as a springboard doesn't justify it as its not his field of expertise either.

The essay might be more useful grounded with references to the sort of thing you link to.

But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought. The proof is that you can stop your inner words mid-sentence and you still know what you were going to think, because the thought itself takes a few milliseconds, and happens before the words start.

> But we all know thoughts aren't words, the words come after the thought

That seems valid at first, but if look at that premise closely, you'll see that even assuming wordless thoughts always come first, doesn't mean that during the process of thinking they don't give way to words. That is to say, thoughts can be a precursor, but words do offer a framework which you can use structure thought.

That's specially handy for abstract concepts, like individuality, the split of the self and the world, which are fundamental to thought as we understand it through language.

Nothing prevents you from understanding a concept with the help of language and then using the concept by itself, detached from the symbols you used to arrive at it, to think. But that requires a certain effort and intention that maybe is what the article is aiming for.

"the split of the self and the world"

is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an illusion and fundamental error

Before right or wrong, it's a concept, it defines the boundaries of the body. It might well be an illusion, a source of unnecessary suffering, but it's a concept you can understand and reason about. I'm taking about frameworks of thought that comes before any value judgement.

I think a better way to show this, would be that anendophasia [0] is a thing.

Some people have no inner voice, but aren't thoughtless automatons. They can still task-switch the same as everyone else.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38728320/

Or by watching rats solve mazes

I don't think we've attempted to study if rats have internal monolgues all that much, yet. It wouldn't surprise me if they did, or did not. I wouldn't say it is safe to assume they don't.

About the only real animal model has shown that some species of monkey probably do. [0]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01664...

On 4chan and reddit, they actually believe that those without an "inner monologue" have no soul.

Reddit has roughly 400 million weekly users. You think all of them believe the same thing?

That's what the evidence suggests.

Just to underpin how wrong this comment is, I - the person who posted the medical explanation - have been rather active on both those platforms.

Or conversely, that one can be lost for words to describe what one is thinking!

I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another person at the company would write books and take credit for his creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only for purpose of communication.

I would say that this is the intuitive, naive way of starting coding if no one has taught you coding or you haven't had to care about maintainability or other people reading your code.

We could today give it to an AI and tell it to name the variables after manually renaming the input and output ones.

Here's an example of a recent HN post for illustration[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777

Anecdotally, the degree to which one does certain types of thinking can change over time, too.

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.

>> the moment when the solution to a problem emerges “in the shower” unexpectedly after a long period of unconscious incubation.

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.

When making visual art, I don’t think in words. Shapes, colors, shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do I translate this to words. I’m not sure what trying to draw by thinking in words would even look like.

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?

Is it like this?: It's one of those things you can't really describe - you just feel it

Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process, I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good, did I find morels this season, does the code work as required)

On this topic I strongly recommend “The World I Live In” by Hellen Keller.

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.

The question reminds me of a quote from Rilke: "There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought".

On that note! I am an intensely verbal person, with words and narrative as my primary mode of thought. This essay and discussion reminds me of a desire I've felt before to develop the muscles, so to speak, of thinking without words.

Does anyone have any advice or techniques to that end?

Perhaps do activities like manipulating physical objects (carpentry?, Lego, Rubiks cube), games like Tetris, or complex body movements where verbalization won't be of much use. Or standard Quantitative Reasoning problems from entrance exams. A few years back, the wordcel vs shape rotator debate/binary was being discussed online: https://roonscape.ai/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?r=53sw

I'd come across this book "Visual Thinking in Mathematics" (https://www.amazon.in/Visual-Thinking-Mathematics-Marcus-Gia...) which goes into some of this.

In the family of my maternal grandfather there are many individuals who are much better at science but have difficulty with language (often in combination with dyslexia) in school. I have some evidence that those individuals (myself included) have a significant higher non-verbal IQ (20 to 30 points) than verbal IQ as categorized by the WISC-V intelligence tests. I often struggle to express my ideas with words. When I think about algorithms it is often in 'abstract' visual images. While developing software, I find myself searching for functions/methods a lot, because I often forget their names or the order of the parameters.

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.

IQ is the measurement, not the real thing, so don't focus too much on it.

The vocabulary is limited by what the recipients will understand, while your thoughts are not. My favourite example: Complex thoughts can have many forms of negative results, but there isn't widespread vocabulary other than "i don't know" to express it.

I can relate. May ask you how your relation with AI tools is? I tend to find myself translating my mental model into natural language, to have a machine convert it into code, then reading that code back to mental model. It's unnerving. It feels much more natural writing my mental model directly into code.

I am not using AI tools for code generation. I have only used it for 'querying' information, for example, when I started to work with Device Trees and Yocto for embedded Linux development. I am happy with IntelliSense. Yes, AI tools can very quickly generate some simple app, but I do not believe it will work for more complex problems.

I think I can relate with you. It’s unnerving for me to see how poorly written my initial natural language interpretation appears. AI reassures me it’s not also incoherent by generating code that does what I expect.

Been thinking a lot recently about what my thoughts look like. They definitely aren't words (though as I type this, I can imagine hearing myself think ahead to the end of the sentence). The best I can describe it is visualisations - whether that's images of maths notation, 3D rotating models, or a flow/map/block diagram.

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)

> (ich bin)

Are you a native German speaker? or additional language? (it's an interesting/seemingly-random association)

The rest is similar to my (dyslexic) reading process. From what I can tell, I coped by memorizing the "shape" or image of words and associated them other things/images/sounds/dictionary-definition/feeling/emotions/experiences or some other abstract things I don't know how to describe -- attached metadata, if you will. The biggest issue is words like (is, that, a, etc) since the associations are weak at best, leading to them being disappeared/changed/hallucinated/moved or replaced by others in the same sentence/paragraph. Sometime when it's really messed up, leads to rereading a sentence or paragraph multiple times until the sequence of all of that makes sense.

But sounding out words is an absolute disaster no matter how much I try and fell behind in early grade school until my overwhelming need to not disappoint family, who were getting frustrated with me, kicked in and I developed my coping methods. It takes longer to read and learn new words but the associating and pattern matching resulted in my comprehension and language scores in school being so high no one picked up on how slow I read (or the disaster that reading aloud is) and how poorly I spell as being something off.

Reminds me of the description of Peter Scholze as he was coming up with condensed mathematics. Didn't write a thing until he had it all worked out in his head (which is how he always works). Knew if he didn't get it worked out before the weekend he'd never be able to build it up again. Once he worked it out, he was able to retain it for months until finally writing it down.

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

My wife was confounded when I told her I don't think in words. For her, it's a one to one correlation.

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.

You sound a little like me. I wasn't aware people thought like that until my partner told me her thoughts took the form of a constant stream of well-formed English. My default mode of thinking isn't natural language (though I can force myself to think this way, it's laborious, as the article mentions), nor images (I struggle with visualization), but more like abstract sequences of both logical connections and intuitive feelings.

Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble remembering for example number sequences.

In athletics words can be a hindrance, as they add time to the thinking/doing gap.

This reminded me of Hans Keller's wordless functional musical analysis. I came across it listening to his documentary on Schoenberg, available here: https://archive.org/download/miscellaneous_plays_1983-02-07_...

"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...

The book "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity" has a large thread exploring this among both historical and contemporary mathematicians. How people who seem to have an almost supernatural gift for math are often just able to "see" more clearly. Not in equations or words, but images.

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.

Yeah, after a lot of thinking and visualization and brain-storming, a lot of which was the sort of formless void of the wordless prayers of St. John of the Cross and what I would reach for in Buddhist meditation (but never managed to hold on to for long if I even reached it --- given that I was regularly hit with a bamboo can before being told to go sweep up in the bookbinding shop, probably not....) I've managed to make a bit of progress on a project to the point of an actual concept realized in 3D in my head --- the problem has been that getting from mental image to 3D model to files which will can actually be cut on a CNC has been nightmarish --- the 3D CAM tools which I can afford either won't use the tooling which I wish to use in the way I need to use it, or one which did converted a 1" x 1" x 2" test section into a ~140MB file after churning for ~18 minutes (I'll need for this to exist in multiples and to be as much as 48 inches long).

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....

Thinking without words has 2 main problems imo:

- 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)

You definitely should read the whole article. The author says that wrapping ideas in words at later stages is important to complete the process of inventing. It's all about the initial processing, to free your mind from language's constraints, because language is indeed constraining. It feels like multiplexing numerous parallel streams of thoughts into a single spoken channel. You have to do it at some point, but only when you are confident you know what those parallel streams carry. Otherwise you will get mess.

A way that can be walked is not The Way

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

The way I think about it is that words constrain a problem. Constraining a problem makes it easier to understand, remember, and convey. But it makes it harder to have, well, unconstrained, creative thoughts about it. Structure can be both good and bad.

This is true of any abstraction.

I've always felt that you can't think in anything besides thought. Words, images, symbols, etc, are all side-effects. They absolutely bend back and influence the thought process, but they are always secondary and indirect. Thought itself is ineffable.

"My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself."

-- William S. Burroughs

I've certainly noticed a bit of a pattern where programmers who can listen to podcasts or lyrics while they code (I can't; I rely too much on my verbal center for coding) can operate much faster and solve more complex problems than your average bear. They're rare, so I don't have enough data to feel certain, but I have a suspicion that sometimes they're forced into it by living in noisy environments where tuning out the words or thinking without them makes more sense.

do you find music without lyrics helps? i do for sure. a bit of bach or beethoven, or some dub kinda music.

I'm not sure if I understand correctly about "thinking in concrete English sentences or words" as other comments have mentioned, so here's a description of what happens to me:

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.

Another aside - I do end up spending a lot of time working on the presentation of a thing like trying to polish things like user interfaces, vector or raster graphics, typesetting, CSS and other visual-ish stuff. It's something I've tried to suppress to actually get functional aspects of a work done. Admittedly, this is the more fun part of a work for me.

I rarely think with words, when I think with words it is like 20x slower, it is more robust, but in that case I would use pen and paper for that.

Sometimes my mind feels the clearest when it’s quiet. Ideas just keep coming when I’m in the shower, zoning out, or about to fall asleep. But the moment I sit down at my computer to write them down, they vanish. Does this happen to anyone else? Or do you need to speak or write things out to get your thoughts moving?

Am I the only one like this?

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.

When a sophon is trying read your mind

Words are the illusion, they neither exist nor are they directly linked to thoughts. Words are "sportscasting."

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

For most of us, writing remains the training ground. But it's also humbling to realize that the moment we try to articulate something, we're already losing a ton of nuance

People find out that we actually think in different ways.

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

Yep, as someone whose brain is biased towards a higher verbal IQ and thinks primarily in words, a lot of the replies to this post are amusing.

I have genuine curiosity about those that claim to think in “pure abstract thoughts” or whatever. I don’t believe my way of thinking is superior. I’m certain that my constant internal monologue is strongly correlated to my tendency to ruminate. Or, I struggle with concepts that do not translate well into a verbal format.

People apparently can’t pass up the opportunity to disparage those with a different thinking style.

FWIW, I have no inner monologue, and think I ruminate the same ways I think. It only has verbal content if I am remembering a recent conversation or "simulating" an anticipated one.

That is truly fascinating to me. My rumination takes a verbal form almost all the time… but it is also often related to past or anticipated conversations or interactions.

With no internal monologue, you can still hear words inside your head, but it would be a more conscious effort rather than an automatic, constant process?

I rarely "hear" utterances in my mind, but that may be more aphantasia than the lack of monologue...

For a recollection, auditory aspects might be present for a high stress moment, such as someone emoting a mere word or syllable. It's more like a static vignette with a brief sound clip. It could also be non-verbal sounds.

I don't know exactly how to describe it, but general speech recollection for me is something like a train of AST fragments that I just sort of know/feel. These are some intermediate representation of verbal content, not the serialized phonemes or lexemes, but also not my core thought mode either, which is somehow non-verbal semantics.

I also get this train of AST fragments from reading or from trying to compose text in my head. These verbal units are larger than words, shorter than sentences or paragraphs, and I'm not sure they always align with what you would call grammatical phrases either. This train can have a timing aspect to it which correlates with the remembered or planned cadence of speech, a bit like some cue sheet. Or it could correlate with written structures.

Ironically, I like poetry but have no appreciation for "spoken word". To me, the structure of rhyme and meter is felt almost spatially when I read the page in silence. Hearing it aloud is distracting, not very enjoyable, and also much harder for me to absorb the content. It's as if I don't have enough short-term memory duration to buffer what is being said and assemble the structures I want.

I like music with vocals, but I similarly don't absorb the verbal meaning that much. I like them for the musicality, tone, and emotional content. If I don't read the whole lyric on a page, I might never fully appreciate the verbal content. Weirdly, I can remember lyrics and sing along, even if I haven't read them and fully absorbed them. It's like I have recall cued to the music, but I would not be able to recite those same lines if I wasn't hearing the song to cue me for each little bit.

Glad you pointed out Feynman’s experience. The paper and the writing were the work. Oftentimes, I don’t settle on a meaningful, elegant solution until I have tried to explain my thoughts many times. “Eureka!” becomes “oh wait…” and back—a pendulum that eventually settles on a beautiful solution.

I knew my mid-workday naps were productive…

I’ve been spending time learning meditation, which is essentially not thinking :)

Isn't it already too late, when you ask yourself that question?

Like, that's funny. But asking yourself that question might just be a step toward answering it. I grew up around a lot of autistic kids who had to train themselves to verbalize anything, but also to restrain themselves from verbalizing random thoughts. Then you reach an age where you start to spew out everything in words, and you have to learn that putting something into language too soon can strip it of its actual meaning and ossify it before you have a chance to fully examine it.

try the nyt connections puzzle for a couple of weeks. When you get better at it, you're associating sets of words without thinking in words. The answers just pop up.