AbacotJosser

With all due respect, the assertion that language is necessary for "higher thought" processes to occur is an opinion and not a fact. You may be struggling with a confirmation bias that words are enabling you to maintain. Being able to formulate an appropriate mental model is the only key ingredient to effective thinking I know of. My opinion is that it doesn't matter whether you build the model in words or pictures, but I find pictures often are superior to words. Here is another anecdote: Three days ago my boss and I interviewed a job candidate, and my boss likes to see how people think so he gives them puzzles to solve. He gave this interviewee this problem: Imagine a 10"x x 10" x 10" cube built of 1000 1" cubes. How many cubes can you see from the outside. The interviewee immediately set about describing an algorithm (in words), using summation and arithmetic so that after about 8 minutes, and on his third try gave the correct answer. I am not a genius, but it took me about a minute and the reason I got there so fast is because of imagination. Everything came down to a mental picture. It occurred to me that the number of cubes I could see was equal to the total number of cubes minus the cubes that I could not see. I imagined a smaller cube inside the big cube and it quickly became obvious the dimensions of the unseen cube was 8 x 8 x 8. The total number of cubes is 10x10x10. So, the solution is (10x10x10) - (8 x 8 x 8). I did my arithmetic using words, and my first answer was wrong because I calculated wrong. In my head, I said 8 x 8 = 48 and 48 X 8 is 384.... 1000 - 384... and guess what, I was wrong because my arithmetic was flawed. The irony is that my mental model was spot on, but I only developed errors after I began using words in my thought process. With all due respect, I submit to you that words often get in the way of higher reasoning and there is plenty of data to support this assertion. Chess players, for example, when thinking about a position often think in terms of mental pictures of the board (not words). Anyway, I don't mean to be disrespectful, so if you think this thread is irrelevant I will withdraw from further discussion.

There is an experiment you can do in your brain on yourself, and I don't know what it means, yet it is interesting. Everybody in this forum is musing on how we use language in our thinking process... but isn't it obvious that using language is not required for thought? Clearly not. We could start with human children and trace their ability to think. They make deductions about their environment without formulating sentences. What about other animals than us? A tiger or a bear for example... I once saw a bear push a "bear-proof" container over the edge of a small cliff. The container broke open, the bear went down and enjoyed a meal. I don't think the bear was thinking in words, and yet he was able to deduce something about cause and effect. When I asked our outfitter if he had ever heard of this behavior before, he had. Here is your experiment.... Just for fun... and I don't have any clue whether it is important or silly... but with some practice you can turn off language inside your brain. Try it. It gives you a different perspective.... For me, it seems to lose certain elements such as calculation, but it opens up other subtle things that are masked by using language. I will leave you with one more story of a human child, who was 8 months old. His mother and father and I watched him, barely able to walk, stumble up to a cabinet door under the kitchen sink. He pulled himself up, and in so doing the cabinet door came open about an inch and stopped. It seemed to us he noticed that it stopped and became curious as to why. After a minute or two, he placed the right side of his head to the left of the door, and began pulling on the door and watching the inside. He was muttering something, but it was unintelligible, but what he did amazed the three of us. He pulled the door open an inch, spied the child proof lock, and reached with his right hand up to the lock and pulled until the cabinet door suddenly swung open, at which time he lost his balance and fell to the floor and the door, being spring loaded swung shut again. We didn't say anything but kept watching. He pulled himself up to the door again, and on his second attempt opened it without falling down. No one had trained the boy to do this, but he came to the solution himself by what I would argue was true scientific process of deductive reasoning. That boy did not have a vocabulary sufficient to describe the problem. I don't want to bias anyone, but I challenge anyone who is interested enough to clear your mind of words to the fullest extent you can. Then, simply observe the world without trying to use words.. Just observe. You will find that words are not necessary to function well. if you try this I would be curious to read your comments.

boring