Thinking without words?

Something which might be easier than completely eliminating the internal monologue would be to optimize it instead by adopting or creating a language with fast pronunciation, especially for the most common words. I looked through Wikipedia's list of conlangs but didn't find anything similar late last year.

I think this is an interesting question. What is it that you want to be able to think of non-verbally? Some of the replies discuss using this to perform mathematical manipulations. Is this your primary goal, or is it something else? What is it you want to process faster? Also, does this mean you want to be able to visualize more, or that you want to somehow think of things in an abstract but still completely non-verbal way (abstract meaning nothing that you could see, hear, touch, taste, or smell)? I may have some input for the first, but not really for the second (at least, not that I know of--the only things I can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch that clearly exist in my thoughts are my emotions, though these are often also imbued with linguistic and visual associations).

Being able to visualize doesn't necessarily require cutting off your word-thinking abilities at all. I know this because I think of a lot of things both visually and in words and symbols and tend to swap between the two interchangeably. This is actually my natural mode of thought. Whether you can adopt my approach may depend on how your mental architecture works. On the other hand, maybe it is possible to learn how to adopt this approach even if your mind doesn't currently work this way, much like people can train to improve their memorization skills. I don't currently know how easy or hard that is, but I like the approach of trying to change something to see if it works. As I understand it, some people are very good at visualization and some never think in pictures at all and are even surprised to learn that some people do. Some people can play songs in their head, and some people can't (I can do this, though I have no special musical ability). I know that I often use visualization both when I am doing math and writing novels, and also when I'm just daydreaming. On the other hand, I will sometimes both see and hear words and symbols in my head in addition to or instead of visuals.

What is the current way that your mind works? Are all of your thoughts in your personal voice, like hearing yourself speak inside your head, or are some annotated with pictures, sounds, smells, etc? People have very different ways of naturally thinking about things, so I'd need to know more to write a more detailed response to your question. I would also be immensely interested to know what kind of thinking styles people have here.

I can't bring up an example, but I suspect that I've often noticed an error in a thought only after it was verbalized.

I did this a few years ago, but I'm not sure exactly how. I wanted to think less verbally because I worried that my thoughts were too constrained by words, which kept me at the very surface level of my consciousness and perhaps inhibited my access to deeper parts of my mind. I think that part of the transformation came about simply because I wanted it to (power of suggestion). It probably also helped that I started watching a lot more films and doing more math. I don't remember the exact process by which I transformed my thought-structure.

Something that I noticed was that my thoughts got much less verbal when I became more emotional. During a few particularly emotionally intense experiences this past year, I found myself less able to reason through thoughts verbally. At the time, I had an impression that my subconscious mind had taken over my thought process, closing my conscious mind out, and denying it the power of words that would let it interfere with the transformations going on inside me.

A few months ago, I decided to start thinking more verbally again, so that it would be easier to fulfill my dreams of being a novelist. I'll try to remember exactly how I did this, but the process is not wholly clear to me. I know that at some point I made a decision to "reprogram myself" to be more verbal, and I think that my desire to transform contributed significantly to the actual transformation. I also made a point of trying to express myself more verbally in my mind. One exercise I did involved looking at things in the world and trying to come up with eloquent verbal descriptions of them. I also started writing more in my journal, and reading a lot more. This wasn't a rigorous scientific experiment, and I didn't keep very careful track of the different things I was doing to reshape my thought-structure, but whatever I did worked, because I think very verbally now.

I'm not sure if this was helpful at all, but I figured I should comment here, since this is something I've actually done. I also don't know how similar these processes are between different people, or whether it matters that I'm female. Furthermore, I'll note that it was much easier to train myself to think verbally again than it was to make myself think less verbally; I was always a very verbal person growing up. Not sure if that's nature or nurture or both.

Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words?

Michael Vassar and some associate of his did researchers into this. He reported some success but for him the without-thoughts thinking was just slower than the verbal form that he had been using for so long so it was not worth switching.

I am currently attending university and taking classes in a language other than my native tongue. There is always this continual inner push to spend more time thinking in the foreign tongue in order to increase my fluency, which vastly increased before, when I had had a very strong commitment to think in the foreign tongue, and whenever I noticed that I was thinking in English, I would spend the time to think the same phrase out in Spanish .

One day during a lecture I was tempting to understand a certain chemical reaction with multiple steps. When I had been at it for quite a while, I asked myself which language I was using? Then I realized I hadn't been using any language, but only the symbolic language of chemistry: arrows, chemical symbols, numbers that represent multiples of various chemicals. I thought this was odd for me, because I am someone who has much more talent in the area of language than symbolic reasoning (at least when applied to mathematics).

I was once looking at an animation of a pumping heart. I didn't know any of the terminology of the various parts, but had an understanding of the path that the blood takes, from the body into the heart, onto the lungs, then back into the heart and out to the body. I found the animation terribly fascinating, as I sought to follow the path of the blood without any words. It seemed to me like I was trying to understand the system not sequentially as a chain, but more as a whole. I was seeking to relate the state of each part of the system to the concurrent state of any and all other components at every given instance along the way. Not being familiar with the Spanish terminology, I found myself in a limbo trying to relate everything without being able to label the parts. I think it provides a valuable insight in that keeps you away from the sequential orientation of thought that language often requires, when you go on thinking without it.

I think this is something like what it takes to understand how the solar system really works. you have to see multiple moving parts in your mind all at once and understand how they all interact to foresee the resultant phenomenon like eclipses and the like. I think I am weak at this when it involves more than just two interacting factors. I have noticed other people have a lot more facility with this sort of thing, but it seems to me like something you can grow in with practice. I once heard that Einstein said he would experience thoughts in the form of some kind of inner animation and then put that into words and finally mathematics. I can't put down a source for that. Temple Grandin, a gifted inventor with autism, has said the same thing. Although I am not the best at mathematics, when working with chemistry I find a certain degree of facility based on being able to imagine molecules and the way they interact

Today I was walking and I found myself in a language limbo moment again. I decided I would try to extend it as long as I could, and even if I began thinking in words, I would just let it go and continue observing things around me. At the moment I saw some grass and thought green I knew I had faltered, but realized as the cars passed me by I had just been observing them interacting and the sun coming from the sky without making any attempt to label anything. It was very interesting, and it seemed to me to be something like holding your breath to maintain the state. At every moment that you realize you are in the state you want to make a statement in words about it and it takes a strange active passivity to then enter back into it again. If that makes any sense! Active Passivity, ha! Well, maybe I never did ever think without words and I was just fooling myself, but I think it did happen. The state seems to lend itself to a certain kind of unconcerned selflessness, but not in a traditional sense. It's more like, you can't see yourself thinking negatively or positively about anyone including yourself while you are in it. You can make no plans for good or evil. At least to me that was how it seemed. I wondered if it was somehow inconsiderate, or wasteful to inhabit that kind of thinking, like a misuse of the human mind. Finally I began to desire to pray to God. As I believe in God and am a Christian of the sort that believes the God described in the bible is the true one with both his corresponding actions towards man of Mercy and Judgement. I realized I couldn't connect to God without words. If something came into my mind about the nature of God how could I justifiably, in my attempt to go on without words in my mind eschew it. Finally, I tried to just present certain non verbal sentiments to my Lord, but it seemed inadequate and I cried out to him, Daddy. The next thought that occurred to me is that humans need language in order to communicate with God and that was maybe the main original intended purpose of it! Then the thought entered, "But maybe the word attitude signifies certain morally significant communications towards God that can be expressed on through to the heavens." Perhaps, but I think it is necessary to verbalize what you are able to verbalize.

Wordless thinking seems valuable, especially for mechanical reasoning, but to the extent that it isolates you, I think you need to abandon it, and also use language to communicate your non-verbally reasoned intuits to others including God himself. But right now it is occurring to me, I never really attempted to maintain that state of non verbal thinking in a forced or immersed social setting. Sex must be an incredible form of nonverbal communication. As well as all displays of affection or body language.

Another example of nonverbal thought that almost everyone has experienced, and probably more than ever a s small child, is the state in which you know what you want to communicate but have yet, or are unable to formulate the set of words which effectively communicates it. This often happens to people who are writing an essay and encountering complex ideas. Obviously you have formulated a thought, yet language is currently in a state of failure of expressing. So, for me, this proves that the state exists. Thoughts exist before words and are then put into words as a conduit to express them to others. Then, in the process of conforming thoughts to words we notice that we ourselves are provided greater insights into the phenomenon we are expressing! So, we then begin to speak to ourselves about everything whether doing so is beneficial, harmful, or indifferent. I think it could be any of the three at any given time! I noticed that after I learned the terminology for the parts of the heart it was much more easy to understand and put the process together as a whole, but I lost interest in that super understanding which would have been what I described earlier as seeking to relate the state of each part of the system to the concurrent state of any and all other components at every given instance along the way. Language seems to facilitate picking a certain point in time and answering questions about what is happening somewhere else in the system, as in taking a snapshot of the phenomenon. Thinking without words seems to work more on the basis of understanding multiple occurrences within a system and being able to evaluate the whole and each isolated part in a fluid, kinetic, more global way with less differentiation or isolation of the component parts.

It isn't clear how much ability people have to think without language. Some people report having running monologues pretty much constantly, but others do not.

There are also a handful of famous cases of people who grew up with little or no language exposure. The most widely studied example is probably Genie. Another well known example is Ildefonso, described in Susan Schaller's book "The Man Without Words". Ildefonso was a deaf child who grew up in an environment where his parents had no way of communicating with him. He wasn't exposed to sign language until he was already an adult. That example makes one understand how people in ancient times considered deaf-mutes to be effectively stupid and crazy, although it isn't completely clear if that's due more to the lack of communication or the lack of language. In the case of Ildefonso, the story goes that when he realized that objects had names in sign language he burst into tears at the revelation.

Language is a very basic part of human thought processes. In order to do almost anything of note we need to be able to use language. I'm not at all convinced that developing ways of "thinking without words" is at all productive.

I've found that when I try and do basic arithmetic in my head (like 1784 * 2), I end up knowing the answer (or some subanswer of the algorithm) in some subsymbolic way but then feel the need to carry out the calculation with the symbols. I can calculate quicker by jumping straight to the answer I already know, although it feels like making a leap of faith. It sounds like you want to do a similar thing with words.

This kind of question is now open to experimental investigation, with the use of TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) to selectively and temporarily interfere with specific brain areas, for instance the language modules. Here is one hit from a Google search.

With a little more time and effort than I have available right now it should be possible to turn up some interesting facts.

Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to think in words. The slings and arrows of bewildering neural processes. Or to take arms against a manner of cerebration.

Enough of my soliloquy.

A good follow-up question is "How do people born blind think?" OR "How do people born deaf think?".

There is an answer out there.

Buddhist practices of emptying your mind

In my many hours of reading texts on Theravada Buddhism I do not recall hearing about such a practice. (7th or 8th jhanas, maybe?) I have read less about Zen but do not recall seeing anything very close to "emptying your mind" there either. I think Mahayana is the work of Satan and thus I have not studied its unholy scripture, but Wikipedia articles did not mention mind-emptying. Google searches of similar phrases yield pure garbage. No anchor can make it make sense for samadhi, and vipassana is right out, so... Are you referring to something other than the vague Western meme of 'emptying ones mind'?

Anyway, I was under the impression that math, programming, etc---abstract reasoning---were conceptual or symbolic but very wordless, and that generally intuition is wordless, but perhaps intuition is too fast by your criteria?

Try playing this game.

Perhaps you could use transcranial magnetic stimulation to inhibit your language centers.

I've been working on "listening" to my pre-thoughts. It's interesting - once you catch it you automatically start translating it into words, or rethinking a thought "audibly"; it's very hard not to. Then I usually make fun of myself by pre-thinking "echo." On the downside, if you don't translate it into words it's vague and harder to remember - thinking with words is awesome.

For more concrete things you can also think about it with some sense - a touch, smell, sound, taste or sight that doesn't need words.

Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words?

Has anyone developed techniques to do math without symbol manipulation?

One relevant experience that comes to mind is "doodling" - drawing aimlessly on a piece of paper, which (at least for me) is usually not accompanied by verbal thoughts at all. Yet there is a logic to such doodles; goals coalesce such as filling out a given area or repeating a pattern which are never explicitly formulated. So this is one sense in which "thinking without words" can be part of a commonplace activity.

I've been told that the main impediment to speed-reading is subvocalization - pronouncing the words in your head, as you read them. If you can stop subvocalizing, you're capable of extracting concepts from text much faster.

Learning to speed-read might be a useful step towards your goal. Apply the usual second-hand disclaimers: I haven't tried this myself.

Firstly....I just got here. Poking around. Hi.

With which criteria could we use to determine whether an attempt to 'think without words' was successful? Is there a threshold one could overcome where they could say 'I've done it.....NOW I'm thinking without words"? Wouldn't such a threshold be completely determined subjectively without any sort of verification available? "I think I'm thinking without words".

Also, if I attempt to critically analyze the medium of my own thought process....most likely an impossible thing to do......the characterization that my thoughts are in 'words' is hard to justify. The concepts of mentalese or private language have sought to describe the medium of our thoughts and have had their problems too.

A last thing, the first sentence of your post seems to suggest that language consists solely of words. And we must stop here to clarify that the sobs of a crying person are still part of 'language' even though no 'words' are spoken. Is there a tangible difference between a sob/crying wail and the statement 'I'm sad"? Human language was born from grunts and crude mouth noises. To distinguish between a 'word' and an appropriately understood 'grunt' or vocal sound is highly problematic.

Maybe it would be interesting to ask deaf people how they think. Sign language, written words, purely visual, ...?

Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words?

Visualisation seems to be the big one.

There is another thing - that I gather helps some people. Sometimes people's ego gets tied into their verbal personality. Then, things that break the hold of their ego over them also help them to break down their conception of themselves as being just the part of them that thinks verbally. A range of traditional techniques aim to produce that result.