Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I consider myself an abstract visual thinker. I do not think in pictures, but in abstract structures. During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me. I also feel that people who are strong verbal thinkers have the greatest resistance against idea that language is not essential for higher cognitive processes.

Growing up, I never used words or even sentences for thinking.

The abstract visualizations I could build in my mind where comparable to semi-transparent buildings that I could freely spin, navigate and bend to connect relations.

In my mid-twenties, someone introduced me to the concept of people using words for mental processes, which was completely foreign to me up to this point.

For some reason, this made my brain move more and more towards this language-based model and at the same time, I felt like I was losing the capacity for complex abstract thoughts.

Still to this day I (unsuccessfully) try to revive this and unlearn the language in my head, which feels like it imposes a huge barrier and limits my mental capacity to the capabilities of what the language my brain uses at the given time (mostly EN, partially DE) allows to express.

> During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me

This begs a question though: Since programming is mostly done with language - admittedly primitive/pidgin ones - why isn't that a struggle? Not sure if you're a programmer yourself, but if so do you prefer certain programming languages for some sense of "less-verbalness" or does it even matter?

Just wondering, not attacking your claim per se.

> As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100)

I used to rationalize to myself along similar lines for a long time, then I realized that I'm just not as smart as I thought I was.

The idea that programming languages and natural languages are processed with the same wetware should be testable with something like the tests described in this submission. I don't expect it to be true, but only expecting something is not science

A programming language has a ton more rules and way less ambiguity than a speaking language.

I see your general point on needing language proficiency to program, but I think it's just a very low requirement.

Parent isn't saying they can't handle language (and we wouldn't have this discussion in the first place), just that they better handle complexity and structure in non verbal ways.

To get back to programming, I think this do apply to most of us. Most of us probably don't think in ruby or JS, we have a higher vision of what we want to build and "flatten" it into words that can be parsed and executed. It's of course more obvious for people writing in say basic or assembly, some conversion has to happen at some point.

I think people who can manipulate complex structures but struggle with language tend to see language in a more formal way, putting more effort into understanding its structure and inner working.

Basically what to most people is so obvious that it becomes transparent ("air") isn't to us, which apparently is an incredible gift for becoming a language researcher. Or a programmer.

Some progress has been made in this area, see [0], [1], [2] and [3], observing both similarities and dissimilarities in terms of language processing:

Siegmund, J., Kästner, C., Apel, S., Parnin, C., Bethmann, A., Leich, T. & Brechmann, A. (2014). Understanding understanding source code with functional magnetic resonance imaging. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 378-389).

Peitek, N., Siegmund, J., Apel, S., Kästner, C., Parnin, C., Bethmann, A. & Brechmann, A. (2018). A look into programmers’ heads. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 46(4), 442-462.

Krueger, R., Huang, Y., Liu, X., Santander, T., Weimer, W., & Leach, K. (2020). Neurological divide: An fMRI study of prose and code writing. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 678-690).

Peitek, N., Apel, S., Parnin, C., Brechmann, A. & Siegmund, J. (2021). Program comprehension and code complexity metrics: An fmri study. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 524-536). IEEE.

[0]: https://www.frontiersin.org/10.3389/conf.fninf.2014.18.00040...

[1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8425769

[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3377811.3380348

[3]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9402005

This reminds me of my experiences working with a software developer transplanted from the humanities who was highly articulate and capable of producing language about programming, yet seemed to not be able to write many actual computer programs themselves.

I think that I ultimately developed an obsessive need to cite all my ideas against the literature and formulate natural language arguments for my claims to avoid being bludgeoned over the head with wordcelry and being seen as inferior for my lesser verbal fluency despite having written software for years at that point, since early childhood, and even studied computer science.

> I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100).

I very strongly suspect that you're overestimating yourself.

I'm a brilliant genius according to IQ tests. Think me arrogant or conceited or whatever - that is literally the truth, fact - proven many times in the educational system (I was homeschooled and didn't follow any sort of curriculum and was allowed to do whatever I wanted bc I kept testing higher than almost everyone) and just for kicks also - the last time I took an IQ test I was in my late 20s and a friend and I had a bet about who could score higher completely stoned off of our ass. We rolled enough blunts apiece that we could be continuously smoking marijuana as we took the IQ test, which followed several bongs finished between the two of us. I was so high that I couldn't keep the numbers straight on one of the number pattern questions - it was ridiculous. I scored 124, my lowest "serious" attempt ever - all of this is 100% true. I need anyone to believe me - take this how you will but I have an opinion that is a bit different.

I'm brilliant - I've read volumes of encyclopedias, my hobbies include comparative theology, etymology, quantum mechanics and predicting the future with high accuracy (I only mention stuff I'm certain of tho ;) but so much so it disturbs my friends and family.

The highest I scored was in the 160s as a teenager but I truly believe they were over compensating for my age - only as an adult have I learned most children are stupid and they maybe in fact didn't over compensate. I am different than anyone else I've ever personally met - I fundamentally see the world different.

All of that is true but that's a rather flawed way of assessing intelligence - fr. I'm being serious. The things we know can free us as much as they can trap us - knowledge alone doesn't make a man successful, wealthy, happy or even healthy - I'm living evidence of this. That doesn't cut it as a metric for prediction of much. There are other qualities that are far more valuable in the societal sense.

Every Boss I've ever worked for has been dumber than me - each one I've learned invaluable stuff from. I was a boss once - in my day I owned and self taught/created an entire social network much like FB was a few years ago, mine obviously didn't take off and now I'm a very capable bum. Maybe someday something I'm tinkering with will make me millions but prolly not, for many reasons, I could write books if I wanted ;)

At the end of the day, the facts are what they are - there is an optimal level of intelligence that is obviously higher than the bottom but is nowhere near the top tier, very likely near that 100 IQ baseline. What separates us all is our capabilities - mostly stuff we can directly control, like learning a trade.

A Master Plumber is a genius plumber by another name and that can and obviously is most often, learned genius. What you sus about yourself is truth - don't doubt that. No IQ test ever told me I lacked the tenacity of the C average student that would employ me someday - they can't actually measure the extent of our dedicated capacity.

I kno more than most people ever have before or rn presently - I don't know as much about plumbing as an apprentice with 2 years of a trade school dedicated to plumbing and a year or two of experience in the field, that's the reality of it. I could learn the trade - I could learn most every trade, but I won't. That's life. I can tell you how you the ancients plumbed bc that piqued my curiosity and I kno far more about Roman plumbing than I do how a modern city sewer system works. That's also life.

It isn't what we kno or how fast we can learn it - it's what we do that defines us.

Become more capable if you feel looked down on - this is the way bc even if what you hone your capabilities of can be replicated by others most won't even try.

That's my rant about this whole intelligence perception we currently have as a society. Having 100 IQ is nowhere near the barrier that having 150 IQ is.

Rant aside, to the article - how isn't this obvious? I mean feelings literally exist - not just the warm fuzzy ones, like the literal feeling of existence. Does a monkey's mind require words to interpret pain or pleasure for example. Do I need to know what "fire" or "hot" is in a verbal context to sufficiently understand "burn" - words exists to convey to to others what doesn't need to be conveyed to us. That's their function. Communication. To facilitate communication with our social brethren we adopt them fundamentally as our Lego blocks for understanding the world - we pretend that words comprising language are the ideas themselves. A banana is a - the word is the fruit, they are the same in our minds but if I erase the word banana and all it's meaning of the fruit and I randomly encounter a banana - I still can taste it. No words necessary.

Also, you can think without words, deliberately and consciously - even absentmindedly.

And LLMs can't reason ;)

Truthfully, the reality is that a 100 IQ normal human is far more capable than any AI I've been given access to - in almost every metric I attempted to asses I ultimately didn't even bother as it was so obvious that humans are functionally superior.

When AI can reason - you, and everyone else, will kno it. It will be self evident.

Anyways, tldr: ppl are smarter than given credit for, smarter and much more capable - IQ is real and matters but far less than we are led to believe. People are awesome - the epitome of biological life on Earth and we do a lot of amazing things and anyone can be amazing.

I hate it when the Hacker News collective belittles itself - don't do that. I rant here bc it's one of the most interesting places I've found and I care about what all of you think far more than I care about your IQ scores.

> predicting the future with high accuracy

You can't do this. It's not a matter of IQ, it's a matter of math. Higher order effects are essentially impossible to predict because the level of detail you need to know the initial conditions in is not possible. Even in simple systems where all the rules are known like a billiards table. Furthermore, if you could do this, you would be a billionaire by now just from trading the stock market. This claim alone makes me doubt the rest of your comment.

Meta: I have noticed many comments written in this style lately. Long-winded with out-of-place internet shorthand. It is as if someone is deliberately trying to sound youthful while not really knowing how. It is the "how do you do, fellow kids" of writing styles.

I am not sure what sort of LLM-powered bot is behind them, or whether it's one person with some sort of schizophrenia, but once you notice it you will see at least one of these per popular post.

IME fast talking people simply give half assed formulations of half assed ideas.

Do you understand quantum mechanics? It's one thing to be smart, it's another to use your ability.

thank you! fascinating reads

I have noticed the style, hadn't thought to attribute it to "sounding youthful". To me it just sounds genuinely from a younger person.

Fixations around "intelligence"/IQ is huge these days, I have found, among young men, not just because of the AI stuff.

And humans in general can still, for now, write and be passionate and maybe have some misplaced enthusiasm on internet forums!

I think you just need to go further in your thought process here: if you recognize that your amazing IQ scores have only very local relevance, that they don't capture everything, why feel the need to have any investment in them at all? Would it be too much of a conspiracy to you if I told you that IQ is rather a lot of BS?

If the category you are working with is the kind of thing that you have to construct such nuance, and circles, and "yes but also..."s around, perhaps you might question your category outright?

Just to say, have you ever maybe thought that what we call "intelligence" is somewhat determined more by time and place than it is by our collective answers to multiple choice questions? Just maybe something to think about.

if you're not a native english speaker, it's normal to score lower on the (English) verbal tests

one of the better memes on hn well played

That was a difficult thing for me as well -- if you have such great ideas in your head but they fall apart once you try to bring them down on paper, maybe those ideas simply aren't that great.

You’d still be reasoning using symbols, language is inherently an extension of symbols and memes. Think of a person representing a complex concept in their mind with a symbol and using it for further reasoning

Other than the word “language”, programming languages and natural languages really have very little in common.

Anecdotally, when I write code, I don’t “talk in my head”. The structures that I have in my brain are in fact difficult to put into words, and I can only vaguely describe them as interconnected 3D shapes evolving over time, or even just “feelings” and “instincts” in some cases.

The code that comes out of that process does not, in fact, describe the process fully, even though it describes exactly what the computer should do. That’s why reading someone else’s code can be so difficult - you are accessing just the end product of their thinking process, without seeing the process itself.

I do subjectively agree with this. I, too, don't "code by words". However, it's the first time someone has described their personal experience to me as interconnected 3d shapes. Really fascinating and really distant from my own experience. For the second part of your message, code comments are a possible place where you can store the process, via the medium of words, this time.

I absolutely agree that predicting the future has nothing to do with IQ - not directly. I'm not suggest that I have a formula or specific process that reveals to me what will happen - actually, it's the opposite.

It's an intuitive process. Almost always the most likely things that can will be what happens - the top 3 most likely outcomes of whatever will almost always contain the thing that does happen but that list must be generated adequately, factoring in the system, players and rules of whatever it is - for example: "at work" , "co-workers" , "who gets a promotion" - the most deserving person only might get the promotion, what the Boss wants is the actual key factor for predicting that outcome.

I rarely reply to replies - to make myself even more conceited, I'm not suggesting that you should feel special or anything, I'm noting this bc you've hit a button of mine - as knowing what will happen before it does is both one of my favorite things to do and an almost natural function of my experience at this point. Not everything can be predicted and I'm not talking like "on x date x will happen exactly" - not typically, there are exceptions. I've never been able to adequately explain this but I will attempt bc I think everyone can do this to some extent.

IQ factors in bc I'm able to do this bc I have an encyclopedia in my head that I am constantly updating as much as I am able - all the time, everyday constantly adding data to a "hard drive" that has so many files I honestly don't even kno what's all there at this point - I don't even try.

Almost everything I've ever read, almost every concept I've actually thought about (highdeas or altered state ponderings included) and everything I've written out by hand is still inside my head rn and I can retrieve if I need it - I unlock it with passion of all things, for example were we to have a heated debate about the Roman Empire during the course of our conversation everything I've ever learned about Rome would come back to me - to the point I could quote professor's lectures verbatim or quote off encyclopedia entries that support my argument exactly from the copy that exists inside my head. I have to be into it for it to work.

Anyways, back to the future ;)

If your correctly identify the parameters of any given situation and you can account for what people want - the intent behind their actions, what motivates them, you will see that their desires, the chain of causation and what is actually possible incredibly narrows down the actual possibilities from the "anything can happen" point of view to one where the next event in the chain is rather obvious.

So, your right - I can't do it Fr and I literally make assumptions, inferences and operate off of hypothetical data often - and more often than not I am able to predict what will happen with high accuracy.

That works bc all people are essentially the same and we all have the same underlying motivations regardless of all demographic factors.

Meh, this could be a book.

To another point of yours - I've made others an incredible amount of money in the stock market and cryptocurrency. I've never been very motivated by money. I think your Buffets, Musks and Bezos have mental disorders and I don't envy their obsession in the slightest.

This was fun :)

Have an awesome day!

I think your comment and mine are two sides of a coin. I'm very aware that intelligence isn't everything and the nuances and circles are not of my creation. Luck is huge.

What you are describing is the difference between a Nicolai Tesla and a Thomas Edison - Tesla was far more brilliant than Edison and what he's was doing was superior to what Edison was doing in the same field of study but Edison won and Tesla died poor and most of his greatest discoveries died with him.

The world is not made for smart people - like I said, an IQ of 150 is an incredible obstacle to a normal life. That is relevant. IQ alone is not enough but of someone spends a lifetime living with a high IQ and paying my sort of attention they will see connections that others don't, stuff will just be obvious to them that others cannot see at all, stuff that others lose sleep over won't bother them and what causes them to lose sleep others won't understand.

I think you need to think further in your thought process if you think something so substantial is merely a consequence of time and place - I assure you there is more to it.

Although I fit the profile of a verbal thinker (English degree, education in the humanities) I don't exactly find language the primary aspect of my thought.

It seems more like a complement to it: the idea arises, and then I have this compulsion to verbalise it, which gets quite frustrating as it takes several iterations. Clearly words do matter to me as a way to structure and record my ideas but there is something that pre-empts verbalisation and to some extent resists it.

I cannot provide insight on how I arrive at ideas. Even when I did literary criticism, the best I can say is that I absorbed lots of text and then suddenly a pattern would spring out. But the same things would happen for me studying maths or the hard sciences.

Software engineering is actually a bit different for me because I am not naturally a good algorithmic problem solver. Really I am somebody very passionate about computing who has a near-compulsion to see and collect more and more technology. So for me it is as simple as saying "this resembles a reader monad" or "this puns on the active record pattern". Less impressive than my humanities intelligence but worth maybe 10x the amount in the labour market :-)

Programming is moreso based on recursive problem solving. (Most) language does have some recursive structures, but these become quite difficult to think about after just a few levels, and really aren't what you'd normally consider to be "good language", e.g.

> The dog's owner's house's roof's angle's similarity to an equilateral triangle is remarkable.

Ok so first of all: I am truly sorry that the world is hard for you. I think its really critical for your well-being to understand that even if you are very assured at how smart you are, you are never too smart to talk to a (lesser IQ) professional of any sort; namely one who can help you navigate your thoughts and problems. Even if I can't convince you of anything else, just try to see how a third-party alone can be helpful in matters of the squishy mind. I see lots of people like you who don't get the help they could get because they feel for whatever reason above it, and it seems like your world view is really ripe for some nasty repression. You must understand your high-IQ as a symptom, not a cause.

Now a little bit cheekier advice. Let me help you make an argument for your position against someone like me, because I really didn't see how I was to be convinced that this thing we are talking about is "substantial" enough to reduce any which way. The only way you can really argue with my position here is to take the point of view that "intelligence" is something like a metaphysical category. It doesn't have to be exactly that, but the important thing is that intelligence is more something "justice" than it is like "phenotype" or "language" or "neuron". You simply cannot be a materialist and also hold the fundamental nature of something like "intelligence," I wont insult you by filling in the dots there, but just know you are committed to a bit of woo-woo when you want to go all the way like you are (which is fine, I like woo-woo, just not in this case). You want, at the end of the day, for the brain to be more than an organ, but a truly teleological entity, which by chance has now touched upon something "substantial". Its a rough argument to make these days, you would of done great in the Enlightenment though :).

Also, what I believe you were trying to get at with the Tesla/Edison thing is this idea that Edison manifests my point of view because he was more successful in like the capitalist sense than Tesla. But that is just surface level here, and not at all what I am saying. I would come back and say "no, those are simply too people we are now calling intelligent, for different reasons." Intelligence isnt about results, its about certain things that we value (at a given time). And I am not quite sure even how you want to make your point here, we all generally consider Tesla as a very intelligent man these days, people even did back then!

I just assumed this was a reddit copy-pasta