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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

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549 points orcul | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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fjfaase ◴[19 Oct 24 21:56 UTC] No.41891068[source]▶
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.
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kerblang ◴[20 Oct 24 00:29 UTC] No.41891928[source]▶
> 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.

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alserio ◴[20 Oct 24 01:00 UTC] No.41892060[source]▶
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
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1. dleeftink ◴[20 Oct 24 02:40 UTC] No.41892495[source]▶
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

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2. alserio ◴[20 Oct 24 12:04 UTC] No.41894791[source]▶
thank you! fascinating reads