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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

(www.scientificamerican.com)
549 points orcul | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.197s | source
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andai ◴[19 Oct 24 22:29 UTC] No.41891282[source]▶
When I was 13 or so, a friend asked me, "So, you speak three languages. Which one do you think in?" and the question left me speechless, because until that moment I hadn't considered that people think in words. It seemed a very inefficient way to go about things!

Much later, I did begin to think mostly in words, and (perhaps for unrelated reasons?) my thinking became much less efficient.

Also related, I experienced temporarily enhanced cognition while under the influence of entheogens. My thoughts, which normally fade within seconds, became stretched out, so that I could stack up to 7 layers of thought on top of each other and examine them simultaneously.

I remember feeling greatly diminished, mentally, once that ability went away.

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etcd ◴[20 Oct 24 01:53 UTC] No.41892296[source]▶
With the drugs were you able to be more efficient for example code quicker, or was it more like better insights. Or perhaps both?
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1. andai ◴[20 Oct 24 12:46 UTC] No.41894998[source]▶
It might be that my working memory was temporarily expanded. Research has found its possible to massively increase it by disabling parts of the brain with electronmagnets.

What it seemed like subjectively though is that my thoughts themselves became "longer", imagine planks of wood. You can stack them (slightly offset, like a video timeline with layers), and the wider they are, the more ideas you can stack before it topples over.

I have unfortunately been unable to replicate the experience. There were after-effects for a few weeks where my senses and cognition were markedly enhanced, but this faded after a few weeks.

My main take-away here is "why are we trying to make machines smarter than humans, we should try to make humans smarter"! (I guess Neuralink kinda does that, but it doesn't actually make the human part smarter...)