A very long time ago I took a programming aptitude test, supposedly from IBM. The test was essentially detecting pattern anomalies. Two straight lines, one crooked. Pick the crooked. The patterns became increasingly more complex. I remember a little voice in my head verbalizing "two straight, one crooked". But at some point the voice stopped but I was sure which item broke the pattern.
My take away is that language is secondary to thinking - aka intuitive pattern detection. Language is the Watson to Sherlock.
The corollary is that treating language as primary in decision making is (sometimes) not as effective as treating it as secondary. At this point in my life (I'm old) I seem to have spent much of my life attempting to understand why my pattern matching/intuition made a choice that turned out to be so superior to my verbal language process.