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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

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549 points orcul | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | 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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1. jbreckmckye ◴[21 Oct 24 19:28 UTC] No.41907543[source]▶
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 :-)