When is it better to think without words?

I don't have an "inner monologue" and don't think in words, only in images, but I've never experienced what this author is describing in terms of "nonsense words" or "hand vibrations".

I was with some friends that were in a band together, and we got thinking about this topic, and ended up arranging ourselves from least verbal to most verbal. I was on one end, where all of my thoughts appear as emotions or images; on the other end was our bassist, who experienced his thoughts as fully formed sentences. He said when he's getting to a difficult passage in a song the words "better focus here, don't mess up" will ring out in his head. He also said he has fully dictated mental conversations with himself.

I also read very quickly because I look at the shape of paragraphs and assemble the word-shapes into mental images and pick up meaning that way; high speed, but low comprehension. I struggle greatly to read philosophy because it's quite difficult to visualize. My wife reads slowly but hears every word in her head; her comprehension is much higher. I can do high comprehension reading by slowing down and looking at every word, but it feels like holding back an excitable dog.

A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.

I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.

I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than my hand-wavy rationalisation.

It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.

Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?

Oh wow I have the exact same experience reading philosophy. Often the difficulty is that the concepts are complex and unintuitive in a non-linguistic frame, but it’s very difficult to think in a purely linguistic frame, or to think that the results of that thought are meaningful in any way. Sometimes I find myself able to restate the general point by sort of moving the words around without having internalized the idea.

I’m aphantasic with no mental imagery at all so my inner experience could not be more different: it’s strange to explain, but I experience “unvocalized” language, which means the words are sort of just there without “hearing” them in my head—-I don’t have inner sound at all either and so the words don’t have an accent, for example. My thought moves at a speed much faster than speaking and I can read fast with high comprehension—-but it takes me incredible effort to remember the color of someone’s eyes, for example. I more or less skip descriptions in novels and prefer to read philosophy.

I’ve always found it interesting that in programming communities the two extremes of aphantasic and hyperphantasic seem to both be very overrepresented.

I just learned that term today, but I guess so. I don't know how I generate words, they're just there. I type at about 120 wpm and speak very quickly as well, but as it's coming out I'm just flashing through different images in my head, often partial images from my own memory, and the words come out without paying attention to them, like out of a lower layer of consciousness. I write a lot of 300+ word messages at work, and it's just image after image firing in my head while the words appear.

I think I have a concept-image map in my head; to test it out, I'm thinking of random words, and very well-defined images are popping into my head. "Insurance" is the impression of slate grey followed by a view into a 90s corporate office room. "Propulsion" is the bell of one of the space shuttle engines firing on full, but not centered in frame. "Gravity" is one of the rooms in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Etc. But it's harder to go the other way; if I see an image or a drawing and have to describe what it is, there's more of a lag before I can retrieve the words to describe it. It's much easier to think of other related images.

What happens when you read descriptions if you can't skip over them?

Same. And it's weird to hear someone else understand this so well.

what happens is that they're comparatively boring

I first heard about “thinking in pictures” from Dr Temple Grandin, who is autistic and associates it with autism. Anyway, it’s also how she thinks and appears to be a super power when it comes to designing feed lots. https://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html

I imagine you also struggled with algebra? Being a non-visual abstraction.

What do you see when you close your eyes? Just light and colors? What about when you dream?

I ask because there's done research suggesting visual hallucinations while sleeping helps maintain the visual cortex's proficiency. IIRC it was just contingent on visual stimuli. Sometimes as I fall asleep I see a very bright white light, so something like that can count.

If you don't remember your dreams it might be interesting to keep a dream journal. It might take awhile to get your first entry. I kept one a decade ago and my first entry was "I remember but color blue" and it took a week. But even though I don't keep it anymore I remember most of my dreams and they are still quite vivid. Might be a fun experiment

Sounds like you think in word blobs that only get unpacked when you talk or write. Otherwise they move through your mind bundled but understandable to you.

I remember them for as long as I read it and then it goes away.

It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.

I don't.

When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.

I've read all 5 books of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.

Not the guy you are asking, but when I close eyes there is only black. If try to imagine let's say apple, maybe it's there at opacity of 0.5% or less. But requires mental effort. No inner monologue as well.

Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.

philosophy, i find, is one of the forms where the shapeless thinking described in the article does a lot of the work for me. especially the phase of internalization. you take a sentence you don’t quite get, and then spend a bunch of time just meditating about it, rejecting the temptations to think elsewhere. and then, in time, it just clicks into making all sorts of sense.

it’s definitely not “purely linguistic” – one form of it is about letting the idea engage you to shape your inner vision.

I dream in images but have only once in my life seen anything but darkness or vague abstract patterns with no connection to imagery with my eyes closed in a waking state.

I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.

But I have a persistent inner monologue that only ever stops with effort when I sit down to meditate.

  > I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.

FWIW, this gets better after practice

Algebra is very visual. Picture the variables and parentheses and constants just moving around, like a choreographed dance. Same with calculus, picturing the curves and areas and surfaces, until you start hitting more than 3 dimensions.

I'm the same way, and I often feel like I don't know what the words that come out of my mouth will be until they happen.

I'm thinking in abstract feelings and images, and then it feels like some subconscious part of my brain is actually figuring out the words and saying them, if that makes any sense.

It can be spooky sometimes since it doesn't always feel like I'm in control of the specific words I use

It’s odd, I experience aphantasia in the way that I am a words thinker, able to talk with myself, the whole 5 miles.

But I am also able to have very vivid dreams, given that I sleep at the right time, around 22:00 - 24:00 and being sufficiently tired also seems to help. They seem very real when I am dreaming them but when I wake up I can remember the thoughts of imagery but can’t recall any real images or pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to have had them in the moment.

Thanks for the link!

Actually, I did struggle with algebra, and also calculus and differential equations. As with most on this site, I fell into an "advanced"/"gifted" cohort, but I was always down at the bottom of the class.

I excelled (relative to my peers, not to truly gifted people) at linear algebra, statistics, systems engineering, and combinatorics.

Usually skimming fast with bursts of visualization, but I have to force myself into that slower, word-by-word mode for dense material

If I close my eyes I see the inner of my eye lids. Interestingly very intense visual stimuli can trigger mental images for me. I remember that when I closed my eyes after endless hours of Counterstrike, I would still see the game, tho I couldn't control what I see. Same goes for porn. Sometimes I remember my dreams, which are visual, but I don't think that I experience any other sense while dreaming. As kid I had lucid dreams, which I was stunned of, because of the amount of details I remembered. I just looked at faces of people I knew. Lucid dreaming is still something which I want to try to train.

Yeah I never understood descriptions or who the intended audience of those long winded descriptive words is, but if other people have this magical capability of getting visual imagery out of it, I guess sure. It is hard to believe, but it must be the case. It is so hard to fathom that other people process things so differently, but I guess it can also explain a lot.

What is your experience of thinking? Sounds like it’s a black box to you

How? I've tried writing it down many times over the years, but never recalled anything by the time I've been able to pick up anything to write with. Not a word.

It’s the same for me and every other aphantasic I’ve spoken with. I go years and years without remembering dreams, but there are distinct periods in my life when I remembered them often. For me it’s essentially if I wake up in a dreaming state and can quickly “translate” them into language. Strange to describe, but I do have a very distinct experience of dejavu sometimes, which I’ve come to believe is tied to latent dream memories—curious if you have anything like that?

It’s actually something very interesting about the function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That there’s such insane variability in the structure of conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all. I’ve read reputable studies that suggest it’s crucial for learning, something similar to training on synthetic data.

For me, it’s dependent on waking up in a half-dreaming state. Then I’m able to sort of “translate” the dream into language, which I remember—-and sometimes from there I can get back to parts of the dream I didn’t think I remembered. It’s still very rare for me and I’ll go years without remembering a single dream—-in fact, mentioning this to friends when I was younger was one of the first areas where I learned my conscious experience was so different. I imagine getting better at it would be similar to getting better at lucid dreaming.

Same—including the time I dabbled in “experience altering” compounds when much younger. I always find it so strange that many people, including in this thread, find the presence of language in their inner experience unsettling or “imperfect”—-I really wouldn’t trade my inner monologue for anything…

I’m the same, but it can also be frustrating when I _try_ to retain that info, it constantly shifts.

I described it to my partner as one of those AI generated videos where the details are constantly morphing and shifting, even if the general idea remains the same - I simply can’t hold onto a single still visualization for more than a second.

So, to agree with you, I have also read all five SLA books, and I could imagine Kaladin right now, but in an amorphous, constantly shifting way, which is a bit unsettling - maybe like Pattern? :-)

Like many other aphantasics below, just my eyelids. It’s ironic because I’ve always had really good (better than 20:20) eyesight, but I can only remember words.

The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesn’t seem to be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly diverse structures of inner experience. It’s clearly a function of the brain much older than conscious experience [1] and I’ve also read research supporting its necessary role in learning (roughly equivalent to reinforcement learning on synthetic data). There are very rare periods in my life when I’ve remembered my dreams often—-which definitely suggests it’s a skill I could refine—-but generally I recall one or two a year.

One of the interesting questions is which properties of inner experience are genetic, which early developmental, and which skills one can refine at any point in life. Before I knew I was aphantasic, I had a phase studying chess and I tried so hard to “get better” at visualizing games—-one of the most frustrating experiences of my life! Knowing one’s limitations, you can then refine appropriate techniques like algebraic representations etc.

[1] GPT found some terrific papers on this question. In fact, dreaming (measured by two-phase REM sleep cycles) goes back to vertebrates — and seems to have been convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish appear as the limit with only a single sleep phase. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 is fascinating.

I think in images and abstractions and algebra/math came very easy to me. I couldn't really describe to someone how it looks in my head though.