When is it better to think without words?

When making visual art, I don’t think in words. Shapes, colors, shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do I translate this to words. I’m not sure what trying to draw by thinking in words would even look like.

Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words provide a good starting point).

Coding ends in “words”, or at least some form of written language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.

Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but they’re not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely different context and origin.

I don’t deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me it’s just one part of the whole stream of conscious.

I’m curious if anyone else feels this way about words?

Is it like this?: It's one of those things you can't really describe - you just feel it

Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process, I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good, did I find morels this season, does the code work as required)