(Replying to PARENT post)
> Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought.
I don't dispute your conclusions, but I think you might be taking the idea of visual thought too literally. It doesn't necessarily mean a rendered view of a scene, but rather can encompass abstract visual-like spaces such as control flow graphs when thinking through the proof of a program's correctness
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(Replying to PARENT post)
When asking what language you think in, they're probably referring to your Internal Monologue [1]. Not everyone has one. It's kind of strange that some of us have it and others don't, it kind of makes me wonder how and why it evolved.
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(Replying to PARENT post)
Another example is that some people describe thinking as needing to talk out a problem with others and if you can't speak freely you can't think. I don't know where the meeting point of all these descriptions of thinking meet, but we're rapidly just ending up with information in > information out.
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(Replying to PARENT post)
- Richard Feynman described an experiment he did to time himself counting to 60. He could do it while reading, but not talking. His friend John Tukey could talk while counting time, but not read.
- Temple Grandin described thinking of a word as seeing every individual example of that item she's ever seen.
- Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought.
This was an "a-ha" moment that explained a lot of human behavior.
For example, why does my manager put me in a noisy room and still expect me to write software, and propose "headphones" when I complain about the noise? He doesn't use silence as a scratch space for thinking. On the flip side, I don't understand why he cares if the lights are on. That's decidedly less important to me than whether we have extra toilet paper.
This article does confirm that thinking is not merely talking to one's self, which seems obvious to me but apparently is not a universal belief. Questions like "Multi-linguals, what language do you think in?" puzzle me because I don't generally think in any language, up until the point where I need to generate words. It's like asking what language a(n instrumental) symphony is written in, or what the key signature is of a painting. The question is a type error.