Comment by JumpCrisscross

> the information of the exact shade is discarded before the scene is committed to memory and before most conscious reasoning

I'm curious if we have any evidence for this. A lot of visual processing happens in the retina. To my knowledge, the retina has no awareness of words. I'd also assume that the visual cortex comes before anything to do with language, though that's just an assumption.

> it's not that the words we know are the reason for how we can think, it's that what differences we care about cause both the ways we think and the words we use

This is fair. Though for something like colour, a far-older system in our brains than language, I'd be sceptical of the latter controlling the former.