Comment by andai

When I learned French as an adult, I pushed myself heavily into "forced immersion", avoiding English completely for long periods of time as my French slowly built itself up. This almost entirely silenced my inner monologue in English for those periods of time, and left me with a toddler's ability to think in French. In this comparative silence, it was much easier to observe my non-verbal thought processes moving around "behind" the scarce words.

Then my French inner monologue got good enough that I could mostly think in French, especially when I was in a French-speaking environment. One fascinating detail was that after switching from a French-speaking environment to an English-speaking one, I would actually spontaneously translate from French to English for about 15 minutes until my brain switched back.

So it seems obvious to me that it's possible to suppress or at least severely impoverish the language of thought, that other "layers" of thought exist besides the words, and that it's even possible to change the actual language of verbal thought.

Also, something which at least some other people in the HN crowd might recognize: When I'm deepest in the zone programming and refactoring, I tend to work with a lot of half articulated concepts I can't put into words. You know how people talk about "code smells"? That isn't a literal smell for me, but it's generally a non-verbal sense that a pattern is wrong.

"Thought is language" is a folk intuition that has been proven wrong over and over. People with severe global or agrammatic aphasia still can score higher on intelligence tasks than you'd expect - even though this data generally comes from people who suffered a stroke, which generally isn't neatly contained to one's language capability. Also, more importantly, even in people with full brain function, the language network appears remarkably unresponsive under neuroimaging when performing arithmetic, logic puzzles, or theory-of-mind tasks. Also famously music tasks: Vissarion Shebalin lost most of his language capabilities to a stroke and still completed his fifth symphony.

There's correlation, and your language network likely augments your intelligence, but as proven by millions of animals, unfortunate humans and also some less-unfortunate human infants, you really don't need language for intelligence.

Where language helps most strongly is metacognition: evidence suggests that it is severely limited without language, and I suppose that is where the common belief that thought is language comes from: the moment you try to think about your thoughts, you use language!

My theory (and this with literally no evidence) is that we use the language network for metacognition precisely because it is not that involved in primary thought. Important to note that "we" here means humans: animals appear to demonstrate metacognition even without language.

You just stated your vibes like it is a fact.

There was a study about this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679762412430...

I'm not sure. I think I had a reasonable amount of metacognition as a child. I remember being eight years old, and having a really cool idea but forgetting it.

So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me.

And so I remembered that I had been fiddling with my seat belt when I had the idea. And so I resumed fiddling, and my cool idea promptly came back.

Metaphors and abstractions came to me much later though. (I struggled with OOP for about 10 years until one day it all just clicked.) Symbolism took me another ten years.