In what language do deaf people think?
straightdope.com
straightdope.com
Made for a great marriage.
(Joking aside, it was really interesting to watch them communicate. He would hold her hands while she "spoke" Then she would hold his hands -- so he knew she was there -- while he spoke back to her. Worked very well, actually. They had two beautiful kids that grew up to become advocates and workers in the hearing and sight-impaired communities)
It was an amazing family. As I recall, both had jobs outside the home. Both were avid readers, writers, and participated in several civic organizations. I used to love visiting them as a kid.
I wonder if it's to intentionally deflate scores which drop to -4. For particularly bad ones, it'd encourage moderators to downvote.
Not that I particularly think yours is. Must've rubbed a few the wrong way.
And since HN already discourages one-liners, I think the moral is to quip at your peril!
EDIT: this was meant to be a reply under @shasta.
Here's an idea: It would be interesting to have the minimum karma required to downvote an item increase with the absolute value of the existing value. Thus as a comment goes more and more negative, fewer and fewer people could successfully downvote it.
They'd also use floorboard telegraphy, hammer on the floorboards to see if anyone is in the house, they hammer back if they feel it.
Taken with the conclusion of the submission that abstract thought requires language for its development, this leads us to the conclusion that abstract thought - far from an isolated activity - is a consequence of community.
It seems to me that it would be possible to develop abstract thought in isolation, but perhaps it would take a genius, in the same way that some mathematicians have developed mathematics in isolation, and it's just that it helps tremendously to have the cultural foundation to stand on. eg. I find it much easier to visualize abstraction, reference and so on, than to say it.
It sounds to me like she was thinking out loud, or 'talking' to herself. Thinking would correspond to imagining her hands moving, presumably in far more detail then the rest of us can render internally. Except perhaps for some master craftspeople who use their hands professionally.
For example, a few pianists can learn a piece from reading the score alone, away from the keyboard.
Wait, I have a question: by thinking in language, does this mean, that, it's very common for people (in the English speaking world) to think like there was a background voice speaking in your head, like the thinking bubble scenes depicted in movies and sitcoms?
As a Chinese, now I can think in languages (dual thinking in Mandarin and English), but in the school days I have developed a totally different, alternative way of thinking process.
All Indo-European languages have alphabet to represent syllables, but Chinese is not a language (Mandarin, Cantonese are languages), it's a distinctively unique writing system. Why unique? Its logograms/logographs are not directly linked with phonemes but linked with the meaning itself.
When I do thinking and reasoning, I recall a concept by the word's exact character shape and structure, then match with the picture of book pages I memorized, identify the corresponding semantics and then organize my result. This is way faster than thinking in languages like a background voice speaking in my head.
Elementary education in China has a technique called 默读, which means read without speaking, after we learned this, later we were taught to get rid of "read" altogether. We only scan the picture of one book page, and cache it as a static picture, then a question is raised about a particular word appeared in that page. We are demanded to recite the context out. This is called memorize-before-comprehend. After decades of training and harsh tests like this, we were totally used to treat thinking as pattern extracting from lines of sentences.
This is why Chinese find English grammar funny, a noun is a noun, it should be a static notation of things, easily recognizable universally, why the hell do people invent stuff like plural form to make obstacles for recognizing?
Human voices spectrum are way smaller than visual spectrum. And our brain is faster and more optimized at processing mass volume visual stuff(especially pattern recognition), does anyone else think in pictures?
Update 1: Anther reason why Chinese are soooooo obsessed with calligraphy. If some idea is really important we write it in an unforgettable, various artful way so the pattern extracting is even faster. And the calligraphy details contains rich hints and link to related ideas.
Update 2: Found out deaf people also have problems with English grammar, similar to the common mistakes Chinese makes http://www.reddit.com/comments/bgasc/_/c0mmn2l
At least in my own experience, I talk to myself without actually making any sounds when I am thinking (in my head, so to speak).
I never really thought that others would do it differently until this post.
I have noticed that most of my thoughts originate as 'tendencies'. These tendencies are not verbal, but often vividly embody ideas. I then have to expend some effort to verbalize them. This is easily done for most of my thoughts (such as this one!), but for some, I find that the tendencies are not vivid enough or translating them effectively into words is beyond my current abilities.
I can get rid of the verbalizing stage altogether, which is what I would do when I automatically reason about where the center of gravity of a spoon I hold in my hand is.
This is horrible obvious when I try to work with numbers. I've never worked with math higher than two digits in spoken language. In order for me to do any more complex math I first need to translate the spoken numbers into written form. Translating between written and spoken forms is painful for me. It can take me two or three seconds per character to comprehend spelling, phone numbers, or math. Writing down a phone number is almost impossible unless one of the parts is one I have memorize. 414, 920, and 644 are numbers I can instantly convert between their written or spoken forms because they are parts of numbers I've memorized. It is frustrating for me because no one I've encountered seems to have this issue and therefore I'm a special kind of moron for not being able to keep up.
The only reason this hasn't caused me horrible problems in life is I'm able to memorize enough to compensate.
> And our brain is faster and more optimized at processing mass volume visual stuff(especially pattern recognition), does anyone else think in pictures?
I'm pretty sure I think at one level of abstract above imagery most of the time. I'm currently reading through Lord of the Rings and I'm finding myself not thinking in imagery at all but simply absorbing information and forming mental maps of the terrain instead of experiencing it visually. Some of it is definitely Tolken's writing style, it readily lends itself to abstraction in my mind.
When reading Lord of the Rings, I force myself to experience it at a lower level of abstraction. At a lower abstraction my brain has to work much harder to form original imagery (not just dropping in stuff from the movies) and my reading drops to a fifth of my normal speed. The experience is much richer and well worth it.
I think that you might have some degree of dyslexia and other co-morbidities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Comorbidities).
Have you ever gotten it checked? An accurate diagnosis can go a long way in formulating a response and finding a solution to this.
I can't even begin to imagine how bad it must be for you, but I do know that if you work at it with some professional help then it will improve in subtle ways. Miracles won't happen due to age, but you will be the richer for it.
Take care.
Sure can't ;)
I don't know if I was clear enough. I only have difficultly converting between spoken and written language. My reading and math skills are fine. I can keep a running total of groceries in my head during a trip to the store.
I do have trouble remembering proper spelling but that's what spell checking for. (OSX 10.6 added automatic spelling correction to TextEdit. I love it!)
So yes, even as a SO, I understand. And judging from your writing style and comprehension, you're not stupid... Just different.
There's a few other things you'd be good at, but those would be best to take private.
Reading also can take on something of that ideographic nature of chinese -- take the word calligraphy. I don't need to read the letters and then put them in order and deduce that the word is 'calligraphy'. I see the whole shape of the word and comprehend it. Thisisalsowhyitssomuchahardertounderstandenglishwhenwedon'tputspacesbetweenwords.
I've got to say I scanned over that as quickly as the rest of the para and had no problem understanding it. Indeed it's hard not to see the word patterns. This sort of thing gets tricky when you remove the vowels or when there are collisions at word boundaries (expertsexchange, etc.).
I read it first as "this phrase is _more_ comprehensible" but knew it wasn't right.
Also you spelt "mispelled" incorrectly ;0)>
The truth is that we all think in an undefinable mental language and our common language is an abstraction of that layer. I remember this interesting experiment that I read about in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.
Someone decided to test if we truly think in language or not. So they took a letter and rotated it. They then asked the subject if it was a mirror image of the original or the original itself. Interestingly they found that the further they rotated the longer it took for people to decode it. Now if people though in terms of language then the opposite would have been true. 180º would have been the easiest since it was just a matter of making the thing go up to the to and drag the feet of the letter down to the ground, but it took longer than 45º. Interesting. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_rotation)
Something quirky about me is that I am a bit dyslexic so it might have forced me to be more aware of this process than most people. Just like what your linguistic environment did to you.
Does anyone else here share my experience?
That's a very big assertion without substantial experimental backing - care to provide some?
Even just defining "think" sounds hard to me.
Well, to 'think' in the OP's article context means to think about. Think about fish, it swims, think about cars, it moves. The replies are more about 'information processing' and 'innovative reasoning'. So people often can not find the correct word for an abstract idea. The human brain stores a huge namespace of world view and knowledge, sometimes the natural languages are not enough to decode and describe its complexity.
If I look at the bolts sitting on my table, I don't literally think in my mind 'oh look those are bolts'. I recognize them for what they are, my brain does some processing, and at the same time as my mind is about to wander off thinking about the project I have them for, it loads the word 'bolts' into fast-access memory for immediate access.
That's why I get so hung up if I see or discuss something I can't remember the word for. I go into a waiting-for-IO state where I can't precache the right word :)
I've a terrible memory and it's been getting worse, sometimes I'll use a temporary variable until the relevant part of my brain has recalled the proper term - this can be for abstract concepts, names or other nouns. Kinda like when one uses the term "whatsit" or "thing-a-me-bob" in physical speech.
I find that words come to me sometimes days later, especially when it's a given name.
My grandfather had alzeimer's and mother is convinced she is going that way, I'm only in my 30s though - it is a bit worrying but also fascinating to consider the internal machinations.
I often solve problems when thinking about something else - a song, a radio program. THen when I go back to the problem, the solution is clear. Where did that "Thinking" occur? Not in my language buffer, it was fully occupied. In fact in might have been getting the language buffer "out of the loop" that allowed the thinking to occur.
When debugging code, I absolutely DO NOT have an internal dialog going on. I'm paging through code, following definitions, looking at code blocks as a whole, putting the code into some mental space that is not words, then voila! the wrong piece shows up in my mind and I have it.
Language is over-rated.
Experienced programmers know this, and constantly re-read their code to make sure it does what they think it does. But I just finished teaching programming to complete beginners, and this was a big hurdle. They would constantly say "My code's right, but the answer is wrong," not realizing the absurdity of the statement. It took a lot of time and patience to train them to always read the code they wrote.
But what's the definition of thinking?
For me there are two ways of "thinking", the conscious one, in which I'm talking to myself and the unconscious, intuitive one, in which I don't talk to myself, but get some kind of "enlightenment", just see or understand something without a conscious thought.
The unconscious thinking works for me on all stuff I'm good at, stuff I learned und exercised a lot, so in a way the conscious thinking has been done before, created some kind of neural connection, and know this connection is activated without my assistance.
For me it's also the case that my logic sometimes works in a unconscious way, that I just get something, but it's the question how much this unconscious logic is assisted by former training.
A quite long time I only used the unconscious thinking. As long I advanced, there has been no need for an other way of thinking. But I got at a barrier, where my unconscious thinking couldn't go further.
I think, that If you're confronted with something completely new and very hard, then the unconscious thinking can go some way, but at some point it won't get further. You need then to change to the conscious thinking, create the necessary neural connections, and If that's done, then you're able to think again in an unconscious way.
I think, that you can limit yourself, if you're only used to one way of thinking
Often I'm debbuging in the same way as you. But sometimes it's very inefficient, when I'm stumble around without a direction.
Sometimes it's way more efficient to step back, get the bigger picture, ask yourself some questions, build assumptions and verify them.
Sometimes during the "conscious" debugging, when I'm talking to myself I'm getting an "enlightenment", and the bug is solved.
E.g. play a kids match game, where you turn up pairs of cards looking for a match. Two of spades, Three of hearts - no match. Turn them back over, try again.
But really, you aren't saying those things in your head - you might but you don't have to. You just look at the cards, and if they don't match you turn them back down. Try another pair - five of diamonds, two of spades - hey! that matches the 1st two of spades I saw!
The whole time you are consciously looking for a match, and unless you're explaining the game to somebody, your language processor can remain idle.
That's right. My naming of the thinking "styles" has been suboptimal.
I think, that the kids game is just easy enough, that your brain can get the rules and playing it without contorted maneuvers.
This isn't unconscious, you're aware of everything, but in a way you just see it, without the need understanding. In a way you're brain understands for you, you don't see the needed steps to get to the understanding.
But when something is a lot harder, than your brain can't just understand all at once, then you need to do the steps for "yourself", by talking to you, by explaining it to you, or by reading an explanation, and this explanation is "written" in your brain, so that the next time the brain can do the steps for itself.
When learning from a textbook, there are those that need pictures to understand explanations. There are those that need the explanation, pictures are useless to them. I don't think they are necessarily thinking any differently, just entering the knowledge through different i/o ports.
I'm not sure if that middle meaning (of disparate symbols that compose the whole) detracts from making the "word" in it's entirety less abstract, but I would say in general that I think about words in terms of their abstract meaning first, then about their relation to other meanings and words. In general (and more so today with spell check) I would say that no native speaker is thinking about the letters that compose a given word.... I'm sure that there are people who can recall words by thinking of the word as it's written- that sounds like one of those memory retention "hacks" I hear about sometimes. Maybe that system is just more prevalent in the asian education system.
Sadly the modern Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are choosing an alphabetical system rather than Chinese characters. The one and only civilization today still using logograms is China.
You're right that the Koreans have pretty much abandoned logograms entirely, though. Now that they use hangul, I understand that there aren't many people remaining who can read anything written in their older writing systems.
Subvocalization has several draw backs. One is that it is very bad at multitasking (eg. try reading this comment while counting).
It turns out that when you are subvocalizing, you send tiny impulses to your throat as though you are speaking, just not strong enough to do so. So it is possible to eavesdrop on subvocalization (NASA has experimented with this -- see wiki article).
Some people naturally don't subvocalize because of learning disabilities; they usually have trouble writing and speaking because they have to translate their thoughts into English.
Of course the idea that you are thinking in a language is rather terrifying. Consider how it is moulding your thoughts. The idea that language effects your thoughts is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (Some people have tried to make better languages to think in, see lojban.)
I find it interesting to note that when I program, I think, at least partially, in that language -- I've even noticed that I attach sounds to some operators in C. I also notice that the way I think varies depending on the area of math I'm working in: when I am doing algebra or calculus, it's a combination of subvocalized math and visualisation of formulas, whereas complex analysis is often almost entirely visual and set theoretic topology often is neither subvocalized or visualised.
/rant
If Sapir-Whorf holds true then we should see those using a specific language excelling in specific areas shouldn't we? Could this perhaps account for some of the stereotypical characteristics we ascribe to different nationalities.
And oh yes, we all think in formulas when doing mathematics. I have problem vocalizing formulas with Greek letters to others but I can quickly write them down. I think it's because Greek letters were never officially taught in China.
Have you heard about the ideographic myth?
see http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writjap.htm
To quote from that page: "Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols."
I believe Japanese uses the ideographic kanji for nouns, plus some adjectival and verbal roots, and the phonological kana for the rest, e.g. grammar words. In English, these same words classes (nouns, adjectives, inluding adverbs ending in -ly, and mosts verbs, except the most common ones) are the words we stress when speaking. Is this the same principle at work in both Japanese and English, where the content words of a language are stressed and easier to remember semantically, and the grammar words and morphological inflections are unstressed and easier to remember phonologically?
Is this also why in written German, the nouns are capitalized (as was Dutch until 50yrs ago and English until a few hundred years ago), because it helps if they stand out?
1. Is our thought process based on language, i.e. does it use syntactical transformations that are characteristics of language. Note that introspective evidence immediately reveals that at least part of our thinking are in images. This type of thinking is clearly now linguistic. So, let's limit the question to the other modes of thinking, e.g. reasoning.
2. If the answer to (1) is affirmative, then in what language do we think? Is it our native language? What if we have two native language? What happens for deaf people? If we think in our native tongue, then how strong an influence does it exert on our thought process (i.e. was Whorf right?)
AFAIK, (1) is now accepted by most philosophy of language people. (2), however, is a matter of some debate. Some people, like Fodor, claim that we think in an innate language. This position is hard to defend for various reasons. With the recent rise of linguistic relativism (suppressed for about thirty years by Chomsky and his followers) more and more researchers are delving into the question of language of thought and the effect it has on our cognitive processes.
For an excellent introductory survey on the philosophical issues, see Murat Aydede's article (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/). If your cup of tea is more along the lines of cognitive psychology/linguistics, check out Lera Broditsky's work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lera_Boroditsky)
I can say that somewhere along my language learning experience (before I learned German), I learned to abstract my thoughts to ideas, then 'implement' them to whatever language I needed to speak at the moment.
One final thing: The most common words in all languages are grammatical functions words, e.g. "the", "a", "every", etc. How can these be represented using images? This is why, no ideogram based writing systems have ever been devised (although people thought for a while that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters had this characteristic).
You can represent brother and justice, via imagery, but what you would be doing is using a token example, comparing and creating a type out of the two situations. Now communicating that idea without a linguistic representation would be near impossible(I can't imagine an easy way) but to apprehend it without a linguistic layer is possible. (ii) It could just be my own misunderstanding of what is being said, but does having a visual representation system, mean that symbols cannot be manipulated to interact, or does that by definition make them a language? Is this a functional definition we are working with?
As well, with words like "every" "the" "a" it sounds like these things are objects to you, and not emergent connectors inherent in a linguistic system, they exist by virtue of the language existing. A visual system may not have need for such conventions. Many of these questions or examples assume an almost external objective (at least thats my interpretation) existence of linguistics, but this is coming from a linguistic mind, and assumes the necessary existence of it.( hence my begging question comment at the beggining).
I held much the same view, until I experienced ineffable idea's and concepts in non linguistic form. Anecdotally, one can try salvia or dimethyltryptamine and gain the qualia experience of a thinking or experience without linguistics.
Good points, but I feel Impossible is too strong a conclusion based on whats been said. :)
Really? How do you then differentiate freedom internally from the literal feeling you are using as a metaphor for it or say from an idea like "tropical breeze"? What's your internal token for "tropical breeze"?
Either way, I just said this to explain that our brain just needs a medium to think or if explained in terms of semantics - a medium to develop the semantic net. The voice that you have in your head is not something with which you are born. It’s something that’s being developed. It’s the same that happens with anyone with a hearing/speaking impairment that the brain will develop a different interface for them to think. For example, most people with autism probably will have a different thinking medium. Not sure if I can say it this way - but I felt that the brain uses ‘its own language’ to develop its thinking ability based on how you are.
Occasionally I'll think with a sign just as occasionally I'll drop in a foreign language word into internal speech.
My youngest at 16mo is getting quite a few signs now (and has a couple of recognisable utterances - "dake" (his bro's name in modified form), "what-this", "cheers"(!)). He's pre-vocal but he can express quite a few things and he can attempt to manipulate us using mock cries. This last point to me means he's thinking about what he wants to acquire (chocolate, ice-cream, whatever someone else is eating!). He also makes responses to signals that he's going to defecate and asks for his potty (sometimes, he's just managing to do this now) - again this seems to be relatively complex thought.
It would be interesting to me to see if his brain pattern indicates, to those doing the research, a pattern similar to a sign language user or not?
That's trivial. It just means "the mind is a structure inplemented in the brain, so any change in the mind translates into some change in the brain".
To me it seemed easy to understand: I think the internal process is that as I read I'm speaking internally to myself and so hear¹ the phonic reproduction, homophones don't matter then, the meaning is clear as in that context "rather course" the path/progression/learning-period meaning of course is nonsensical. Also there's probably something in the couplet "rather coarse" being common and there being few words that can follow rather.
I'm pretty good at proof reading but making many homophone (homophonic?) errors in informal writing.
--- ¹ I wrote this as "here", lol.
I don't read "out loud, but silently" (if you see what I mean). I don't hear the words in my head as I read. I trained myself at age 8 or 9 to read very, very fast by not "sounding out" things in my head. Net result is that I get confused quickly by misspellings. Then I need to backtrack and read things "out loud" while trying not to see what's there.
Which is tricky.
Were you an early reader? I read at age 11 when I was 6 (although formal reading ages weren't assigned then).
But that's a guess.
And it seems to me that I have two modes of reading: fast and "normal." In both I have trouble with misspellings that create alternate or near alternate parses, and yet in "normal" I do "hear the voices in my head."
So it's not just that.
At this point I'm reminded of the tennis player who was losing a match, and during the change-over he said admiringly to his oppenent: "Your serve is the most fluid, flowing and graceful serve I've ever seen." "Thank you" replied his opponent. At the next change of ends he asked: "On the ball toss, do you breathe in or out?" His opponent didn't reply, but did lose his next 6 service games as he wondered.
I probably won't think too much more about exactly what happens when I read. Besides, I've heard that double-blind experiments in psychology and linguistics often produce results contrary to those produced by introspection.
I think I'll stick to math and hacking.
There is a huge distinction between the pre-lingually and post-lingually deaf. Signed and spoken languages stimulate completely different areas of the brain. So if you are delayed in acquiring a language like English you're going to have difficulty mapping between a signed and a spoken language, in grammatical terms (note this does not really affect speech/the ability to speak, since that depends more on training and residual hearing).
Delayed acquisition of a spoken language is basically like learning a foreign language, except much, much harder. And this wasn't really proven definitively until fairly recently, with fMRI studies.
There are some other interesting consequences for things like testing (psychometrics, etc), especially for those tests given verbally or in writing.
Humans cannot communicate in concepts, however, and we need a perceptual language (optimally one that we can both see and hear) to do so. Not only does this enable us to communicate ideas and concepts to others, but it also serves as a kind of storage system for the mind, making learning and the formation of complex thoughts much easier.
It is generally easier to think in terms of language than abstracts, because language is simply the concrete form of conceptual information.
Because deaf people can only visually, not audibly, perceive their language, they are obviously set back in terms of their ability to learn and think audibly. However, because they can still use sign language and understand written language, I would not expect their learning or thinking ability to be lessened by any significant degree.
(To me, thinking in words seems strange and inefficient. On the other hand, I often have clear and simple thoughts in my head that take me several minutes to translate into any language, because none of the words and expressions I can think of seem just right, so thinking in words seems like it would be useful for communicating.)
For instance, suppose I realize I'm out of milk. It'll come to mind that I should go to a grocery this afternoon to buy more milk, but this intention doesn't form as a complete sentence in my head. It may literally take a couple seconds for me to recall the vocabulary I'll need to express this thought in words, but I can continue thinking about my trip to the grocery -- which one I should go to, what else I need to pick up there, etc. -- before any words have even come to my mind. So ideas and their linguistic representations are very distinct to me, and sometimes I don't even bother with the latter at all, because (for whatever reason) forming the linguistic representation of a though imposes a significant overhead on my brain. (I'm also dyslexic, for what it's worth, and I often wonder of these issues are related.)
My hypothesis is that for people with better functioning language centers than mine, words may come to mind so easily that the delay between thought and linguistic representation is imperceptible to them, hence they "think in words". But for people like me those words might come late or not at all, but regardless, I do think all the same...
I have met other people who share your intuition, but for me (native speaker of English with normal hearing) and for my wife (native speaker of Taiwanese with normal hearing) it is routine to think visually, with no words at all. We have multiple thinking styles, and quite a bit of our thinking does not involve words. I used to have the intuition that everyone can think visually, until I met people who self-report that they cannot imagine doing so.
There is still some dispute over some of the related issues. I know some linguists who separate SWH from "Linguistic relativity." It is clear that there are ideas we can have without necessarily having the language to express them, but similarly, in groups with fluent polyglots the language in use shifts regularly according to the subject/topic. It seems clear that polyglots will prefer one language over another, and that seems to be correlated with the subject, but research in this subject is hard, and clear, unambiguous and uncontroversial results are rare.
A single word can hold a large amount of meaning, but to the brain that single word uses the same "storage" and any other word.
So by having many complex words a person can think more "efficiently".
This is why many fields have jargon - the jargon helps the thinking process, by essentially acting like file compression - you compress an entire concept into a single word, and you can now think about some big complicated thing by using a single word.
This is also why language have so MANY words. English has something like half a million of them. Yet it would be totally possible to replace the vast majority of them with simpler, but more, words.
But doing so has drawbacks to thinking ability.
http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/What_is_Toki_Pona%3F
When you see a bug, you a bug, whether it's a cockroach or a spider. Thinking becomes clearer and simpler (or so they say).