Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I'm talking more about "thinking before you speak." As in, it seems to me that without some form of inner speech, it would be impossible to plan anything before vocalizing it, as you'd need to start talking/writing in order to actually think.

View on HN

In a normal conversation I certainly don't do that. There's no way in hell I would have TIME to do that. It's too fast.

And anyway, why would that make any more sense? How would you plan the internal voice in order to produce it? An inner-inner-voice? That would need an inner-inner-inner voice?

It sounds like you have the homunculus idea of how human brain works. But this idea is nonsensical...

Why do you think that?

How could one "think about what they're going to say" without some level of prior inner speech or conceptualization? It may not be precisely the same as spoken speech, but it would still be a kind of speech.

Why do you assume conceptualization requires verbalization?

That's just how I understand the process, from my experience.

Can you elaborate why you think it doesn't, instead of writing single sentence replies?

I don't know whether it does or doesn't, but I just don't see any evidence that demonstrates that we do. E.g. how do you know from your experience whether the verbalization drove the conceptualization or whether it's effectively purely narration of non-verbal conceptualization? It's not even a given that they happen at the same time vs. being a post-rationalization of processes happening separately (e.g. we know from split-brain experiments that the brain halves are perfectly happy to verbalize explanations for decisions they demonstrably didn't make)

I personally have a very hard time thinking out loud but have no problem thinking quietly. I'm for example terrible at explaining something while working on it but could easily explain it afterwards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com