Thinking Without Language

Posted on January 9, 2007 by Dave Pollard

In yesterdayís post, I stressed the need for new ways of thinking innovatively about the complex problems our world faces:

Einstein famously said ìWe can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.î We need some radical, even crazy thinking. Innovation is not incremental change and it is not arrived at analytically. And we need not only radical innovations; we need radical ways of innovating, more holistic, more intuitive, more collaborative, more discontinuous, more imaginative, and more connected to the wisdom and understanding of all life on Earth.

It seems to me that one way of thinking differently would be thinking without language.

A lot of academics argue that language is a precondition to thought. Anyone observing babies or ‘wild’ children (those brought up in the wild without exposure to language) or animals knows this is ludicrous. Anthropologists and students of history can tell you that language is a product of thought, and its invention was primarily to allow us to communicate our thoughts (fuzzily, alas) to others. Language is a kind of shorthand representation of our thoughts. But if you spend enough time using that shorthand as your means of thinking, you can start to get the two (language and thinking) confused. Whatís worse, your ability to think without or outside of the symbolic representational shorthand of language can atrophy from disuse.

Thinking is the act of processing information to create knowledge (=ability or capacity, from the German word that also means cunning). Watch a bird or squirrel figure out how to extract food from a feeder, or watch dogs corner their prey or herd sheep, and youíll see how to think without language. The learning process is one of trial and error, but the result is knowledge, a superior, acquired ability born from practice.

Not surprisingly, this is also how humans learn best, by doing or observation or being shown, rather than by reading or being told. Such learning and knowledge is ëinformedí by both intuition (the coding in our DNA that suggests some experiments to try) and perception — paying attention with all our senses, not just the five best-known, and appreciating these perceptions). It is partly an unconscious or subconscious process (ësleeping on ití or just giving it time, will often transform information into knowledge in profound ways we are not consciously aware of). Because of the vast amount of detailed information that is needed to thrive in a complex environment, people in indigenous cultures do not depend as heavily as we do on the conscious mind to process that information — they appreciate how the subconscious, dreams, and instincts play into and enrich our understanding, and allow these elements to play an important part in their decision-making process.

Indigenous cultures have other lessons to teach us about thinking without language. They let their children learn principally by trial and error, and by suggestion rather than instruction. Exchange of knowledge in these cultures is expected, automatic, urgent and completely candid, and deceit and hoarding knowledge is extremely disreputable behaviour (because it can expose others to danger).

Their expression “the land is made perfect by knowledge” implies that what is valued to them is knowledge and understanding of the environment, not control or ownership of it. They observe the land and the natural world much more attentively than we do, and they assign names to things and to places in order to help them memorize and cope with potential dangers (“words are as precise as they need to be”), not for taxonomic reasons. Language is a tool to aid the thought process. Stories, and listening, are profoundly important to them: A story takes as long as it needs to take to be told, and through practice storytelling becomes an art. It is valuable because it is context-rich enough to allow vicarious thinking and learning — it enables us to see and hear and think and learn through anotherís observation from another time.

Our purpose for thinking, like that of babies and animals without (symbolic, abstract) language, is to make decisions. It is not important that these decisions be logical, or intelligent, or rational. What is important is that they are effective, workable, successful. Not necessarily the best decisions, but good decisions. These decisions are the result of intellectual, emotional, sensory/somatic (body) and intuitive knowledge (to use the Jungian model) and integrate the conscious and unconscious. In ‘modern’ adult humans knowing is less integrated and more conflicted, because we are taught not to trust any kind of knowledge other than the conscious intellectual type.

Wild children, linguists tell us, can never learn language once they reach puberty ñ the neural pathways of their brains have by then formed in different ways from those of us who are taught to think as much as possible through language, and cannot be rewired, any more than ours can be rewired to be as profoundly perceptive and intuitive as they are, or to have the very different thinking capacities of indigenous cultures. Our brains have become dependent on language.

But there are ways to practice that can make them less dependent, and that is what we need now, to discover different ways of thinking. We need to learn to reconnect with and listen to our instincts, our emotions, our senses (synaesthetically), our bodies, and our unconscious dreams. And then we need to re-learn to integrate all this knowledge and apply it to thinking holistically about the complex problems we face in this century. This will not be easy. It will take an enormous amount of coaching, practice and patience. But Einstein was right: We aren’t going to be able to solve these problems with the same kind of thinking that created them. So we have no choice. Now what we need to do is find (modest, generous,patient) people who can show us how to do this re-learning.

Categories: Let-Self-Change, and Conversation, Language & Narrative

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9 Responses to Thinking Without Language

David Parkinson says:

January 9, 2007 at 21:52

Wouldn’t meditation practice be the likeliest place to start learning to think w/o language? Either that or friendly psychotropics.
MLU says:

January 10, 2007 at 00:34

Of course, the old word for harmonizing instincts, emotions, senses, and intellect was “integrity.” Intelligent work has been done on how integrity is attained, though, alas, it was all done in words. Purity of heart is to will one thing. . .You might find Vygotsky interesting, on the social origins of language. It’s unlikely–absurd, really–that we developed thinking minds and then added language to communicate. Though there are levels of thinking that are done without language, one cannot, for example, watch a baseball game without language, though one could see the figures running and the glitter of the scoreboard scoreboard and the movement of clouds in the sky. The other apes cannot watch a baseball game, among other things.Interesting that you feel compelled to write about this. . .
Stephen Downes says:

January 10, 2007 at 05:53

I have long written on the topic of subsymbolic communication and reasoning. So I think you strike a note here. But it could be more sharply hit:You write, “What is important is that they are effective, workable, successful. Not necessarily the best decisions, but good decisions. These decisions are the result of intellectual, emotional, sensory/somatic (body) and intuitive knowledge (to use the Jungian model) and integrate the conscious and unconscious.”I think that decisions based on subsymbolic reasoning are the best, and not decisions that are merely good enough.There is a mechanism that describes subsymbolic reasoning. You suggest that the mechanism is “the result of intellectual, emotional, sensory/somatic (body) and intuitive knowledge (to use the Jungian model).” I think you’re flailing here.Subsymbolic decisions (and subsymbolic reasoning generally) is the result of the experience of perceptual processes (which is where we get emotionl, sensory and somatic influences).In a nutshell, it is the association of these experiences with previous experiences. Any experience, any perception, is the activation of millions of neural cells. These activations may, depending on the experience, include characteristic patterns of activation. It is the matching of these patterns that constitutes the basis for reasoning.These patterns may reflect any sort of perception – sights and sounds, music, animals, forms and faces. We may associate characteristic sounds with them – these characteristic sounds – words – are also patterns. But for many of our habitual experiences, there are no words. They are ineffable.Patterns are created from perception through a process of abstraction – we filter our perception, taking in some aspects, discarding the rest. Formal reasoning is this process taken to a great degree – it is abstraction of abstraction of abstraction. Eventually we arrive at ‘pure’ concepts – things like conjunction, entailment, existence, being – which form the basis for formal reasoning.These concepts are extremely powerful, but their power is gained at the price if the abstraction. They express broad sweeping truths, but very little about the here and now.The reasoning of the master is a subtle dance between these two extremes, between the concrete and the universal, a waltz through the layers of abstraction, drawing subtly on each as it applies to the situation at hand.
Max Casebeau says:

January 10, 2007 at 10:12

Dave,I have a book coming out that discusses this whole problem. the subtitle reads Forward. !”A prescription on how understand man
François Guité says:

January 10, 2007 at 10:44

I don’t believe efficient languages can be built from scratch. Remember Esperanto They must emerge from society and culture.Perhaps
Pat Keenan says:

January 10, 2007 at 14:08

I believe the true value of computational technology is it’s ability to interconnect language.Emergence of a new language is underway, and inevitable if this connected age remains for another decade. What could end up with is a different, more interrelated, way of speaking. Using words as they exist and reusing concepts which are bound to many different thoughts.Maybe we need to talk more about everything all at once, rather than speaking less about specific things.
Chris Hinton says:

January 10, 2007 at 16:41

Meditation is definitely a route to a non-verbal mode of thought. Study of Tibetan Buddhists has shown that their meditation practices lead to permanent neural change. The Zenists have a word for this acomplishment. They call it Satori and apparently this is a profound psychological experience that changes you forever. In our western society I think that one of the epiphenomena of being so language centric is that we ignore other valuable data, most of which you have alluded to here. I would suggest that we lionize rational thought at the expense of our affective realm. Our feelings take a back seat if we acknowledge them at all. The result of this is that that bastion of rationality, the university professor, is seen as the epitome of intelectual acomplishment. Those others who work more in the other realms, and I am referring to artists here, are seen as “nice to haves” and their contribution is not acknowledged and never put on part with the language-based intellectual accomplishments. I would argue for more balance and for a greater recongnition of the role that feelings play in our cognition and existance.
Bharat says:

January 12, 2007 at 04:47

I would encourage you to read Jiddu Krishnamurti who has a lot to say about this topic.RegardsBharat
Dave Pollard says:

January 14, 2007 at 19:12

All: Thank you for your thoughtful comments. David: Yes, heh, on both counts. I’m still looking for the idiot’s guide to meditation. David/Chris: It seems to me that meditation should be more intuitive, shouldn’t it? Stephen: Well argued, as always, but perhaps a little too scientific ;-)