Joey, thanks for your comment. Absolutely! I'm sure you're correct, that the connections are complex-- thought to language, language to thought, with thought being a huge category of functions and language being a very narrow "channel." I am also writing this as a first draft, so it may not be entirely clear :)
You might be interested to know that when I mentioned the idea that thought is wordless to a neuropsychiatrist colleague who grew up in a bilingual home (truly both languages spoken at home), he said that he had often wondered which language he "thought in" and hadn't been able to decide. He felt that the idea that thought is non-linguistic was the reason he hadn't been able to figure this out.
Jeremy, you make a very articulate and reasoned argument. I entirely agree! And thank you for adding this evolutionary perspective to the conversation.
Ahhhh....yes. Quiet. Time. Even "boredom." All necessary for creativity.
I think of writing as sending something out to readers...creating an experience for them. In the case of my writing, this is often about a new idea. I don't conceptualize writing as trying to capture actual experience.
Exactly! As you articulated so well, language is extremely limited in its ability to capture the complexity of our inner lives. This is especially true for words on "paper." Written language is very powerful in its reach and endurance, but even spoken language is at least accompanied by tone of voice, cadence, emphasis, pitch, and so on. Words on paper or screen have only punctuation marks—a weak substitute. Thank you so much for your comment!
Robin, I haven't thought about this topic of automatic writing or "channeling" before now. These sound very much like free-associating but with the added component of immediately recording in written form what comes to mind. The process you describe sounds very satisfying and productive!
I'm so glad you wrote to us about your subjective experience of writing... which is clearly different from what we have described. You seem to work out what you are going to say before you sit down at your computer or pad of paper. This might have something to do with the subject matter you're writing about. You must have mastery of the ideas before you write.
I am a bit confused, however, when you say that you edit as you're writing. If you're editing, aren't you are going through a process of refining the words you first put down, trying to communicate best what you are thinking?
I do want to add something in response to what you said about aspects of your inner experience that are wordless, like emotions. Other than when using language, and even while using language, everything else your brain is doing is wordless: reading social cues, prioritizing, navigating across the room, recognizing objects or sounds, feeling complex emotions, the list is endless. And the brain does it all quite effortlessly...including rapidly producing words without you having to "think them" first.
The brain is extraordinarily complex and, unfortunately, subjective experience is extremely limited if you are trying to figure out what is actually going on neurologically.
I enjoyed this very much. It made me reflect on a common question for multilingual people -- in which language do you think/dream/etc? While this discussion would argue, I think mostly correctly, that the answer is neither, I suspect there is actually more to the story. As a native monolingual and adult learner of Spanish, learning a new language caused me to think differently, not just be able to express all my thoughts with a new dual pairing of words. The structure of sentences, the way concepts are expressed, etc.
A Chinese proverb expresses this idea "To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world."
I'm trying to put my thoughts into words here, so please excuse this first draft if it's not the most articulate... but I think that the neural transaction between language and thought is not unidirectional, and that this adds another layer of complexity to the discussion.
The lead review in the TLS that arrived yesterday instantly reminded me of your recent blog posts, discussing how thinking is independent of language. The review is of a book called "Playing Possum: How animals understand death" by Susana Monso. The book (and the review) makes it clear that non-human animals think, not that this is anything that most people would doubt. But since animals don't have the elaborate language of humans, their thoughts must not require words. And even if you believe that the thoughts of humans are more complex than those of non-human animals, it would be hard to argue that thought, in humans, evolved from anything other than the same cerebral processes of their pre-human (pre-language using) ancestors. It would be like saying that human vision is completely different from vision in non-human primates, and that would obviously be nonsensical. So, though it feels like we think in words, what you and Barbara describe in your blog, and what Susana Monso describes in her book, make the argument for non-language-based nature of thought pretty convincing.
Then there is the issue for a writer to give up trying to capture actual experience and just focus on the craft of language and story construction like a composer writing music. The rhythms, the structure, weaving the patterns of thought, the motifs, the characters, etc. Then it just becomes about the writing process, the art of it. It is all interesting. But overall I remain suspicious of language. Is it blinding us to what we would experience if we were not so wrapped up in it? Hence, I try to stay as quiet and equanimous as possible to try to see the deeper things.
Yes I know I think in images and scenes, using language is a form of interpretation and translation. Most of what we think and experience cannot be translated into language. Words are too few and too simple to capture the range and subtlety of thought or emotion or experience. If you wanted to attempt it like Proust you would need to go out for ten minutes to have an experience and then spend the rest of the day and night capturing the experience in interpretation. That means we have to edit out 99% of everything to say anything.
Intriguing conversation. I wonder how you feel about automatic writing, or channeling. I have done both, where I just leave myself open to whatever wants to come and write whatever comes to me in the moment--often unconsciously.
I find it very helpful and find the messages I'm writing reveal things I'm not consciously aware of. I just go. Often, what comes out is surprising. Sometimes, I talk to my father--who passed 20 years ago but was a great sounding board for me in life--to get his wisdom. The ancestor memoir I'm working on now came in a channel from my grandmother, in her voice.
If I were to nail it down in brain science terms, I'd say I open up my focus and gaze to unlock the default mode network (DMN) and let it riff. But it's not a conscious process of setting my "thoughts" down on paper or on the screen.
I find this "letting go" or "letting in" process to be evocative and a spur to problem solving--in my writing and in life.
I respectfully disagree. Not about the general hypotheses presented - Barbara is an expert, and I have no way of knowing how other people’s minds work - but about myself. I never find out what I think by writing, because the reason I write is to put on paper what I already think. And my subjective experience is that I think in words. Otherwise how would they get formed so instantaneously? Where are they coming from?
Also, I very seldom think my first drafts are not good - maybe that’s because of the thoughts that are already fairly clear before I start writing, or maybe it’s because I edit as I am writing.
(Maybe all of this is due to what my psychiatrist husband said was my “intellectual arrogance.” Too bad I can’t put a rolling on the floor laughing emoji here.)
Possibly - if you want to make a distinction between the emotional and the strictly cognitive (if there even is such a thing as the latter) - I would say that possibly I don’t feel emotions in words. That might be why they are difficult to convey to other people in words.
A similar perplexity concerning “not in words” is this: Someone - I think it’s Damasio - said that when you have an (emotional) feeling, that’s your brain noticing a bodily state. That also doesn’t seem right to me, because it would presuppose a lot of different, but similar, bodily states, each one of which would correspond to an emotion. That model doesn’t really account for how complex and mixed emotions can be, and certainly not for ambivalence.
Thank you, Barbara and Elizabeth, for sharing these thought-provoking conversations
Joey, thanks for your comment. Absolutely! I'm sure you're correct, that the connections are complex-- thought to language, language to thought, with thought being a huge category of functions and language being a very narrow "channel." I am also writing this as a first draft, so it may not be entirely clear :)
You might be interested to know that when I mentioned the idea that thought is wordless to a neuropsychiatrist colleague who grew up in a bilingual home (truly both languages spoken at home), he said that he had often wondered which language he "thought in" and hadn't been able to decide. He felt that the idea that thought is non-linguistic was the reason he hadn't been able to figure this out.
Jeremy, you make a very articulate and reasoned argument. I entirely agree! And thank you for adding this evolutionary perspective to the conversation.
Ahhhh....yes. Quiet. Time. Even "boredom." All necessary for creativity.
I think of writing as sending something out to readers...creating an experience for them. In the case of my writing, this is often about a new idea. I don't conceptualize writing as trying to capture actual experience.
Exactly! As you articulated so well, language is extremely limited in its ability to capture the complexity of our inner lives. This is especially true for words on "paper." Written language is very powerful in its reach and endurance, but even spoken language is at least accompanied by tone of voice, cadence, emphasis, pitch, and so on. Words on paper or screen have only punctuation marks—a weak substitute. Thank you so much for your comment!
Robin, I haven't thought about this topic of automatic writing or "channeling" before now. These sound very much like free-associating but with the added component of immediately recording in written form what comes to mind. The process you describe sounds very satisfying and productive!
Hi Marilyn,
I'm so glad you wrote to us about your subjective experience of writing... which is clearly different from what we have described. You seem to work out what you are going to say before you sit down at your computer or pad of paper. This might have something to do with the subject matter you're writing about. You must have mastery of the ideas before you write.
I am a bit confused, however, when you say that you edit as you're writing. If you're editing, aren't you are going through a process of refining the words you first put down, trying to communicate best what you are thinking?
I do want to add something in response to what you said about aspects of your inner experience that are wordless, like emotions. Other than when using language, and even while using language, everything else your brain is doing is wordless: reading social cues, prioritizing, navigating across the room, recognizing objects or sounds, feeling complex emotions, the list is endless. And the brain does it all quite effortlessly...including rapidly producing words without you having to "think them" first.
The brain is extraordinarily complex and, unfortunately, subjective experience is extremely limited if you are trying to figure out what is actually going on neurologically.
I hope this is somewhat clarifying.
I enjoyed this very much. It made me reflect on a common question for multilingual people -- in which language do you think/dream/etc? While this discussion would argue, I think mostly correctly, that the answer is neither, I suspect there is actually more to the story. As a native monolingual and adult learner of Spanish, learning a new language caused me to think differently, not just be able to express all my thoughts with a new dual pairing of words. The structure of sentences, the way concepts are expressed, etc.
A Chinese proverb expresses this idea "To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world."
I'm trying to put my thoughts into words here, so please excuse this first draft if it's not the most articulate... but I think that the neural transaction between language and thought is not unidirectional, and that this adds another layer of complexity to the discussion.
The lead review in the TLS that arrived yesterday instantly reminded me of your recent blog posts, discussing how thinking is independent of language. The review is of a book called "Playing Possum: How animals understand death" by Susana Monso. The book (and the review) makes it clear that non-human animals think, not that this is anything that most people would doubt. But since animals don't have the elaborate language of humans, their thoughts must not require words. And even if you believe that the thoughts of humans are more complex than those of non-human animals, it would be hard to argue that thought, in humans, evolved from anything other than the same cerebral processes of their pre-human (pre-language using) ancestors. It would be like saying that human vision is completely different from vision in non-human primates, and that would obviously be nonsensical. So, though it feels like we think in words, what you and Barbara describe in your blog, and what Susana Monso describes in her book, make the argument for non-language-based nature of thought pretty convincing.
Then there is the issue for a writer to give up trying to capture actual experience and just focus on the craft of language and story construction like a composer writing music. The rhythms, the structure, weaving the patterns of thought, the motifs, the characters, etc. Then it just becomes about the writing process, the art of it. It is all interesting. But overall I remain suspicious of language. Is it blinding us to what we would experience if we were not so wrapped up in it? Hence, I try to stay as quiet and equanimous as possible to try to see the deeper things.
Yes I know I think in images and scenes, using language is a form of interpretation and translation. Most of what we think and experience cannot be translated into language. Words are too few and too simple to capture the range and subtlety of thought or emotion or experience. If you wanted to attempt it like Proust you would need to go out for ten minutes to have an experience and then spend the rest of the day and night capturing the experience in interpretation. That means we have to edit out 99% of everything to say anything.
Intriguing conversation. I wonder how you feel about automatic writing, or channeling. I have done both, where I just leave myself open to whatever wants to come and write whatever comes to me in the moment--often unconsciously.
I find it very helpful and find the messages I'm writing reveal things I'm not consciously aware of. I just go. Often, what comes out is surprising. Sometimes, I talk to my father--who passed 20 years ago but was a great sounding board for me in life--to get his wisdom. The ancestor memoir I'm working on now came in a channel from my grandmother, in her voice.
If I were to nail it down in brain science terms, I'd say I open up my focus and gaze to unlock the default mode network (DMN) and let it riff. But it's not a conscious process of setting my "thoughts" down on paper or on the screen.
I find this "letting go" or "letting in" process to be evocative and a spur to problem solving--in my writing and in life.
I respectfully disagree. Not about the general hypotheses presented - Barbara is an expert, and I have no way of knowing how other people’s minds work - but about myself. I never find out what I think by writing, because the reason I write is to put on paper what I already think. And my subjective experience is that I think in words. Otherwise how would they get formed so instantaneously? Where are they coming from?
Also, I very seldom think my first drafts are not good - maybe that’s because of the thoughts that are already fairly clear before I start writing, or maybe it’s because I edit as I am writing.
(Maybe all of this is due to what my psychiatrist husband said was my “intellectual arrogance.” Too bad I can’t put a rolling on the floor laughing emoji here.)
Possibly - if you want to make a distinction between the emotional and the strictly cognitive (if there even is such a thing as the latter) - I would say that possibly I don’t feel emotions in words. That might be why they are difficult to convey to other people in words.
A similar perplexity concerning “not in words” is this: Someone - I think it’s Damasio - said that when you have an (emotional) feeling, that’s your brain noticing a bodily state. That also doesn’t seem right to me, because it would presuppose a lot of different, but similar, bodily states, each one of which would correspond to an emotion. That model doesn’t really account for how complex and mixed emotions can be, and certainly not for ambivalence.
Thank you, Barbara and Elizabeth, for sharing these thought-provoking conversations