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Thinking with limited senses.
AdamBomb
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When I think about it, my thoughts - and presumably those of others - consist of words and imagery; I envision the appearances of people or objects according to my memories, as do I mull over an idea by posing and answering questions in words and sentences within my mind. That's in laymen's terms, anyway, and I consider this to be normal.
It's safe to say my thoughts have developed this format as a result of the sensory information I receive from my vision, underpinned with the structure I've gained from literacy, which of course was developed through vision and hearing.
So, in the event of an individual being born both blind and deaf, but with a fully-functional brain, in what format would their thoughts be? How would a brain process information without structure?
Still, this person would have taste, touch and smell remaining - all methods of perception - so would the brain replace with these the standard sight and sound as its foundations for thought? And if so, how would that even work?
This isn't for a project or anything; I'm simply interested in how adaptable the brain is.
It's safe to say my thoughts have developed this format as a result of the sensory information I receive from my vision, underpinned with the structure I've gained from literacy, which of course was developed through vision and hearing.
So, in the event of an individual being born both blind and deaf, but with a fully-functional brain, in what format would their thoughts be? How would a brain process information without structure?
Still, this person would have taste, touch and smell remaining - all methods of perception - so would the brain replace with these the standard sight and sound as its foundations for thought? And if so, how would that even work?
This isn't for a project or anything; I'm simply interested in how adaptable the brain is.
I'll be back for breakfast.
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before watching this I had never really considered people visualising maths and physics fundamentally differently to how I do
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That is a good point, but how would she associate one with the other? You could assume someone wrote "water" on her skin and then prompted her to feel some water, but there'd be little connection if she didn't know what the teacher's intentions were beforehand.
It's difficult to think about.
Surely not, because a child learns to speak with their eyes just as much as their ears. They hear the sounds and they physically see the things with which they are associated, as well as the movements of their parents' mouths.
Although, just like a child perceiving these things would eventually learn their connection, perhaps a deaf and blind person would eventually understand the word or symbol for water is connected to the actual liquid, if only as a result of the sequence in which the stimulus occurs.
In that case, if the person was to think about water, their mind would recall it with memories of touch and sensation.
Whether this has something to do with my diagnosis as a high-functioning autist or not I do not know.
I'm pretty sure I don't think this way. I mean, I CAN think this way, and I do sometimes. But most of the time my thougts are more basic- I'll get a general sense of an idea, before I can actually put it into words.
Wow, really? That's interesting. So you think almost exclusively with images?
With me, my thoughts evolve with the format; I usually begin with words and sentences, and as the idea grows I start to develop images and supplemental text.
What do you mean by a sense? That occurs before words or images? Kinda metaphysical!
I don't think with images either.
Yeah it's... very hard to describe. I mean, how can I use words to describe something explicitly isn't words? It's like most of my thinking is done unconsciously, and I have only a dim awareness of what's going on there. If I try, I can concentrate and figure out exactly what's going on there, and that will usually force it into specific words, images, and feelings. But before I do that, the thought already exists as a jumble of pure thought.
The brain has the capacity to mimic the evidence of our senses, and thus to depict sensory images that aren't actually happening. This isn't all of our thought, or even the majority of our thought. It's just the elements of our thought that are easiest to recognise as thoughts.
Think of it this way; when we think of a word, we 'hear' that word in our head, but how do we know what that word means? The whole process of linking meaning to words is thought, and it takes place entirely non-verbally.
Interestingly, I'm listening to the part of the Feynman video where he discusses reading/counting multitasking at the same time as I'm writing this post, with no trouble whatsoever in parsing both of them.
The idea that we think in words and are, thus, limited in our thoughts by our vocabulary or linguistic structures is referred to the Whorfian or Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which has been pretty firmly rejected by the developmental psychology community. We think in 'mentalese', which isn't exactly a language and isn't directly expressible in words or images, and so may or may not vary drastically from person to person.
A useful example halfway toward your question about blind/deaf people is the case of a profoundly deaf person. They see fine but were born deaf and have never heard anything. Such people think, to the extent that their thoughts involve language (as when rehearsing something they'd like to say or having a mental dialog or similar) in ASL. There's a fairly large body of evidence that such people even sign in their sleep because they dream in ASL.
Key to applying the profoundly deaf example to deaf/blind people is the fact that ASL is not an invented language like esperanto. It was developed organically by deaf people as a natural mapping of their personal mentalese into symbolic expression. So clearly they have thoughts of equal complexity to people who learn spoken languages as infants. Presumably the same is also true for the deaf/blind, though I would imagine that - like Helen Keller - it would require a very dedicated teacher to enable them to communicate at all, and to avoid them having developmental deficiencies due to their near total isolation from sensory input. We are primarily visual creatures and secondarily auditory creatures. Touch, taste, and smell can be profound senses due to their roots deep in the pre-sentient parts of our brains, but they don't convey anywhere near the volume of data that a developing human needs to form a complete picture of his/her world.
Check out Oliver Sacks if you want to read more about this kind of thing. He's a psychologist who wrote several books about odd cases of abnormal psychology and development, one of which was specifically dedicated to the 'language' of thought, I think, though I can't recall the title.
There's another lady whose name I've forgotten entirely who gave a TED talk on this topic, or one related to it. She explained that the ability and tendency to think in pictures is both non-uniform in the population and, to some extent, linked to autism. People higher up on the autistic spectrum are more likely to think partially or entirely in images, while something like 20% of people don't (or possibly can't) think in images at all.
That is not to say that the way we think is not deeply affected by our senses. Language does affect our capacity for thought, as do our senses, although it is tremendously difficult to distinguish the effects on thought itself from the effects on how we express those thoughts.
You'll never have a future as a down-on-his-luck noir detective without a booming inner-monologue.
But really, though, when I read something, everything is reread as a voice in my head. When I type something, everything is given voice inside my noggin first and then I type it. I suspect this has something to do with how we're educated. That we're taught to 'proofread' our thoughts before we commit them to paper so what we write makes sense. It's the only time I'm aware I have an inner-monologue.
I don't think he wrote one specifically about that, but The Minds Eye and Seeing Voices both deal with thought in a sensory-limited context (blindess and deafness, respectively).
Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation.
BTW, I just want to echo Echo. I don't think in words, unless I'm specifically thinking about communicating with somebody. Like right now, I have an inner monologue of the words I'm typing into this text field. But once I walk away from the computer and reflect, that inner monologue silences and turns into a collage of sensory imaginings and non-sensory concepts.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
but they're listening to every word I say
Here's something that I find interesting . . . split-brain patients have disconnected right and left brain halves. And they function normally in real life. BUT if you flash words / images so only one half of their brain receives it, they can say the word if it goes to their left brain, but not if it goes to their right brain.
But if it goes to their right brain they can draw it without consciously knowing what they saw.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntnua6TRue4&feature=related
Skip to about 1:31 in that video and it shows several experiments. Just amazing.
I'm the same way. The only time I think with words is when I'm thinking about words, like preparing a presentation in my head or whatever. Same with images. Generally my thoughts don't have a "shape" in terms of senses or symbols. For example when doing an exam, I write the answers down and the information just comes out as I write the words, but the answers are already finished in my head in an abstract form before they get formed into words. It's a barely conscious process, almost akin to a trance, as I'm not aware of thinking about anything. I don't know if the two things are related, but I'm also pretty fast at exams and problem solving in general. Often I take much more time parsing the question than formulating an answer.
I can't really describe it any better than that. I was almost 30 when I first realized that everyone doesn't think like this.
I grew up in a bilingual family, and I've read that this kind of abstract thinking develops more commonly in bilingual kids (I'll dig up a citation later if I can). Maybe when you speak two languages as soon as you learn to speak, neither of them entrenches itself too firmly into your thought processes? iirc something like this is also common in people with autistic spectrum disorders, although I don't know if it's the same phenomenon. I watched a documentary about autistic savants the other day, where one guy described his thought process as looking inside his mind and "finding the answer waiting".
I'm not sure it's right to say that they don't consciously know what they saw. They do know what they saw, because they can reproduce it in an image. Instead, they can't verbally report what they saw, because the speech centers of the brain don't have access to what was seen.
For example: I see a ball being thrown at me so I think about that visual, I feel pain when I totally miss the catch and it beans me in the teeth, I hear my tooth crack, I smell and taste the resulting blood, and then once all that registers in my brain and finally translates, I then think the words "oh my god I just got beaned in the face with a ball and this hurts". There may also be a second translation where that word-thought is translated verbally into something like "$#@!"
So even if you only really remember thinking the words (or even the image), don't pure senses have to come first??
A deaf person in that situation would do exactly the same, except eliminate "hear my tooth crack". Same for a deaf/blind person, eliminate "see a ball being thrown at me" and "hear my tooth crack." (BTW I took a college course taught by a Deaf professor once, and she said that having 'heightened' senses because you are missing one or two is total BS and there is no good science backing it. I never formally researched it or experienced it, but she seems like an okay source I guess.)
I can probably think of a few examples of this:
When formulating a proper sentence (one that somebody else has to hear or read, so it must be understandable to them) I will sometimes have a blank space in the sentence. There should be a word in the space, though I either forget what it is or I'm unsure if it exists in the first place. Yet, the idea is there, and is not lacking because I can't think of this word.
Math: Back when I was better at math it simply showed up in my mind. I think about it, but there are no words or images (nor images of numbers) running around in my head as I'm doing it. I'm consciously manipulating numbers/equations, but I know of no way to describe this process aside from "thinking".
Ideas: I'm good at thinking broadly. I can take several ideas that are seemingly unconnected, and link them together to formulate a new idea, come to a conclusion, solve a problem, etc. I have no idea how this works, especially since I seem to be better at it than most people I know. My mind somehow trawls over a vast swath of my memory, picking out an idea which can fit together.
About a month ago I really noticed this happening. I had an opinion, on something or other, I don't remember now. Likely a very rough prediction about how some hypothetical situation. It sat in my mind as a very loose idea, had I told it to someone it would have been "here is what I think in a couple words, but I haven't really thought about it". Well for some reason I actually thought about it in detail that time. I noticed that while I had not thought about this question in any depth at all, I had a huge breadth of ideas to summon. They were all things that I "knew", however I had never explicitly linked them together as the basis for another idea. I was surprised at the result; after a minute or two of thinking, this rough idea now had examples from a wide variety of fields. How does my brain do this? I haven't a clue. The idea was expressed as a sort of argument (which I'll do internally, as though I'm explaining/debating with someone), but that was only to clean up the different ideas and tie them together. There was no visualization, no words or any other metal artifact that was used to actually bring in these disparate ideas.
In the same way that computer functions are ultimately expressed by a series of ones and zeroes, the brain's functions can be broken down to electronic impulses and neurochemicals. So it would follow that if your hardware (major centers, sensory and motor) is damaged or missing altogether, that doesn't necessarily mean the ones and zeroes aren't there, it just means they don't get displayed in the same way--or even any way that would be practical to the function (survival, procreation, socialization) of the computer (human).
Might be too much of an oversimplification, but I wouldn't mind someone with real tech knowledge and someone with real brain knowledge to weigh in on it.
edit: To carry the simile a little further--for those pieces of hardware that are different, you might have the same ones and zeroes, but expressed differently based on their unique structures. Also, the software could certainly be slightly different, resulting in similar but different outcomes.
I link concepts together by "manipulating" how the shapes interact. But it's nothing as concrete as what you are probably imagining by me describing it to you. You wouldn't be able to draw it or show me an example of it because a large part of it is not consciously defined in a describable way.
to understand a thing, I have to ... I have to think about it enough until it has it's own shape form that I can mentally play with and use to interact with the other shape forms in my head.
A simple sentence, a simple piece of syntactic meaning, has no meaning to me without an associated shape form. I literally cannot understand a novel sentence until I have cogitated on every word in that sentence and there is an associated shape form for it. It wont stick in my memory. I have massive trouble with arbitrary acronyms. I need to consciously rememorise the visual shape of the acronym and reassociate it to the same shape form as the full set of words, or I suddenly wont be able to understand the sentence.
Fortunately as I get older there are less and less words in the English language that require this. But it sure does make reading scientific reports about new research long and difficult.
It becomes a lot easier if I try to rewrite strange sentence in my own words, as I seem to be more of a hands on person generally and doing that helps me generate these shape forms a lot easier.
And naturally I got no problem with fiction, since it's all about using your own imagination. I do have big problems with large blocks of descriptive text though. I tend to skip them. I love terry pratchett because he lets me imagine it mostly on my own.
I think the best way to try to imagine it would be if you went into a 3d designer and made a new artistic style shape that represented each thing and then centered them around a view point that represented you. Each topic would have it's own cluster, so you'd have large clusters of shapes and to understand them you'd need to switch the viewpoint over to the middle of that cluster. For me though it's more like when I'm not thinking of them they just disappear from conscious awareness.
I also think primarily in words. I wonder if that's responsible for my being so good at English grammar and spelling through the years, or if that skill and my tendency to think in words share another common cause. It wasn't too long ago, actually, that I realized that everyone else isn't like this--that some people have to actually think about what they want to say or write rather than the reverse.
I can also think in images, in a way. They're not really images so much as geometries, though. There are images, of course, but there are also spatial relationships that are as real to me as the images. It's sort of like an AutoCAD drawing in my mind. This is... surprisingly hard to describe.
An example: one night I was looking at the sky and idly wondered whether a certain point of light was Jupiter or Venus (it was bright enough that I wasn't sure which, and my knowledge of observational astronomy is rather limited). It occurred to me suddenly that it was Jupiter, because I had projected the arc of the lunar terminator into a plane and determined that the point of light lay further from the Sun than the Moon did (and consequently could not have been Venus).
But it wasn't a problem I was trying to solve, really. I just kind of saw it there.
Before that point, I never realized that people didn't actually visualize math problems in the same way I did.
Were you ever diagnosed with mild autism?
I ask because in cases of even the mildest autism people get really strange ways of visualizing things and it really helps with advanced mathematical skills.
Never by a doctor. Although I do recall always visualizing math wierdly.
Doesn't everybody have their own unique way of visualizing math? It just seems like some people can grab answers from it, while others can't/need paper.
I wish I could remember his name
But yah, everybody has varyind mental visualizations of math. And some people have much BETTER visualizations and are able to solve problems and computer faster.
association is a completely normal phenomenon and how the basic architecture of the brain works. It's how one neuron ends up "connecting" to another.
It's not a "weak" disorder. Everybody can have unique associations.
That different people's ways of "thinking" are different is due to their own unique pattern of associations, developed over their lifespan. It's normal for people to "think" a bit differently from each other.
He was also the very first person I thought of when I saw this thread.
It's incredibly fascinating; I strongly recommend this for those who haven't seen it:
Daniel Tammet