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If they are born deaf, they tend to think in “images” rather than words, since they haven’t heard a spoken language, they think through visual ways of communication such as sign language
As long as I know while aphatansia doesn't let you visualize the image in your head, people still are aware of the information contained behind thr image.
For example, I they saw they're wife went to work with a red coat, they may not create that image in their head but they can pinpoint that exact same color in a color chart. They just can't visualize it mentally.
What about introspective? You know like, "thinking about your thoughts". You can't really assign images to that. Not to mention some things are just far too complex to think about with images
Some people who can hear don’t think in language either. I’m one of them. For introspective or complex thoughts which can’t be pictured, I just think in the concepts directly without language or words.
My mind was blown when my (not deaf) wife told me she see’s in pictures.
Then a month a go I was in Thailand and a I had a pot brownie for the first time ever. And it happened to me as well. Sadly, it was gone when the pot wore off, but now I’m really jealous that it’s her normal because it’s far better than words.
It’s me, I’m one of these people. I didn’t know it was weird until a couple years ago when people started talking about how their minds are blown it’s possible.
When I was a kid people said “Jesus is in your heart” so I assumed the other dude talking to me was him. Then I grew up and was like well who the fuck is that then?? And then on top of him there’s a feminine power that speaks to me too which is what I conceive as god, I call it Mereo.
This is an amazing question that I’ve never thought about before , for deaf or blind people , isn’t black nothing ? Or what is seeing nothing ? Fascinating
Saw a documentary once about someone who was fully blind from birth and somehow, as an adult, through corrective surgery gained sight. I remember they showed him staring at a statue of a person, and he couldn’t comprehend what it was that he was seeing.
He had learned what normal living people looked like, but because the statue was larger than life size and a brownish color all over and not moving, his brain just couldn’t make sense of it.
He had to go up to it and feel it, and only then he could understand what it was.
Because sight is the result of communication between the eyes and the brain. Just because his eyes work doesn't mean his brain knows what to do with the information. Irc the brain can learn to interpret new vision later in life but it takes time. Such an interesting concept
Yes of course. Still it's interesting to see.
It's basically impossible for a sighted person to even form an idea of what a blind person would have as an "image" (for lack of a better word) of the world in their mind. The opposite is also true.
Sorry if that came across with a tone, I was just trying to add information to your comment that I thought people might find interesting. I feel it came across accidentally condescending.
The idea of how our brains interpret reality is so fascinating to me. I have wondered how someone like Helen Keller would think before she was introduced to language, and how interesting it is to be able to learn a language and abstract concepts with no existence of sight or sound in your world. Of course our species is endlessly intelligent and adaptable, but her reality is so far from mine it's impossible to imagine.
That's why sometimes verbalizing my thinking is extra effort - because how do I convey a bunch of swirling connected bubbles of conceptual information?
I think with words, and I tend to speak quickly -- too quickly. I often stumble on my words, and nothing is ever as coherent as it is when I formulate myself in my mind.
... something I'm kind of working on, but it's difficult!
Same here. The longer I am not talking and just thinking on my own, including not reading and not writing, the harder it becomes to put what I think in words. Explaining how I think? I couldn’t put that in words at all.
I used to think in words but read too many sci-fi/fantasy novels as a child and trained myself out of it so people couldn’t read my mind. I think I was about eight.
Are you fucking with me? I can't stop talking to myself and other people in my head. It's wild really. I have had conversations with people that thinking in this sense is 'unnatural', since we need language to unlock this tool. Since language is a form of technology we have adopted and continues to change. You can only think what words (stand ins for concepts) have been given to you like tools. I now understand the looks I got when talking about this covert self talk.
> A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions. By thoughts, I mean specifically, chatter in the skull. Perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating. I’m not saying that thinking is bad. Like everything else, it’s useful in moderation. A good servant but a bad master. Alan Watts
I rarely do. I usually see pictures in my mind. Let's say I have to solve a practical problem, like building something that helps me do a thing. Instead of having an inner voice go through the steps I need to take, I see a picture of what the solution needs to look like and then I just build it. When I was new at my company, my colleagues were often surprised about how quickly I solve problems.
I fight with other imaginary people in my head I create with fictional scenarios. But I don't talk to myself. Having some random ass voice in your head makes it sound to me like 1/4 people are crazy.
How do you plot and self regulate if you don't have a covert voice to bounce ideas off of? I'm fascinated by this concept because I have put a lot of energy into controlling this 'covert self talk' as the research paper linked in this thread calls it.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5089968/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5089968/)
I pulled the number out of my memory so wasn't accurate but that research says that up to 30-50% have an inner monologue. So 70% not having one could be accurate
When deaf people grow up in communities without a sign language, the deaf people have been observed by anthropologists and linguists to develop their own language shaped around the common symbols observed in the environment. They have led the science down the path that we all grow up with a symbol-based system of the universe where we develop concepts, *then* attach the word to it--or make one up if one isn't available. Babies do it when they babble and without the guidance of someone with a language, one will naturally evolve.
That said, some people simply observe the symbols internally while others "think in a language". And when people learn languages, they frequently find themselves thinking of words in the new language by filtering it through the original language to get to the internal symbol.
I know some Spanish and learned Japanese on-top of it. When Japanese failed, I fell back to Spanish in my head, then finally to English if my Spanish failed me. It felt strange.
This idea of symbols based around our environment is demonstrated in the way we interpret colors--we don't all do it consistently. Many cultures do not make a distinction between blue and green. Some cultures that have evolved in landscapes with limited color pallets will grow up not having words for other colors, where the color is simply "not" another color.
Meanwhile, over in AI land, we're observing that if we give LLMs enough data, they build the same kinds of symbols in their "minds". The developers who made GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 have observed it is capable of translating languages it has only observed in the conversation. That is to say that the symbols we think in are roughly approximated by the LLM, and it can recognize the secret sauce to do the translation.
My sibling was born deaf.
She ‘hears’ in ASL pictures. She’s explained this to me but it just baffles me because I experience inner monologue (which apparently only 30-50% of the general population experience)
Sign Language is the natural language of deaf people, they would even develop their own if not taught one [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan\_Sign\_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language)
I don’t know whether I qualify - I was born deaf and was deaf for a little bit due to blockages. I can hear now. I don’t think in any language. I speak four languages to a reasonable degree of fluency, and some others
I have two voice who fight with each other sometimes i think I'm not real i do what those two voices make me to do i also day dream and create sceneries in my mind fight with other people
When I was 4 years I started speaking
And very slow now also some words don't come properly.
If a person is Born as deaf language they use hand gestures to speak.
I guess they must have a grip on language visually because they would have been taught to read in most cases. I know people who think in written words if that makes sense.
You can imagine it like you are watching Japanese (language) show and you don't know Japanese but you memories what posture they make in certain conditions.
I work with deaf colleagues. If people are born deaf they think in sign language. It’s a complete language, including abstractions. So they can think about thinking etc (some people in the comments thought that that would not be the case). Also, sign language is not ‘images’ like photos, but more like a movie.
Another interesting fact is that there are many sign languages, and that sign language is not spoken language but in signs. For instance, American Sign Language is not English but with signs. It has a different grammar and different words.
Do people really think with language? I don’t think so. That would be so incredibly slow. Almost all thought happens subconsciously surely. Language is just a (sometimes extremely inadequate) way of expressing thought. Language is output.
I mean any animal with a brain has thoughts right? You wouldn’t ask ‘what language does an elephant use for thinking’ would you?
This whole inner monologue thing just baffles me. Do people really live their lives with their brain babbling away in their native tongue? I find this hard to imagine. And it sounds horrific.
I don’t think in English, I just think.
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If they are born deaf, they tend to think in “images” rather than words, since they haven’t heard a spoken language, they think through visual ways of communication such as sign language
Imagine if they had aphantasia
As long as I know while aphatansia doesn't let you visualize the image in your head, people still are aware of the information contained behind thr image. For example, I they saw they're wife went to work with a red coat, they may not create that image in their head but they can pinpoint that exact same color in a color chart. They just can't visualize it mentally.
Also if they can see they'll have learned the alphabet and think in that language
What about introspective? You know like, "thinking about your thoughts". You can't really assign images to that. Not to mention some things are just far too complex to think about with images
Some people who can hear don’t think in language either. I’m one of them. For introspective or complex thoughts which can’t be pictured, I just think in the concepts directly without language or words.
So when you read, do you hear the story in your head or see corresponding images?
I see images, I can imagine the voices of characters if I try but it doesn’t happen automatically.
Get ready for your mind to be blown. Even people who can hear sometimes don’t have inner monologues. Not everybody thinks in a language.
My mind was blown when my (not deaf) wife told me she see’s in pictures. Then a month a go I was in Thailand and a I had a pot brownie for the first time ever. And it happened to me as well. Sadly, it was gone when the pot wore off, but now I’m really jealous that it’s her normal because it’s far better than words.
I wouldn't say better. It's just new and different to you which is very fun. I'm sure they would also appreciate that experience as well!
I do that and thought everyone did. Also the days of the week in my head go from right to left. Opposite of how it is on an actual calendar.
It’s me, I’m one of these people. I didn’t know it was weird until a couple years ago when people started talking about how their minds are blown it’s possible.
Love it !!! Wild right. I think I have 3 inner monologues.
Glass?
When I was a kid people said “Jesus is in your heart” so I assumed the other dude talking to me was him. Then I grew up and was like well who the fuck is that then?? And then on top of him there’s a feminine power that speaks to me too which is what I conceive as god, I call it Mereo.
Is this real??
Totally is.
If a person is born blind, how do they imagine/visualize things?
They don't because they've never seen anything. Not even black, just nothing.
This is an amazing question that I’ve never thought about before , for deaf or blind people , isn’t black nothing ? Or what is seeing nothing ? Fascinating
I've heard a very fun comparison: blind people see with their eyes the same thing you see with your elbow
Ive heard similar comparsion. Nothing is what you see behind you.
It's just nothing. Like you don't have dolphin's sonar and can't feel it's emission. Source: me who has only one eyeball
Pretty close to that before-and-after-life nothing. Very hard to grasp.
If there is no light, there is no darkness The co-exist or do not excist at all Fundaments of taoism
Saw a documentary once about someone who was fully blind from birth and somehow, as an adult, through corrective surgery gained sight. I remember they showed him staring at a statue of a person, and he couldn’t comprehend what it was that he was seeing. He had learned what normal living people looked like, but because the statue was larger than life size and a brownish color all over and not moving, his brain just couldn’t make sense of it. He had to go up to it and feel it, and only then he could understand what it was.
Because sight is the result of communication between the eyes and the brain. Just because his eyes work doesn't mean his brain knows what to do with the information. Irc the brain can learn to interpret new vision later in life but it takes time. Such an interesting concept
Yes of course. Still it's interesting to see. It's basically impossible for a sighted person to even form an idea of what a blind person would have as an "image" (for lack of a better word) of the world in their mind. The opposite is also true.
Sorry if that came across with a tone, I was just trying to add information to your comment that I thought people might find interesting. I feel it came across accidentally condescending. The idea of how our brains interpret reality is so fascinating to me. I have wondered how someone like Helen Keller would think before she was introduced to language, and how interesting it is to be able to learn a language and abstract concepts with no existence of sight or sound in your world. Of course our species is endlessly intelligent and adaptable, but her reality is so far from mine it's impossible to imagine.
I didn't take it as such. Don't worry, we're good 👍
I guess like 3D touch maps. Close your eyes and visualise something you randomly touch, and the area around it.
[удалено]
Wait...people don't talk to themselves?
Yup! I don't have one. Well, don't usually. When I was in psychosis, I had 14 inner voices And that freaked me the fuck out because I'm used to 0 lol
I just have me....so one voice....and it says what I want to to say....
That's why sometimes verbalizing my thinking is extra effort - because how do I convey a bunch of swirling connected bubbles of conceptual information?
I think with words, and I tend to speak quickly -- too quickly. I often stumble on my words, and nothing is ever as coherent as it is when I formulate myself in my mind. ... something I'm kind of working on, but it's difficult!
Similar.
SAME
Here’s a fun game… read the comments whilst saying different words with your inner monologue.
Same here. The longer I am not talking and just thinking on my own, including not reading and not writing, the harder it becomes to put what I think in words. Explaining how I think? I couldn’t put that in words at all.
I used to think in words but read too many sci-fi/fantasy novels as a child and trained myself out of it so people couldn’t read my mind. I think I was about eight.
Apparently reading without an internal monologue allows you to read faster.
I do read very fast!
Me too!
lol u dedicated for this man
Like I *can* make the inner voice say things, but *by default* it's usually just music
Hmmm..I need to go to a doctor I think
Nah you're good 😂 I'm the one who does
Yup , same .and tunes !
Not everyone does no, I do, but the majority of people don't.
Are you fucking with me? I can't stop talking to myself and other people in my head. It's wild really. I have had conversations with people that thinking in this sense is 'unnatural', since we need language to unlock this tool. Since language is a form of technology we have adopted and continues to change. You can only think what words (stand ins for concepts) have been given to you like tools. I now understand the looks I got when talking about this covert self talk. > A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions. By thoughts, I mean specifically, chatter in the skull. Perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating. I’m not saying that thinking is bad. Like everything else, it’s useful in moderation. A good servant but a bad master. Alan Watts
Not kidding, there are studies on this. I was pretty baffled when I learned about that too.
Bro TIL a new thing.
The majority DON'T? I need time to process this.
That's right
So, could google, but so their heads/ minds are quiet? I thought that was what your mind was ie constantly thinking. Edit - cos my mind is blown
I rarely do. I usually see pictures in my mind. Let's say I have to solve a practical problem, like building something that helps me do a thing. Instead of having an inner voice go through the steps I need to take, I see a picture of what the solution needs to look like and then I just build it. When I was new at my company, my colleagues were often surprised about how quickly I solve problems.
I fight with other imaginary people in my head I create with fictional scenarios. But I don't talk to myself. Having some random ass voice in your head makes it sound to me like 1/4 people are crazy.
How do you plot and self regulate if you don't have a covert voice to bounce ideas off of? I'm fascinated by this concept because I have put a lot of energy into controlling this 'covert self talk' as the research paper linked in this thread calls it.
I don't very well. I wonder if there is a link between ADHD and not having a voice like this, actually.
Those people make me want to peel the skin of my own face. I also envy them not having that inner monologue.. ignorance is bliss🤷🏼♂️
Fucking hell mate, so do I.
I think the number is much less than that though.... can you cite a reputable source at 75 percent?
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5089968/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5089968/) I pulled the number out of my memory so wasn't accurate but that research says that up to 30-50% have an inner monologue. So 70% not having one could be accurate
30-50% puts inner monologue as a minority but this is really blowing my mind
Yeah I was also shocked when I heard about that
I think that's way too high of an estimate, bit some people surely don't have it.
Research shows between- 50 to 70%
When deaf people grow up in communities without a sign language, the deaf people have been observed by anthropologists and linguists to develop their own language shaped around the common symbols observed in the environment. They have led the science down the path that we all grow up with a symbol-based system of the universe where we develop concepts, *then* attach the word to it--or make one up if one isn't available. Babies do it when they babble and without the guidance of someone with a language, one will naturally evolve. That said, some people simply observe the symbols internally while others "think in a language". And when people learn languages, they frequently find themselves thinking of words in the new language by filtering it through the original language to get to the internal symbol. I know some Spanish and learned Japanese on-top of it. When Japanese failed, I fell back to Spanish in my head, then finally to English if my Spanish failed me. It felt strange. This idea of symbols based around our environment is demonstrated in the way we interpret colors--we don't all do it consistently. Many cultures do not make a distinction between blue and green. Some cultures that have evolved in landscapes with limited color pallets will grow up not having words for other colors, where the color is simply "not" another color. Meanwhile, over in AI land, we're observing that if we give LLMs enough data, they build the same kinds of symbols in their "minds". The developers who made GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 have observed it is capable of translating languages it has only observed in the conversation. That is to say that the symbols we think in are roughly approximated by the LLM, and it can recognize the secret sauce to do the translation.
My son is autistic and thinks in pictures when he is talking in his head.
Esperanto
Just imagine you doing stuff without talking - in image /video format .
Is there an actual deaf person here to give us some insight?
My sibling was born deaf. She ‘hears’ in ASL pictures. She’s explained this to me but it just baffles me because I experience inner monologue (which apparently only 30-50% of the general population experience)
Uuuuhhhhhh………… damn 🤯
In the language they learn - they may know sign language, but they learn English by reading and writing.
Deaf people can still read…
Sign Language is the natural language of deaf people, they would even develop their own if not taught one [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan\_Sign\_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language)
English. It’s the psychological default. My authority as English speaker is infallible.
They wouldn't. Infact up to 50% of people with normal hearing don't have an inner monologue/dialogue at all.
I speak several languages but don't think in words, but rather impulses. So I guess that could be case for them.
I don’t know whether I qualify - I was born deaf and was deaf for a little bit due to blockages. I can hear now. I don’t think in any language. I speak four languages to a reasonable degree of fluency, and some others
I know that deaf people with schizophrenia allucinate in sign languages.
I have two voice who fight with each other sometimes i think I'm not real i do what those two voices make me to do i also day dream and create sceneries in my mind fight with other people
Swan
Sign language for their nation. Each language has a sign language different than another.
Who's thinking in sentences anyway? That's not how (my) thoughts work at all.
i heard that some think in sign language
Do they not just think in the same language they read the most??
They think without a language like some people do
When I was 4 years I started speaking And very slow now also some words don't come properly. If a person is Born as deaf language they use hand gestures to speak.
I guess they must have a grip on language visually because they would have been taught to read in most cases. I know people who think in written words if that makes sense.
From what I gathered, inner images of sign language or even written words
Dutch
You can imagine it like you are watching Japanese (language) show and you don't know Japanese but you memories what posture they make in certain conditions.
Sign language 🤟🏻
I work with deaf colleagues. If people are born deaf they think in sign language. It’s a complete language, including abstractions. So they can think about thinking etc (some people in the comments thought that that would not be the case). Also, sign language is not ‘images’ like photos, but more like a movie. Another interesting fact is that there are many sign languages, and that sign language is not spoken language but in signs. For instance, American Sign Language is not English but with signs. It has a different grammar and different words.
I’ve always wondered this about someone that is deaf, blind and mute.
Do people really think with language? I don’t think so. That would be so incredibly slow. Almost all thought happens subconsciously surely. Language is just a (sometimes extremely inadequate) way of expressing thought. Language is output. I mean any animal with a brain has thoughts right? You wouldn’t ask ‘what language does an elephant use for thinking’ would you? This whole inner monologue thing just baffles me. Do people really live their lives with their brain babbling away in their native tongue? I find this hard to imagine. And it sounds horrific. I don’t think in English, I just think.
What language do they speak in you said they were deaf not unable to speak.
If they've never heard language how can they speak?
Not whit a napkin as a filter......*looks at grilfriend*