Month: October 2004

Concerning my recent post on Thinking Without Words, a reader writes:

What about people who are deaf from birth? How do they think? Do they make up their own words? Or do they think without words, in a form of mentalese?

Good question!

This is something I was thinking about a while back (actually, about twenty years ago), so I asked one of my cousins, who was born deaf.

He responded that he sees people signing in his head reflecting his internal monologue.

Deaf folks have the same translation reflex that we do, they just translate their mentalese into a gestural language (typically ASL or American Sign Language here in America) rather than into a spoken language (like English).

In a related question that occurred to me, I wondered what people blind from birth associate with colors. It occurred to me that they would likely associate colors with tactile sensations–their minds filling in something they are familiar with (tactile sensations) for something they aren’t familiar with (colors).

So I asked a blind friend and he told me that it was indeed true: He associated the color red with the tactile sensation of heat, the color green with the tactile sensation of handling a dollar bill, and the color yellow with the feeling of touching a little yellow wooden bench he sat on when he was a small child. He hadn’t ever seen these colors, but he formed the tactile substitute impressions for the colors based on what others told him about things having these colors (i.e., things that are “red hot,” “greenbacks,” and in his own case, a yellow child’s bench).

Amazing how the human mind works, isn’t it!

There’s a scene in Bablyon 5 where Capt. Sheridan has just met Lorien–who is the first intelligent being to arise in the history of the universe and who is still alive after all these years.

At the moment, Sheridan is quite distracted by recent events and is unable to appreciate a question Lorien is mulling over. Lorien points out to Sheridan that the Universe began with a Word, but which came first? The Word or the Thought behind it? You can’t have words without thoughts or thoughts without words, so there’s a kind of chicken-vs.-egg situation here.

There are several remarkable things about this scene. One is that it was written by Joe Straczynski, who is an atheist but was nevertheless willing to put on the lips of Lorien (a kind of cosmic Adam) a statement about Creation taken from the Gospel of John. As always, kudos to Joe for being willing to treat religion thoughtfully and respectfully in his fiction.

Another remarkable thing about the scene is that Lorien is wrong.

Oh, sure. You hear his view about the interdependence of thoughts and words articulated a lot, and it can seem prima facie justified: We have an awful hard time thinking without an internal monologue going in our heads. Yet it is still untrue that we can’t think without using words.

There are a variety of ways to show this, though I won’t go through them all here. I will mention two, however.

One is the ability of individuals to clearly think and understand complex realities without the ability to articulate them in words. I recently was reading a book by a cognitive scientist who cited the case of a man who had a stroke while he was sleeping and woke up unable to use language, even in his mind. He later regained his language ability and described his experience vividly. As soon as he woke up, he realized something was wrong. He couldn’t use certain parts of his body, and he quickly deduced that he must have had a stroke during the night. He tried to call out to his wife (who had already gotten out of bed) for help, but couldn’t remember how to use words.

He thus understood the concepts I have had a stroke and I can use words to get help without having the ability to cash out these thoughts in linguistic form.

He was (temporarily) reduced to a state of functioning only in what cognitive scientists call “mentalese”–the “language of the mind,” which we frequently experience with an almost-simultaneous accompanying internal gloss in English (or whatever the language is that we’re thinking in at the moment).

Yet it is possible to think without the gloss. Situations in which we have to think very fast are good for bringing this out, as we may be having to think so fast that we don’t have time to do the gloss that we normally reflexively provide.

Lately I’ve been trying to cultivate an awareness of my own thinking in mentalese, and I’ve found that driving offers a lot of opportunities.

For example, this Saturday I was driving up a particularly narrow, twisty road on a mountainside. The road had lots of intersections, and if a car came whizzing through one of these intersections under the control of a careless drive, it could smack into you in no time flat.

Thus as I drove up the hill, I was very sensitive to the cars that might pop in from the right or the left.

Sure enough, as I was rounding one turn that had an intersection, my peripheral vision caught a car coming right up to the intersection at a high rate of speed. Only having a second to decide whether to slam on the breaks or not, I quickly looked down at the roadsurface of the intersection to see if there was a white line at the intersection, blocking the car’s path and signalling it to stop. I realized that if there was a white line that the driver of the other car would be legally required to stop and, unless he was extraordinarily careless, he would stop, meaning that the risk of a collision was low enough that I shouldn’t swerve dramatically or slam on the breaks (which are themselves risky moves in such an environment). I saw that there was such a white line, kept driving, and the other car stopped.

I thought all of this–the need for the white line, its legal implications, its probable implications for the other car stopping, and the ensuing implications for what I needed to do as a driver–in under a second and didn’t have time to cash it out in words.

It was a moment of pure mentalese.

It took me a lot longer just now to articulate in words what happend than it took me to think it all as it happened when unencumbered by words.

And that’s the way it tends to work: We first reason through a situation very fast in mentalese and, upon having a particular insight, we start reflexively cashing it out in words in our internal monologues–unless events (like driving in a complex environment) force us to think about other things. This reflexive translation of mentalese into a verbal language is what generates the illusion that words and thoughts are mutually dependent on each other.

They aren’t.

You know those cool robots they have now?

A friend of mine has one that cleans the pool in her back yard.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting one of those carpet cleaning robots.

Some people have lawn mowers that work the same way.

But robots don’t have to move from place to place in order to count as robots. The assembly-line robots in Detroit auto plants, for example, are fixed in one spot.

This got me to thinking: What exactly is a robot? Unless we artificially restrict the term to meaning “android” (i.e., a man-shaped robot) then they seem to be any device that, while activated, automatically performs a task that used to be performed by human effort. (See Wikipedia’s entry for more.)

So I started thinking: I’ve got this tall, oscillating fan in my bedroom. Is it a robot?

They’ve had fans for centuries, but not automatic ones. Before this century you either used a small hand fan to fan yourself (as one sometimes still does) or you had a servant use a large fan to cool a whole room. (Y’know, like in all those movies where Egyptian rulers are being fanned with the big, feathered fans.)

The oscillating fans we use today perform this function without the use of human labor.

That seems to make them robots.

Dish washers and washing machines seem to be, too. People used to (and sometimes still do) perform those tasks by hand.

HERE’S A STORY SAYING ROBOT USAGE IS EXPECTED TO SURGE SEVEN-FOLD BY 2007.

It seems to me that the robots are already here. They infiltrated our society a long time ago.

In preparation for the Robot Uprising.

I’m going to be sleeping lightly tonight.

I’ve got a robot in my bedroom.