Jimmy Akin

Regarding our recent discussion of deafness and mentalese, a reader writes:

But what about deaf people who don’t know sign language? I recently read an article that claimed a surprising number of deaf people don’t know sign language, or at least don’t know it very well, especially deaf children who grow up with parents who have normal hearing. So how do they think? Or what about deaf people in remote areas who never encounter sign language? They are obviously thinking somehow but what form do the thoughts take?

If a person were totally deprived of language–both spoken, gestural, and anything else one might propose–then the person would have no option but to think in pure mentalese.

That being said, it isn’t clear to me how common completely language-less people are. I question whether they even exist. The language instinct is so strong in humans that the accounts I have read indicate that even deaf people not exposed to a formal sign languages come up with informal signs.

Recently I was reading an account of a deaf man from Mexico who was never exposed to formal signing. This gentleman not only was able to get across the border with the United States, he was able to survive in the Los Angeles area. When he was discovered, he did not know any established language, including sign languages. An effort was made to teach him a sign language, and soon he “made the breakthrough.” Afterwards, he not only was able to describe his prior experience, he also was able to lead those working with him to other non-signing deaf individuals, who were more common than had been known.

These individuals had a network amongst themselves that had previously escaped notice. Despite their lack of conventional language, they had found ways to communicate with each other and often entertained each others with elaborate pantomimes describing their experiences.

This suggests that the language instinct in humans is so strong that even in the absence of exposure to a formal language, they will come up with an informal one.

This suggests that even these individuals may not think in pure mentalese but might have an accompanying “translation” of their thoughts into the informal gestural methods of communication they invent.

It would be fascinating to have better data on this, however.

There’s going to be a total eclipse of the moon tonight, and North America has the best seat in the house for it.

You may be able to catch the eclipse on FOX, as it will occur during the World Series game that FOX is broadcasting.

For full viewing instructions, including when totality will occur in your timezone, as well as background on what a lunar eclipse is, etc., GO HERE.

For those in the continental US, totality (which lasts less than 5 min.) will occur at 7:18 Pacific, 8:18 Mountain, 9:18 Central, and 10:18 Eastern.

Enjoy!

P.S. Unlike an eclipse of the sun, you can look directly at an eclipse of the moon!

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.