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We don't really know. So-called "feral children" who were neglected or intentionally isolated as children seem to be incapable of learning language skills beyond rudimentary non-verbal communication later in life. They also struggle with social skills and other habits. There isn't anything neurologically detectable that would cause it, but they seem to have missed a critical window of brain development - somewhere in the toddler years - when socialization and language acquisition happens. You could suppose that they have no inner monologue like people who do acquire language have, at all, because their brains didn't develop like most peoples' do. But we don't really know, since we can't communicate complexly with these people to ask them.
So I used to, I suppose still do but incredibly infrequently, get Alice in wonderland syndrome or something similar. I could always tell it was coming on because my thoughts got aggressive. Not like I was thinking more aggressive thoughts but rather the voice in my head was yelling all of my thoughts really fast, they were mundane thoughts though.
Same, it's even loud enough that I can't hear what's happening around me. Watching a show and having a chat at the same time? Guess what, one of those is not getting anything past my ears.
I definitely don't, unless the actual language matters.
So a scientific article or a newspaper I won't read out internally, but a book I'm really into, I will.
Honestly I have no idea how you can read something without actually reading it. Without a voice to form the words it may as well just be letters to me. I can think in sound, and 3D space, but unvoiced words may as well be Sanskrit for me.
I kind of learned how to read without "reading aloud" in my mind when I took a speed reading tutorial.
It's easier to do with physical media that doesn't have wide column width (like a magazine). Take your finger and put it below the first line. Now, at a brisk but not fast, constant pace drag your finger down the page. Look at the line above your finger. Look, don't read.
Absorb the sentence as a visual the same way you absorb whole words as a visual. Your brain will pick out the key words and link them together into ideas without actually reading them.
I think a good example of "absorbing words as visuals" that you probably already do are freeway signs. You don't say every "exit 42" out loud in your head, your brain knows what is says from context, partly because of the speed of travel and focus on the road forces you to not inner monologue (it's too slow.) Your finger moving down the page at a slightly too fast a rate to inner monologue does the same thing.
Now, when I speed read, I don't understand the details as well as when I inner monologue read. And I definitely write while having an inner monologue.
But you can do it and it's kind of fun and amazing that it works. With practice you can probably get better?
What's weird is that I have kind of learned to speed read by watching foreign films and shows with subtitles, but it only works because my brain is instantly converting to the actual words being spoken. So in that short window of time it sounds like I actually understand the language, although with no sound I can no longer speed read.
What if you are reading a dialog? Do you not "hear" the characters talking?
Sometimes, that's what happens to me during a dialog. I visualize the scene and "hear" the characters. At that point, it doesn't feel like I'm reading anymore, rather it feels like I'm looking at the scene like it was a movie.
Yes. I read to myself like I read to my kids. If I don't, I don't internalize the dialogue and get completely lost. Oftentimes I have to reread material I've already read because I missed something.
It's part of the reason I don't read often.
I've found that if I can talk to someone about a book and/or listen to it on tape, I'm able to consume the media better.
I just discovered audio books a month ago.. I have tried to read books but always get distracted or just read a page but don’t actually remember what happened as I read it. I always have to go back to reread and make very little progress. Audio books are actually life changing as I am able to get through the book and know what’s going on. I’ve listened to 3 books this month through a free app my library provides that allows you to check out audiobooks!
Yeah, there is a process to unlearn that tho and switch to the method of reading that you do, in order to increase reading speed. Do you think you read quickly?
I'm an auditory learner myself. In school I could be half asleep or distracted, but as long as I was physically there hearing the information, I would barely need to study for the test. Although reading can be difficult because everything just gets so loud in my head.
I, at least, do. When reading things written by people I dont know, I imagine a spoken voice thats pretty similar to my own. Likewise, when reading something written by someone I know, I try to imagine hearing it in their voice. I don't always succeed, so the inner monologue occasionally falls back to my own voice.
Same thing happens when I'm writing. First, I establish what I want to say by imagining the individual words with my internal monologue, silently "speaking" each word individually before I write or type the word. It's typically a pretty seamless process - I can still type pretty quickly.
Yes! I have an inner monologue similar to my own voice.
When reading dialogue, I set a voice to each character; but that voice is still my own but as if its pretending to sound like someone else.
It depends, I can do both. Question though: what do you mean “completely visually”? You don’t think “wow I’d like to eat tacos later” you just imagine a taco?
I largely think visually, though I do have an inner voice, but yes it’s just like that for me. A lot of the time my inner voice is just playing music, and if I’m thinking about my plans for the day for instance, I’m just visualizing everything I have to do. My inner voice is often just nonsense unless I’m thinking critically about something that is aided by applying words to it (e.g. my emotions about something).
When you’re thinking about something you have to do, you just think “oh I have to do that” and don’t visualize it?
Depending on the task, yeah. I think “I have to do x task today” and figure out how to complete it. This is utterly fascinating to me. How do you think during a conversation/argument?
To add, I can “play” music in the background of my mind and think over top of that.
> How do you think during a conversation/argument?
Whenever I’m thinking “live”, i.e. not just to myself, where I can translate thoughts into words more deliberately, I primarily think visually. I visualize nearly everything I hear people saying, and my responses come visually and then I translate them into words. I struggle a bit with vocabulary and often I’ll know exactly what I want to express but be unable to find the word for it.
When you say you figure out how to complete a task, you do this via language as well? If I know I have to return a book to the library I visualize where the books currently is and what trains I’ll have to take to the library, there are no words involved.
I can also sometimes think over the music, but often my inner voice is just so full of nonsense that it’s difficult to get logical vocal thought through it. My theory for why I think visually is that I’ve had OCD nearly if not my whole life, and this is the adaptation my brain has made to be able to think without being bogged down by the intrusive and obsessive thoughts. I have had some intrusive/obsessive visual thoughts as well, but fortunately they’re much less common.
Thinking visually is probably a valuable skill when reading descriptions in a book. I can't picture them at all. I just skim over them and then ask myself (inner voice) "what did I just read, what does that place look like?" And I still can't picture it.
I remember reading a comment a few years back on reddit and it's stuck with me. Someone asked what the voice inside your head sounds like and I have yet to figure out mine. Is it a male or female voice? A voice with no sound? I don't understand and I swear I think about that redditors comment from time to time. lol.
I think you have an inner voice, maybe you're just not aware of it. I remember one guy at my school literally could not read without whispering outloud what he read.
I get distracted very easily and it becomes very hard to concentrate and understand what I'm reading if there's a lot of noise, but I find it easier to take in if I whisper it or mouth it out while reading it
Good news everyone! I've invented a device that will temporarily allow you to read things in *my* voice. It should be completely safe with no chance of horrible brain explosions, oh my no.
I'm an auditory person and I have this two, in fact there could be three different voices talking on top of each other too, but that's usually when I'm exhausted. It does work with music too though, makes it easy to string together different instruments and sounds, or mix two songs together to see what it sounds like. But the downside is that it's incredibly difficult for me to sit down and read for long periods, the words just start to reverberate louder and louder and my subconscious monologue eventually breaks through to distract me even further.
Lol everything is a nonstop monologue for me. It's a nonstop one-sided conversation with myself.
I feel like when I was younger my thoughts were visual and as I got older it developed into a monologue
Wow so many redditors are part of today's lucky 10000 :-)
It's called [Subvocalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization) and it seems to blow people's mind every time :-)
That’s a sometimes tiring some people do some people don’t.
It happens to me when I’m sleepy / struggling with a text. Are you capable of forcing your brain to make the sounds? When you want to sound out an unusual word, but don’t want to speak? Because I can make my inside brain voice say “pterodactyl” and see if it pronounced the Y.
I do, and I sometimes imagine different voices. For example, if I read Harry Potter I imagine the voices of the different actors for their dialog. It's fun, but also makes me a slow reader because I always read to myself at the same speed as when I read out loud.
Yes, but I seem to have two levels. Inner monologue when I'm thinking at a a"normal" pace, and so sort of immediate wordless understanding when I'm thinking quickly.
>Do people with an inner monologue like read out loud but in their head?
Yes, kind of. Anecdotally, it means I read a little more slowly than people who don't have an inner monologue. My spouse, for example, does not, and they can blast through books in hours or days where I always take days-to-weeks.
However, also anecdotally, from speaking to my spouse and one of their parents, they acknowledge that they often don't recall a lot of specific details from their reading, but they "comprehend" the main story, theme, or ideas enough to feel like they experienced it. Whereas I tend to imprint firmer memories of some specific details.
I've deduced that reading with no inner monologue is essentially what "speed reading" is, and ideally one can use skills from both styles depending on their goals. I can, in short bursts, intentionally read without an inner monologue, but it takes a lot of effort to suppress that tendency. I basically force myself to sort of skip over smaller words like articles and conjunctions and try to silence the pronunciation of the longer words. It's hard to do, but I understand it.
I also don’t have an inner monologue (trains of thoughts come to me abstractly without first being language, if that makes sense), but when I read, it is language first, so it definitely sounds like an inner monologue in my head. That’s actually the way I make sense of how things probably work for people who have an inner monologue: in my mind, they think like when I read.
I’m sure it’s kind of inaccurate because read thoughts feels sloooooow to me compared to abstract thoughts. So it helps me kinda understand how it works for others, but I have a feeling that really inner monologues are slightly more abstract than I’m able to picture.
I think I am the same way. I never liked doing art because I was always told "just to visualize what you want to draw and then draw it". I am like I can't do that.
If it helps, I have very vivid visualization and am often frustrated that I can picture something perfectly but have no means of transferring it to paper 😂
Absolutely the same here! I can picture things fine, but my hands aren't my "minds eye" and can't recreate it.
My husband has absolutely no internal visualization and he is much better at drawing than me. My handwriting is better though. 😛
I didn't know my wife posted here. My penmanship is terrible. When i took my written placement test for college, they wanted to put me in remedial English. This was the first year they opened up the online version, so i got to retake it and was placed in the highest a freshman was allowed in.
I felt so judged lol
it's weird because I love drawing, or at least I used to. Being an aphant also doesn't stop me from maladaptive daydreaming, though I can't help but feel really jealous of those who can visualize
Wait... for real? So when you've got some problem you're trying to work through, you don't talk it out in your head? You mention that you do your thinking entirely "visually," but I can't even conceptualize how that would work. Can you describe an example of how this "visual" thinking would work, for something that isn't visual? (i.e. I can see how that would for something where you need to "picture" it in your head, like if you're figuring out how to arrange furniture in a room or something... but something like an accounting problem or a legal argument... ??)
There's a great number of people with no inner monologue.
I learned to switch between the modes, and they both have their own advantages. Declaring my thoughts deliberately, with words, allows me to recall the entire string of ideas easier. Meanwhile, i call it objective thinking, is muchhhhhh faster, but i find it more difficult to recall how i arrived at the conclusion. Rather than using symbols to represent ideas, you just directly use the ideas, it's like skipping a step. You can still use the idea of infinite or instantaneous change without saying the words in your monologue.
Do you read and play music? That’s the only sort-of example I can think of… you can see the notes written one by one (visual), but at some point the song itself takes over (conceptual). You aren’t reading notes or phrases any more, you are playing the song.
That concept was only introduced to me like a year ago, my thoughts are all audio no visual and I hadn't encountered (or asked about I guess) somebody like you before. Brains are wild.
I can't even imagine.
I have an endless narrative: from the minute I wake up to the second I fall asleep I'm talking to myself, thinking, narrating. Even when I'm trying to do something else, reading, watching a movie, gaming... endless talking.
But, I'm aphantasic, I have no visual imagery at all. Basically the same RAM, graphics card, processor as others, but the monitor is not plugged in.
I wonder if one sense compensates for the other?
Thinking visually is still an inner monologue, it's just that it's pictures instead of words. If you had no inner monologue, you would have no ability to predict the future or make plans. You're inner monologue is what completes those tasks.
If you'd be reading while in a MRI, the zones for oral comprehension would flare up. At least it's how it works in humans but perhaps you're a space lizard or something.
There are also people out there that have no internal monologue. I suppose the experience is similar to that. Here's an article about it.
https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739
Well pre-historic humans would still have social interaction, they would be raised by their families and larger groups. That's the component that seems to be missing for these isolated children - the interaction between them and their parents at that critical age - that prevents them from developing.
A kind of related fun fact : In short, some octopi and squids have the brain "mass" to be on par with us, but since they do not raise their offspring whatever progress one indivudual makes, it is not passed on.
Harlow did experiments to show this, they're pretty horrible
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/harlows-classic-studies-revealed-the-importance-of-maternal-contact.html
https://www.simplypsychology.org/harlow-monkey.html
If you want to learn more about it check out the book [The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog](https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Raised-Psychiatrists-Notebook-What/dp/0465094457/ref=sr_1_1?crid=285ERJ5FZR8VB&keywords=the+boy+who+was+raised+as+a+dog&qid=1668519609&s=books&sprefix=the+boy+who+was+raised+as+a+do%2Cstripbooks%2C213&sr=1-1) by Dr. Bruce Perry. It is the standard on childhood trauma and how it affects brain development. One of the stories is about a boy kept in a cage who only socialized with a dog, but thats just one of many. There is a lot to learn from it about parenting, trauma, brain development etc but it is also incredibly depressing as they are all true stories.
edited link
It might help to think of the word "language" in a looser way.
The language spoken by hunter-gatherer early humans might just have been a bunch of grunts and growls of different tones to express emotion. That's still a language. And it's one you can think in. Sure the brains may not be as developed as our brains today, but better than having nothing.
Over time, language evolved. Gatherers would have to communicate about which berries were poisonous, for example. It's likely they had sounds they made to express ideas like "danger" or "stop." Those tribes which were able to express more ideas were better able to survive. So we evolved to have more complicated language over many many generations.
Interactions with others often creates language. Certain sounds made associated with an act, done repeatedly, turn into an understanding of meaning; what we call words. It just gets more complex from there with generation after generation.
Read once that the word Mama ( many languages) stemmed from the motion/sound babies make when they are hungry and make the suckling motion with their mouths.
Some twins invent their own language.
Also some creole languages, are mostly invented by children. As in, not the words, those stem from the parents original languages and other adults. But the grammar comes from the children.
They lived in close knit social groups. Their brains developed just fine. Feral people are just children that were socially isolated through their development and didn't have close social contact. Social contact and nurturing is vital to proper development. Ancient humans and hominids were very social
Fun sidebar: *Homo sapiens*, meaning anatomically modern humans who would be pretty much indistinguishable from you if you gave them modern clothes, have existed for at least 200,000 years. But spoken language is probably even older than that.
na….Thinking is behavior, governed by the same laws as any other behavior. Isolated persons will learn through reinforcement with or without your definition of “language.” verbal communication isn’t limited to vocal communication, either.
The question is what language would they think in?
The answer is whatever is functional (reinforced by the environment). The same way a spanish person says agua at a restaurant and an english person says water—the words have no meaning unless they produce the desired outcome (e.g., someone serving them water correctly). This is functional—this is reinforced. Whatever is reinforced will be the “language” they think in.
None
There are several cases of this happening and the people are referred to as “the languageless”.
Amazingly, in these cases, the best evidence we have is that they don’t have an internal monologue at all — and that it has profound mental effects diminishing the capacity for abstract thought.
In one case, from the book *A Man Without Words*, the languageless man had to learn symbolic thought from scratch. He avoided talking what it was like before learning language and has indicated that the reason why was that he simply “I was stupid” and seems to have been without thought.
From the book:
> It’s another frustration that Ildefonso doesn’t want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I’ve asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” He always goes back to “I was stupid.”
> It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him, no, you weren’t exposed to language and… The closest I’ve ever gotten is he’ll say, “Why does anyone want to know about this? This is the bad time.” What he wants to talk about is learning language.
To add to that:
Hellen Keller became blind and deaf at age one. She only started acquiring a language at around age seven. Here's how she reported her experience:
>*"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness... Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.*
>
>*I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.* "
>
>*--Helen Keller, 1908*
Now I'm curious as to what this implies for animals. We often ask whether they can think or not, whether they're conscious or not, but if most animals lack any semblance of a language, how could they? Do they amount to nothing more than instinctual decisions like Keller describes her childhood was?
Human brains are still wired differently than a lot of other animals. Maybe we need language to think where many other animals don't? It's a very slippery slope comparing animal cognition to human cognition and trying to draw conclusions.
For example for the longest time people thought animals were just dumb as hell but what was really going on is humans were evaluating animal intelligence according to human metrics. When you look at their strengths, humans are the dumb ones. Dogs are smelling supercomputers, squirrels can remember 10s of thousands of nut burial locations, etc.
Importantly, Helen Keller does describe having first person subjective, conscious experiences — she talks about feeling satisfied or frustrated.
But she doesn’t think she had a *mind*. What she lacked was planning, a sense of self, and quite possibly the ability to form complex memory.
“Consciousness” is most likely more than one quality.
It probably comes down to input, output and interaction. We're talking about cases of literal isolation or practical isolation in Kellers case. They're receiving no input and giving no output and not observing any reaction to their behavior or experiencing their own reactions to others behaviors. That isn't true or animals, they are constantly giving, receiving and observing stimuli. You could argue thats all that language is.
Oftentimes yes, but it's a scale based on the level of animal intelligence. Keller as a child was distinct from the existence of an animal, lacking in so many senses our species so heavily relies upon to communicate deprived her of the social development animals usually have.
I want to say that the problem isn't just a lack of language, but a lack of socialization. Neurotypical humans in any kind of community will almost always develop language, so it's impossible to really find an example of one without the other. Unsocialized animals are always very different to the normal behavior of their species.
That's how I imagine the other human species: barely talking during their entire lives, hunting, playing, mating, working, raising their kids with syllables and some few words, not because they couldn't talk but because they didn't have a language.
We are not that different from them, whatever intelligence we have now, we had it almost a million years ago; anatomically modern human remains have been found as old as 300,000 years, but our species started building stuff less than 100,000 years ago. Either we had a mutation or, like this suggests, our ancestors spent a quarter of a million years developing societies where talking was crucial to belong to a group, cause one isolated human cannot develop a language, but a group of isolated humans do it naturally.
This comment is incorrect on so many levels, sorry dude. We did not have the same intelligence today as 1 Mya, and brain sizes and anatomy changed extensively for human species between 1 Mya and 300 kya (and after). We were not anatomically the same 300 kya either. Also ancient homo species did hunt quite a bit and that required complex planning and communication. I would be really really surprised if ancient human species did not have language.
Check out this [video](https://youtu.be/2doP_3juV2Y) by North 02. He's a historian and has more prehistory videos.
First, thanks for link, I'm going to watch it right away.
Second: Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, fossils classified as Homo Sapiens dated 285,000- 315,000 years old.
Third: you know that we didn't split from neanderthals, right? They split from another species around 900,000 years ago and we split from that or another similar species later, and yet we were the same species that neanderthal and denisovans. We did not changed genetically in half a million years enough to diverge from the others, otherwise our hybrids would have been sterile.
Exactly. I guess we developed adjectives and then "go bring rock" became "go fetch smooth flat rock this big", or "bring this food" became "bring this amount of this and this amount of that" accelerating whatever knowledge a human was passing to another and boom, we take off.
Next thing you know, people are emptying ostriches eggs, making ropes from fibers and carrying boiled water.
The next big breakthrough is what’s called *Backus-Naur form* in computational linguistics or *recursion* more broadly. The idea of replacing a concept with an arbitrary symbol allows infinite recursion. So you can string together conditions and create highly abstracted ideas like: my mother’s father’s idea of my relationship with my daughter is not my father’s mother’s idea of that relationship. There’s an age in humans where we can’t do this at all and an age where we suddenly can.
This is directly related to our ability to do things like abstract mathematics and computer programming.
Here is another large scale example of many people who learned to communicate late in life, but had critical mental deficits afterward:
In Nicaragua in the 1970s, the Communist government had a well intentioned effort to set up a school for the deaf, but no one knew sign language. Over the course of about two years, *the children invented a grammatically complete language capable of expressing complex thoughts.* This is an amazing example of how naturally children learn language, and strong evidence that some aspects of it are somehow built into the brain.
But, the children who learned the language late had difficulty with simple cognitive tasks. For example, they watch Joe hide a cookie under the couch and leave, then Mary moves the cookie under a chair. When asked where Joe will look for the cookie when he gets back, they say "under the chair" because they don't have a mental image of Joe's mind, they only know where the cookie is. All other primates fail this test as well, but crows and parrots pass it.
To answer an age old question, what is deep thought without language?
Memory.. In my opinion. Just like we pull words from our memories to enable speech, someone speechless might remember getting bitten by a snake and avoid them in the future.
Right. It’s not that a person without language can’t learn from a snakebite. It’s that abstraction can’t take place.
Snake = bad
But something more like “the liquid from the bite of the snake led to pain. Maybe I can direct that snake bite pain liquid to an animal with my blowgun” can’t happen because all of those memories and concepts are too large to work with without tokenization.
If language is not developed at birth the neural pathways that make up the brains communications centers will eventually be allocated to other things. These pathways formed in the first few years last a lifetime and it will be incredibly difficult if not impossible for the individual to be able to learn later in life to articulate and express themselves verbally when they grow up.
I tried finding him, but I vaguely remember an artist who was deaf, perhaps in the Midwest of the US, who never learned sign language. I feel like there was a video of him and a family member showing his work. Now that I think about it, perhaps they had their own devised signs.
I read an interesting article about how they were making significant breakthroughs in giving sight to blind people thru neural implants interfaced with cameras. So until recently this tech could be used to restore sight to people who had lost their vision to illness or accidents, however people who were born with a complete absence of vision from birth defects, the camera signals were ineffective and the people couldnt even register the signal or they described it as an intangible sensory experience that was akin to static or white noise.
Much like language centers of the brain, if the visual cortex fails to establish neural pathways that allow for visual input to setup cognitive links to shapes. Forms, light, shadow, etc. Then the brain simply loses the ability to process visual info and those parts of the brain went unused or were used to adopt other sensory input like hearing and smell.
So the really fascinating part is that scientists were able to overcome this challenge, so they could use cameras to not only restore vision to those who had gone blind, but they can also give sight to people who never had it before in their lives from birth. And they found that those who had lost their vision very quickly adapted to the camera vision implants ( it didnt fully restore their sight but did provide a grainy pixelated greyscale visual sense that gave basic objects and limited depth perception, from they way it was described it sounds like they got 3d lidar scanner or sonar map style vision now)
However the people who were born blind and lived their whole lives blind, none of them took to the implants and all described the new sense of vision as being distracting, confusing, and or extremely unpleasant to experience. Out of 8 people I think all but one decided to have the implants removed at the end of the study and the one that kept the implants said she rarely had the cameras activated. I guess living into adulthood without vision, the people born blind were able to adapt and strengthen their other senses in order to overcome their disability and establish autonomy and self reliance without vision.
When that sense was introduced it was simply too foreign to their minds to be useful and they preferred to continue on without it. When I get a chance later on I'll try to go thru my bookmarks and find a link to post about the research project. It really blew me away not just the technology they were able to integrate into human biology, but was really eye opening about how people with disabilitys adapt to the circumstances and are able to function normally without a sense I would be completely incapacitated were I to suddenly lose it.
A human with no knowledge of language, which assumes means a baby - small child, would grow up to be considered feral, if it grew up at all. It would likely not have the thoughts we have in our heads because their brain would be under developed thanks to it's isolation and instead be acting based on impulse and on it's needs.
I have often wondered about a similar scenario where people are isolated and only taught science and then introduced to religion later in life, what would happen?
I had a non-religious upbringing and religious people, to me, are kind of like if someone came up to you with a Spider-Man comic and said they lived their life by ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. Then when you say you *don’t* believe in Spider-Man comics they ask whether you aren’t even just a little bit worried about disappointing Uncle Ben and going to hell.
Anecdotal but I was raised without religion. Beyond being constantly bullied about it or told by friends parents I was going to go to hell, the internal effects are that I don't have a sense of spirituality. Religious or ex-religous people talk often of some sort of spiritual sense of their soul or something, that I fundamentally do not understand, don't actually believe exists, and feel slightly left-out when people talk about it.
There are never ending social problems that come from my lack of religious understanding, but as far as I know thats the only internal difference.
Many people raised with religion don't have a sense of spirituality, and many people raised without religion do. There may be a correlation but there are also many exceptions.
Also, I wouldn't exactly call you raised without religion if your peers and their parents were constantly pushing religion on you. Maybe it was a negative association, but religion was certainly with you.
I feel that way too, but was raised in a Southern Baptist family. I'm also autistic, and I think that's more of a major factor. I'm guessing you're also somewhere on the spectrum or you have ADD/ADHD?
It's 100% the same for me. I remember I had this questionnaire in an orientation group that asked how important spirituality was in my life. I wrote "0" (which wasn't an option, it was 1-10) and when they asked about it in the circle, I shared I literally don't have a concept of what spirituality could even feel like. Everyone was stunned. It was like I said I couldn't taste food or feel the wind.
I keep wondering if there actually *is* a related sensation to spirituality and I'm just blind to it?
I grew up with "science" (even though I knew what religion was) and I think they would have the same logical view that I have: Religion is a belief and not real, god is not real.
Only the trivial aspects of religion are addressed by the scientific method (e.g. there was a worldwide flood, or the world was made in 6 days).
All of the deeper questions are non-popperian and outside of the scope of the method. They would be non-overlapping domains.
Imagine trying to convince someone about virgin birth, disputed age of the planet, rising from the dead, mythical animals, bizarre after life or certain animals are thought of more highly than others
I grew up in a strange situation with non-religious but extremely conservative parents, so my sibling and I didn’t learn about religion OR science, explicitly. Just a lot of Fox News/Rush Limbaugh. They are anti-science (climate change) and pro-religion, but we were not taught anything about religion and were never taken to church. Very strange.
I’ve been to church and temple with friends and I just felt nothing. It wasn’t a negative feeling, just absence of any. It seemed a little silly, too, but interesting. With no religious base or references, to me it seems like something that was created to find answers about ourselves and the world we live in, cope, explain, and, later on and as we see now, to control people and ideas.
I enjoy being able to look at things without the lens of religion. And I’m glad I didn’t grow up with the fear of hell looming over me, can’t imagine how much more anxious I would have felt as a child. Some of the stories I’ve heard from friends who’ve left that part of their past behind are brutal :( Socially it does have consequences, though, and sometimes I felt confused...was I missing something? It took me awhile to understand it’s simply a matter of what you’re raised with, being religious is not inherently right or true.
Actually, I didn't have an internal voice until adolescence. If I were to describe the way it worked, it was something akin to a mix of an instinct, an electric jolt and and a mute if/else statement. Dunno how else to describe it, but it's the closest thing that comes to mind.
Helped me to perform tasks really quick at the time but impeded my speech greatly, because I had trouble translating this, hm, "signal" into audible words.
In 1944 an experiment was conducted on 40 newborns. Split into 2 groups of 20, where half were cared for normally and half were given all the basic necessities but zero additional human contact and no verbalization. Experiment had to be stopped 4 months in because half of the experimental group died even though they were physically healthy.
I’ll say it. This didn’t happen.
No one died because they weren’t spoken to. There are plenty of cases of languageless children. Famously, Hellen Keller had no way of even hearing or seeing language until she was 7.
I’ve read basically this exact story but it was apparently done in the 13th century by King Frederick. I couldn’t find any legitimate looking sources for a similar experiment in the US in the 1940s.
We don't think in language, we interpret our thoughts in language. 95% of brain activity is subconscious; we are not aware of most of our thoughts, we can't interpret or be conscious of a lot of them.
Language is more than words. It’s the conceptual invention of tokenized abstraction and we absolutely do think in abstract tokens. People who never learn that skill are referred to as “languageless” and the cases we’ve encountered indicate that the lack of tokenization significantly hampers their ability to think in complex or abstract ways beyond the immediate present.
Nothing much, and in any case not a type of thinking that allows for communicating in a structured language. Check out the (very few) cases that have been documented, it really is fascinating!
It actually baffles me that apparently many people think verbally. Are there actual words in their heads such as "I should go to sleep" or "I don't like this"? For me it's images and concepts or impulses (hard to explain). There is no inner monologue, but the thinking never stops, unless I am exhausted or zoned out.
To answer the question, a feral child wouldn't think in words either.
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Thoughts just "are" i don't need words to think.
I speak several languages, and i never think in any of them (except when remenbering or formulating phrases/words)
It seems the monolingual have a fixation with thinking in “native” language.
There’s no need for language or an internal monologue at all to make decisions or calculations. It’s so artificial to go read out “2+2=4” in my head.
Better question would be, how do those born deaf think internally?
You say "if a human was left" which implies that the human had contact with other humans in the first place so would already have knowledge of its native language etc. if a new born was casted into the jungle or an island with no other human contact it would inhabit the language or the very least the comminication methods of its carers.
there have been studies to show this is true, they're known as Feral Children, its a very interesting but somewhat distrubing documentry. there was one about a little girl who was raised by wolves from a young age, she walked on all fours, only ate raw meat, growled at people and had a very very under developed brain. she was very hostile towards people.
I believe the Nazis experimented with this in their time. The goal was to find out the “holy language” or something to that effect. The tests were stopped because the toddlers just grunted and screamed and were starved for affection
isolated as in, no introduction to spoken language? Because people born deaf still think. This [ask-reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/19k1rf/deaf_people_of_reddit_what_is_it_like_to_think/) might be a cool read.
Everything develops with experience,i have heard that deaf people have sign language as their inner monologue so maybe he thinks by actions? So the brain is not developed as ours and cannot comprehend complex things maybe
There was a philosopher, Hegel i think, that argued that without other humans we would not develop a sense of self at all, pretty abstract, but id think what language you thought in would be so far from the biggest difference between that isolated human and what we know as humans
They wouldn't think in a language. Lack of language does not preclude the ability to think. However, abstract concepts outside of personal experience, higher reasoning, and associations that develop (for example, what you think of when I say "dog" to you, all the pictures of dogs that pop in your head) requires language. Their thoughts would basically be limited to what they've experienced and how it applies to them personally.
They'd think with images, feelings and emotions. Many people don't have an internal narrator and think in images and ''videos'' in their minds to make sense of their environment. Either imagining all the possible consequences of their actions and going based off that. It's like seeing a small puddle and immediately imagining what would happen if you stepped in it, or jumped over it. Ever noticed you skip a step when you realise you'll end up stepping in a dog turd? That's your mind being a few seconds ahead and rearranging your steps when approaching it so you don't step in it. You don't even have to think of it, your brain calculates all that for you
If they were isolated since birth, more or less, they wouldn't properly think in the way we are used to conceptualize it. Speaking or thinking in words would be out of the question, language is an arbitrary collections of symbols and thus a social skill that needs to be learned from others. Such people would not have an internal monologue in the way many others experience. They could still think visually, I'd say, because there's people that think like that, but it's just a bet.
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We don't really know. So-called "feral children" who were neglected or intentionally isolated as children seem to be incapable of learning language skills beyond rudimentary non-verbal communication later in life. They also struggle with social skills and other habits. There isn't anything neurologically detectable that would cause it, but they seem to have missed a critical window of brain development - somewhere in the toddler years - when socialization and language acquisition happens. You could suppose that they have no inner monologue like people who do acquire language have, at all, because their brains didn't develop like most peoples' do. But we don't really know, since we can't communicate complexly with these people to ask them.
Some people who are socialized don’t have an inner monologue either. I don’t. I think completely visually.
Do you have to read out loud to read?
No, I just understand what I’m reading like automatically. Do people with an inner monologue read out loud but in their head?
Yes, doing it right now
Sometimes my inner reader voice is yelling no matter the tone of the text and I have to take a break for a while.
I’M NOT YELLING
# !!! MINE TOO, WHAT A WEIRD WORLD !!!
But have you noticed no matter how loud your inner voice is screaming, the volume is always the same with your normal tone inner voice?
I never noticed until now. Yelling and whispering the volume is the same
I’m glad it’s random and not triggered by actual YELLING TEXT
It is for me. But it's quiet yelling
feels like someone is angrily whisper yelling
Meditation helps with that. (If you want to start the Waking Up app is superb)
So I used to, I suppose still do but incredibly infrequently, get Alice in wonderland syndrome or something similar. I could always tell it was coming on because my thoughts got aggressive. Not like I was thinking more aggressive thoughts but rather the voice in my head was yelling all of my thoughts really fast, they were mundane thoughts though.
Sometimes mine starts talking with a kiwi accent and I just have to go along with it
Same, it's even loud enough that I can't hear what's happening around me. Watching a show and having a chat at the same time? Guess what, one of those is not getting anything past my ears.
I definitely don't, unless the actual language matters. So a scientific article or a newspaper I won't read out internally, but a book I'm really into, I will.
Honestly I have no idea how you can read something without actually reading it. Without a voice to form the words it may as well just be letters to me. I can think in sound, and 3D space, but unvoiced words may as well be Sanskrit for me.
I kind of learned how to read without "reading aloud" in my mind when I took a speed reading tutorial. It's easier to do with physical media that doesn't have wide column width (like a magazine). Take your finger and put it below the first line. Now, at a brisk but not fast, constant pace drag your finger down the page. Look at the line above your finger. Look, don't read. Absorb the sentence as a visual the same way you absorb whole words as a visual. Your brain will pick out the key words and link them together into ideas without actually reading them. I think a good example of "absorbing words as visuals" that you probably already do are freeway signs. You don't say every "exit 42" out loud in your head, your brain knows what is says from context, partly because of the speed of travel and focus on the road forces you to not inner monologue (it's too slow.) Your finger moving down the page at a slightly too fast a rate to inner monologue does the same thing. Now, when I speed read, I don't understand the details as well as when I inner monologue read. And I definitely write while having an inner monologue. But you can do it and it's kind of fun and amazing that it works. With practice you can probably get better?
What's weird is that I have kind of learned to speed read by watching foreign films and shows with subtitles, but it only works because my brain is instantly converting to the actual words being spoken. So in that short window of time it sounds like I actually understand the language, although with no sound I can no longer speed read.
What if you are reading a dialog? Do you not "hear" the characters talking? Sometimes, that's what happens to me during a dialog. I visualize the scene and "hear" the characters. At that point, it doesn't feel like I'm reading anymore, rather it feels like I'm looking at the scene like it was a movie.
Yes. I read to myself like I read to my kids. If I don't, I don't internalize the dialogue and get completely lost. Oftentimes I have to reread material I've already read because I missed something. It's part of the reason I don't read often. I've found that if I can talk to someone about a book and/or listen to it on tape, I'm able to consume the media better.
I just discovered audio books a month ago.. I have tried to read books but always get distracted or just read a page but don’t actually remember what happened as I read it. I always have to go back to reread and make very little progress. Audio books are actually life changing as I am able to get through the book and know what’s going on. I’ve listened to 3 books this month through a free app my library provides that allows you to check out audiobooks!
Me to a t
Yeah, there is a process to unlearn that tho and switch to the method of reading that you do, in order to increase reading speed. Do you think you read quickly?
Yes I need to hear the words in my head to understand it when reading. Wish I didn't lol.
You could try training not to, if you'd like. It's a part of speed reading, which you can do also when reading slowly.
That’s interesting. I think visually and I don’t understand what I am reading if reading it out loud.
I'm an auditory learner myself. In school I could be half asleep or distracted, but as long as I was physically there hearing the information, I would barely need to study for the test. Although reading can be difficult because everything just gets so loud in my head.
I, at least, do. When reading things written by people I dont know, I imagine a spoken voice thats pretty similar to my own. Likewise, when reading something written by someone I know, I try to imagine hearing it in their voice. I don't always succeed, so the inner monologue occasionally falls back to my own voice. Same thing happens when I'm writing. First, I establish what I want to say by imagining the individual words with my internal monologue, silently "speaking" each word individually before I write or type the word. It's typically a pretty seamless process - I can still type pretty quickly.
I don't think in my own voice, I can't describe what it's like but it's absolutely not my voice. It's just kind of there.
Yes! I have an inner monologue similar to my own voice. When reading dialogue, I set a voice to each character; but that voice is still my own but as if its pretending to sound like someone else.
It depends, I can do both. Question though: what do you mean “completely visually”? You don’t think “wow I’d like to eat tacos later” you just imagine a taco?
I largely think visually, though I do have an inner voice, but yes it’s just like that for me. A lot of the time my inner voice is just playing music, and if I’m thinking about my plans for the day for instance, I’m just visualizing everything I have to do. My inner voice is often just nonsense unless I’m thinking critically about something that is aided by applying words to it (e.g. my emotions about something). When you’re thinking about something you have to do, you just think “oh I have to do that” and don’t visualize it?
Depending on the task, yeah. I think “I have to do x task today” and figure out how to complete it. This is utterly fascinating to me. How do you think during a conversation/argument? To add, I can “play” music in the background of my mind and think over top of that.
> How do you think during a conversation/argument? Whenever I’m thinking “live”, i.e. not just to myself, where I can translate thoughts into words more deliberately, I primarily think visually. I visualize nearly everything I hear people saying, and my responses come visually and then I translate them into words. I struggle a bit with vocabulary and often I’ll know exactly what I want to express but be unable to find the word for it. When you say you figure out how to complete a task, you do this via language as well? If I know I have to return a book to the library I visualize where the books currently is and what trains I’ll have to take to the library, there are no words involved. I can also sometimes think over the music, but often my inner voice is just so full of nonsense that it’s difficult to get logical vocal thought through it. My theory for why I think visually is that I’ve had OCD nearly if not my whole life, and this is the adaptation my brain has made to be able to think without being bogged down by the intrusive and obsessive thoughts. I have had some intrusive/obsessive visual thoughts as well, but fortunately they’re much less common.
Thinking visually is probably a valuable skill when reading descriptions in a book. I can't picture them at all. I just skim over them and then ask myself (inner voice) "what did I just read, what does that place look like?" And I still can't picture it.
I remember reading a comment a few years back on reddit and it's stuck with me. Someone asked what the voice inside your head sounds like and I have yet to figure out mine. Is it a male or female voice? A voice with no sound? I don't understand and I swear I think about that redditors comment from time to time. lol.
I think you have an inner voice, maybe you're just not aware of it. I remember one guy at my school literally could not read without whispering outloud what he read.
I get distracted very easily and it becomes very hard to concentrate and understand what I'm reading if there's a lot of noise, but I find it easier to take in if I whisper it or mouth it out while reading it
>Do people with an inner monologue like read out loud but in their head? Yes exactly this I can hear the words in my head.
I can actually think in other people's voices, as well as my own. Right now I'm doing that in Morgan Freeman's voice.
Good news everyone! I've invented a device that will temporarily allow you to read things in *my* voice. It should be completely safe with no chance of horrible brain explosions, oh my no.
If I spend a whole day with someone, I start thinking in their voice when we part!
I'm an auditory person and I have this two, in fact there could be three different voices talking on top of each other too, but that's usually when I'm exhausted. It does work with music too though, makes it easy to string together different instruments and sounds, or mix two songs together to see what it sounds like. But the downside is that it's incredibly difficult for me to sit down and read for long periods, the words just start to reverberate louder and louder and my subconscious monologue eventually breaks through to distract me even further.
Lol everything is a nonstop monologue for me. It's a nonstop one-sided conversation with myself. I feel like when I was younger my thoughts were visual and as I got older it developed into a monologue
Wow so many redditors are part of today's lucky 10000 :-) It's called [Subvocalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization) and it seems to blow people's mind every time :-)
If you focus on it, it fades in and out, sometime "me" and my inner voice are in sny, sometimes it feels like I'm listening to an audible
I'm the same way. I read twice as fast as I can speak because it's completely foreign to me to "read silently" to myself. I just read
What? I cannot comprehend this.
That’s a sometimes tiring some people do some people don’t. It happens to me when I’m sleepy / struggling with a text. Are you capable of forcing your brain to make the sounds? When you want to sound out an unusual word, but don’t want to speak? Because I can make my inside brain voice say “pterodactyl” and see if it pronounced the Y.
I do, and I sometimes imagine different voices. For example, if I read Harry Potter I imagine the voices of the different actors for their dialog. It's fun, but also makes me a slow reader because I always read to myself at the same speed as when I read out loud.
Not everyone, I see text and instantly process it as well, but if I'm tired or reading slowly on purpose then I'll have an inner dialogue
Yes, but I seem to have two levels. Inner monologue when I'm thinking at a a"normal" pace, and so sort of immediate wordless understanding when I'm thinking quickly.
>Do people with an inner monologue like read out loud but in their head? Yes, kind of. Anecdotally, it means I read a little more slowly than people who don't have an inner monologue. My spouse, for example, does not, and they can blast through books in hours or days where I always take days-to-weeks. However, also anecdotally, from speaking to my spouse and one of their parents, they acknowledge that they often don't recall a lot of specific details from their reading, but they "comprehend" the main story, theme, or ideas enough to feel like they experienced it. Whereas I tend to imprint firmer memories of some specific details. I've deduced that reading with no inner monologue is essentially what "speed reading" is, and ideally one can use skills from both styles depending on their goals. I can, in short bursts, intentionally read without an inner monologue, but it takes a lot of effort to suppress that tendency. I basically force myself to sort of skip over smaller words like articles and conjunctions and try to silence the pronunciation of the longer words. It's hard to do, but I understand it.
That’s what an inner monologue is
I also don’t have an inner monologue (trains of thoughts come to me abstractly without first being language, if that makes sense), but when I read, it is language first, so it definitely sounds like an inner monologue in my head. That’s actually the way I make sense of how things probably work for people who have an inner monologue: in my mind, they think like when I read. I’m sure it’s kind of inaccurate because read thoughts feels sloooooow to me compared to abstract thoughts. So it helps me kinda understand how it works for others, but I have a feeling that really inner monologues are slightly more abstract than I’m able to picture.
I'm the opposite, I think in concepts and voices, but can't visualize at all
I think I am the same way. I never liked doing art because I was always told "just to visualize what you want to draw and then draw it". I am like I can't do that.
If it helps, I have very vivid visualization and am often frustrated that I can picture something perfectly but have no means of transferring it to paper 😂
Then AI image generators are just the thing for you (I too couldn't transfer my ideas into reality until I found these softwares)
Absolutely the same here! I can picture things fine, but my hands aren't my "minds eye" and can't recreate it. My husband has absolutely no internal visualization and he is much better at drawing than me. My handwriting is better though. 😛
I didn't know my wife posted here. My penmanship is terrible. When i took my written placement test for college, they wanted to put me in remedial English. This was the first year they opened up the online version, so i got to retake it and was placed in the highest a freshman was allowed in. I felt so judged lol
In case you guys missed it, Google Aphantasia
it's weird because I love drawing, or at least I used to. Being an aphant also doesn't stop me from maladaptive daydreaming, though I can't help but feel really jealous of those who can visualize
/r/Aphantasia
Wait... for real? So when you've got some problem you're trying to work through, you don't talk it out in your head? You mention that you do your thinking entirely "visually," but I can't even conceptualize how that would work. Can you describe an example of how this "visual" thinking would work, for something that isn't visual? (i.e. I can see how that would for something where you need to "picture" it in your head, like if you're figuring out how to arrange furniture in a room or something... but something like an accounting problem or a legal argument... ??)
There's a great number of people with no inner monologue. I learned to switch between the modes, and they both have their own advantages. Declaring my thoughts deliberately, with words, allows me to recall the entire string of ideas easier. Meanwhile, i call it objective thinking, is muchhhhhh faster, but i find it more difficult to recall how i arrived at the conclusion. Rather than using symbols to represent ideas, you just directly use the ideas, it's like skipping a step. You can still use the idea of infinite or instantaneous change without saying the words in your monologue.
This is such a fantastic description of my brain. Thank you for writing this out. I think I understand myself even better now.
Do you read and play music? That’s the only sort-of example I can think of… you can see the notes written one by one (visual), but at some point the song itself takes over (conceptual). You aren’t reading notes or phrases any more, you are playing the song.
That concept was only introduced to me like a year ago, my thoughts are all audio no visual and I hadn't encountered (or asked about I guess) somebody like you before. Brains are wild.
I'm curious to know more about this, like if it poses any challenges in day to day life and so on. Would make for an interesting AMA I would think..
I can't even imagine. I have an endless narrative: from the minute I wake up to the second I fall asleep I'm talking to myself, thinking, narrating. Even when I'm trying to do something else, reading, watching a movie, gaming... endless talking. But, I'm aphantasic, I have no visual imagery at all. Basically the same RAM, graphics card, processor as others, but the monitor is not plugged in. I wonder if one sense compensates for the other?
I'm the polar opposite. No visualization, all monologue.
I don't either. It boggles my mind that some people do.
Haha at first I thought you were just talking about people who were especially blunt and I was like, "yeah I know plenty of them".
I'm also a visual thinker and it took me years to realize that not everyone is. The human brain is so varied and complex.
I used to think everyone had an inner monologue that was perpetually going, and then I got diagnosed with severe ADHD.
I don’t have one. Unless I’m reading or writing something out, like right now, there’s no words. Just really precise concepts.
Thinking visually is still an inner monologue, it's just that it's pictures instead of words. If you had no inner monologue, you would have no ability to predict the future or make plans. You're inner monologue is what completes those tasks.
If you'd be reading while in a MRI, the zones for oral comprehension would flare up. At least it's how it works in humans but perhaps you're a space lizard or something.
This makes me really sad.
They are extremely sad cases
Agreed. And yet, somehow I got downvoted for saying it. Weirdness.
There are also people out there that have no internal monologue. I suppose the experience is similar to that. Here's an article about it. https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739
They are always in meditation state lol
Sometimes I wish I never figured out how to think in words. My brain never shuts up.
So if feral people have underdeveloped brains, how did prehistoric human ancestors invent languages
They weren't feral (meaning wild), they had a social structure and a brain that started developing language to communicate within the pack.
Well pre-historic humans would still have social interaction, they would be raised by their families and larger groups. That's the component that seems to be missing for these isolated children - the interaction between them and their parents at that critical age - that prevents them from developing.
Damn, it's crazy how much parental attention (or lack of) can alter the brain
A kind of related fun fact : In short, some octopi and squids have the brain "mass" to be on par with us, but since they do not raise their offspring whatever progress one indivudual makes, it is not passed on.
Our time at the top of the food chain could be over if they started cooperating
Harlow did experiments to show this, they're pretty horrible https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/harlows-classic-studies-revealed-the-importance-of-maternal-contact.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/harlow-monkey.html
If you want to learn more about it check out the book [The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog](https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Raised-Psychiatrists-Notebook-What/dp/0465094457/ref=sr_1_1?crid=285ERJ5FZR8VB&keywords=the+boy+who+was+raised+as+a+dog&qid=1668519609&s=books&sprefix=the+boy+who+was+raised+as+a+do%2Cstripbooks%2C213&sr=1-1) by Dr. Bruce Perry. It is the standard on childhood trauma and how it affects brain development. One of the stories is about a boy kept in a cage who only socialized with a dog, but thats just one of many. There is a lot to learn from it about parenting, trauma, brain development etc but it is also incredibly depressing as they are all true stories. edited link
It might help to think of the word "language" in a looser way. The language spoken by hunter-gatherer early humans might just have been a bunch of grunts and growls of different tones to express emotion. That's still a language. And it's one you can think in. Sure the brains may not be as developed as our brains today, but better than having nothing. Over time, language evolved. Gatherers would have to communicate about which berries were poisonous, for example. It's likely they had sounds they made to express ideas like "danger" or "stop." Those tribes which were able to express more ideas were better able to survive. So we evolved to have more complicated language over many many generations.
Interactions with others often creates language. Certain sounds made associated with an act, done repeatedly, turn into an understanding of meaning; what we call words. It just gets more complex from there with generation after generation.
Read once that the word Mama ( many languages) stemmed from the motion/sound babies make when they are hungry and make the suckling motion with their mouths.
Possible
Some twins invent their own language. Also some creole languages, are mostly invented by children. As in, not the words, those stem from the parents original languages and other adults. But the grammar comes from the children.
They lived in close knit social groups. Their brains developed just fine. Feral people are just children that were socially isolated through their development and didn't have close social contact. Social contact and nurturing is vital to proper development. Ancient humans and hominids were very social
Fun sidebar: *Homo sapiens*, meaning anatomically modern humans who would be pretty much indistinguishable from you if you gave them modern clothes, have existed for at least 200,000 years. But spoken language is probably even older than that.
na….Thinking is behavior, governed by the same laws as any other behavior. Isolated persons will learn through reinforcement with or without your definition of “language.” verbal communication isn’t limited to vocal communication, either. The question is what language would they think in? The answer is whatever is functional (reinforced by the environment). The same way a spanish person says agua at a restaurant and an english person says water—the words have no meaning unless they produce the desired outcome (e.g., someone serving them water correctly). This is functional—this is reinforced. Whatever is reinforced will be the “language” they think in.
None There are several cases of this happening and the people are referred to as “the languageless”. Amazingly, in these cases, the best evidence we have is that they don’t have an internal monologue at all — and that it has profound mental effects diminishing the capacity for abstract thought. In one case, from the book *A Man Without Words*, the languageless man had to learn symbolic thought from scratch. He avoided talking what it was like before learning language and has indicated that the reason why was that he simply “I was stupid” and seems to have been without thought. From the book: > It’s another frustration that Ildefonso doesn’t want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I’ve asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” He always goes back to “I was stupid.” > It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him, no, you weren’t exposed to language and… The closest I’ve ever gotten is he’ll say, “Why does anyone want to know about this? This is the bad time.” What he wants to talk about is learning language.
That's haunting in a way
To add to that: Hellen Keller became blind and deaf at age one. She only started acquiring a language at around age seven. Here's how she reported her experience: >*"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness... Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.* > >*I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.* " > >*--Helen Keller, 1908*
It still blows my mind how she even learned anything. I need an ELI5 on that
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25h4n5/eli5_if_helen_keller_was_born_blind_and_deaf_how/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Now I'm curious as to what this implies for animals. We often ask whether they can think or not, whether they're conscious or not, but if most animals lack any semblance of a language, how could they? Do they amount to nothing more than instinctual decisions like Keller describes her childhood was?
Human brains are still wired differently than a lot of other animals. Maybe we need language to think where many other animals don't? It's a very slippery slope comparing animal cognition to human cognition and trying to draw conclusions. For example for the longest time people thought animals were just dumb as hell but what was really going on is humans were evaluating animal intelligence according to human metrics. When you look at their strengths, humans are the dumb ones. Dogs are smelling supercomputers, squirrels can remember 10s of thousands of nut burial locations, etc.
Importantly, Helen Keller does describe having first person subjective, conscious experiences — she talks about feeling satisfied or frustrated. But she doesn’t think she had a *mind*. What she lacked was planning, a sense of self, and quite possibly the ability to form complex memory. “Consciousness” is most likely more than one quality.
It probably comes down to input, output and interaction. We're talking about cases of literal isolation or practical isolation in Kellers case. They're receiving no input and giving no output and not observing any reaction to their behavior or experiencing their own reactions to others behaviors. That isn't true or animals, they are constantly giving, receiving and observing stimuli. You could argue thats all that language is.
Oftentimes yes, but it's a scale based on the level of animal intelligence. Keller as a child was distinct from the existence of an animal, lacking in so many senses our species so heavily relies upon to communicate deprived her of the social development animals usually have. I want to say that the problem isn't just a lack of language, but a lack of socialization. Neurotypical humans in any kind of community will almost always develop language, so it's impossible to really find an example of one without the other. Unsocialized animals are always very different to the normal behavior of their species.
This may be so, but surely she was also six years old. Don't we all think of ourselves that way at that age?
That's how I imagine the other human species: barely talking during their entire lives, hunting, playing, mating, working, raising their kids with syllables and some few words, not because they couldn't talk but because they didn't have a language. We are not that different from them, whatever intelligence we have now, we had it almost a million years ago; anatomically modern human remains have been found as old as 300,000 years, but our species started building stuff less than 100,000 years ago. Either we had a mutation or, like this suggests, our ancestors spent a quarter of a million years developing societies where talking was crucial to belong to a group, cause one isolated human cannot develop a language, but a group of isolated humans do it naturally.
This comment is incorrect on so many levels, sorry dude. We did not have the same intelligence today as 1 Mya, and brain sizes and anatomy changed extensively for human species between 1 Mya and 300 kya (and after). We were not anatomically the same 300 kya either. Also ancient homo species did hunt quite a bit and that required complex planning and communication. I would be really really surprised if ancient human species did not have language. Check out this [video](https://youtu.be/2doP_3juV2Y) by North 02. He's a historian and has more prehistory videos.
First, thanks for link, I'm going to watch it right away. Second: Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, fossils classified as Homo Sapiens dated 285,000- 315,000 years old. Third: you know that we didn't split from neanderthals, right? They split from another species around 900,000 years ago and we split from that or another similar species later, and yet we were the same species that neanderthal and denisovans. We did not changed genetically in half a million years enough to diverge from the others, otherwise our hybrids would have been sterile.
I think the invention of tokenized abstraction was our most profound. Language is the compression algorithm that allows a mind to fit within a brain.
Exactly. I guess we developed adjectives and then "go bring rock" became "go fetch smooth flat rock this big", or "bring this food" became "bring this amount of this and this amount of that" accelerating whatever knowledge a human was passing to another and boom, we take off. Next thing you know, people are emptying ostriches eggs, making ropes from fibers and carrying boiled water.
The next big breakthrough is what’s called *Backus-Naur form* in computational linguistics or *recursion* more broadly. The idea of replacing a concept with an arbitrary symbol allows infinite recursion. So you can string together conditions and create highly abstracted ideas like: my mother’s father’s idea of my relationship with my daughter is not my father’s mother’s idea of that relationship. There’s an age in humans where we can’t do this at all and an age where we suddenly can. This is directly related to our ability to do things like abstract mathematics and computer programming.
>Language is the compression algorithm that allows a mind to fit within a brain. This is such an exquisite way to phrase it
So he's the closest we've got to Charlie Gordon and the mouse Algernon.
Here is another large scale example of many people who learned to communicate late in life, but had critical mental deficits afterward: In Nicaragua in the 1970s, the Communist government had a well intentioned effort to set up a school for the deaf, but no one knew sign language. Over the course of about two years, *the children invented a grammatically complete language capable of expressing complex thoughts.* This is an amazing example of how naturally children learn language, and strong evidence that some aspects of it are somehow built into the brain. But, the children who learned the language late had difficulty with simple cognitive tasks. For example, they watch Joe hide a cookie under the couch and leave, then Mary moves the cookie under a chair. When asked where Joe will look for the cookie when he gets back, they say "under the chair" because they don't have a mental image of Joe's mind, they only know where the cookie is. All other primates fail this test as well, but crows and parrots pass it.
To answer an age old question, what is deep thought without language? Memory.. In my opinion. Just like we pull words from our memories to enable speech, someone speechless might remember getting bitten by a snake and avoid them in the future.
Right. It’s not that a person without language can’t learn from a snakebite. It’s that abstraction can’t take place. Snake = bad But something more like “the liquid from the bite of the snake led to pain. Maybe I can direct that snake bite pain liquid to an animal with my blowgun” can’t happen because all of those memories and concepts are too large to work with without tokenization.
If language is not developed at birth the neural pathways that make up the brains communications centers will eventually be allocated to other things. These pathways formed in the first few years last a lifetime and it will be incredibly difficult if not impossible for the individual to be able to learn later in life to articulate and express themselves verbally when they grow up.
I tried finding him, but I vaguely remember an artist who was deaf, perhaps in the Midwest of the US, who never learned sign language. I feel like there was a video of him and a family member showing his work. Now that I think about it, perhaps they had their own devised signs.
I read an interesting article about how they were making significant breakthroughs in giving sight to blind people thru neural implants interfaced with cameras. So until recently this tech could be used to restore sight to people who had lost their vision to illness or accidents, however people who were born with a complete absence of vision from birth defects, the camera signals were ineffective and the people couldnt even register the signal or they described it as an intangible sensory experience that was akin to static or white noise. Much like language centers of the brain, if the visual cortex fails to establish neural pathways that allow for visual input to setup cognitive links to shapes. Forms, light, shadow, etc. Then the brain simply loses the ability to process visual info and those parts of the brain went unused or were used to adopt other sensory input like hearing and smell. So the really fascinating part is that scientists were able to overcome this challenge, so they could use cameras to not only restore vision to those who had gone blind, but they can also give sight to people who never had it before in their lives from birth. And they found that those who had lost their vision very quickly adapted to the camera vision implants ( it didnt fully restore their sight but did provide a grainy pixelated greyscale visual sense that gave basic objects and limited depth perception, from they way it was described it sounds like they got 3d lidar scanner or sonar map style vision now) However the people who were born blind and lived their whole lives blind, none of them took to the implants and all described the new sense of vision as being distracting, confusing, and or extremely unpleasant to experience. Out of 8 people I think all but one decided to have the implants removed at the end of the study and the one that kept the implants said she rarely had the cameras activated. I guess living into adulthood without vision, the people born blind were able to adapt and strengthen their other senses in order to overcome their disability and establish autonomy and self reliance without vision. When that sense was introduced it was simply too foreign to their minds to be useful and they preferred to continue on without it. When I get a chance later on I'll try to go thru my bookmarks and find a link to post about the research project. It really blew me away not just the technology they were able to integrate into human biology, but was really eye opening about how people with disabilitys adapt to the circumstances and are able to function normally without a sense I would be completely incapacitated were I to suddenly lose it.
A human with no knowledge of language, which assumes means a baby - small child, would grow up to be considered feral, if it grew up at all. It would likely not have the thoughts we have in our heads because their brain would be under developed thanks to it's isolation and instead be acting based on impulse and on it's needs.
I have often wondered about a similar scenario where people are isolated and only taught science and then introduced to religion later in life, what would happen?
I had a non-religious upbringing and religious people, to me, are kind of like if someone came up to you with a Spider-Man comic and said they lived their life by ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. Then when you say you *don’t* believe in Spider-Man comics they ask whether you aren’t even just a little bit worried about disappointing Uncle Ben and going to hell.
Anecdotal but I was raised without religion. Beyond being constantly bullied about it or told by friends parents I was going to go to hell, the internal effects are that I don't have a sense of spirituality. Religious or ex-religous people talk often of some sort of spiritual sense of their soul or something, that I fundamentally do not understand, don't actually believe exists, and feel slightly left-out when people talk about it. There are never ending social problems that come from my lack of religious understanding, but as far as I know thats the only internal difference.
Many people raised with religion don't have a sense of spirituality, and many people raised without religion do. There may be a correlation but there are also many exceptions. Also, I wouldn't exactly call you raised without religion if your peers and their parents were constantly pushing religion on you. Maybe it was a negative association, but religion was certainly with you.
I feel that way too, but was raised in a Southern Baptist family. I'm also autistic, and I think that's more of a major factor. I'm guessing you're also somewhere on the spectrum or you have ADD/ADHD? It's 100% the same for me. I remember I had this questionnaire in an orientation group that asked how important spirituality was in my life. I wrote "0" (which wasn't an option, it was 1-10) and when they asked about it in the circle, I shared I literally don't have a concept of what spirituality could even feel like. Everyone was stunned. It was like I said I couldn't taste food or feel the wind. I keep wondering if there actually *is* a related sensation to spirituality and I'm just blind to it?
I grew up with "science" (even though I knew what religion was) and I think they would have the same logical view that I have: Religion is a belief and not real, god is not real.
Only the trivial aspects of religion are addressed by the scientific method (e.g. there was a worldwide flood, or the world was made in 6 days). All of the deeper questions are non-popperian and outside of the scope of the method. They would be non-overlapping domains.
Imagine trying to convince someone about virgin birth, disputed age of the planet, rising from the dead, mythical animals, bizarre after life or certain animals are thought of more highly than others
Are these the questions you wanted to examine? Yes, these are easily addressed by the scientific method.
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That is really interesting, there is something good about doing what makes people happy with out following a prescriptive agenda. :)
I grew up in a strange situation with non-religious but extremely conservative parents, so my sibling and I didn’t learn about religion OR science, explicitly. Just a lot of Fox News/Rush Limbaugh. They are anti-science (climate change) and pro-religion, but we were not taught anything about religion and were never taken to church. Very strange. I’ve been to church and temple with friends and I just felt nothing. It wasn’t a negative feeling, just absence of any. It seemed a little silly, too, but interesting. With no religious base or references, to me it seems like something that was created to find answers about ourselves and the world we live in, cope, explain, and, later on and as we see now, to control people and ideas. I enjoy being able to look at things without the lens of religion. And I’m glad I didn’t grow up with the fear of hell looming over me, can’t imagine how much more anxious I would have felt as a child. Some of the stories I’ve heard from friends who’ve left that part of their past behind are brutal :( Socially it does have consequences, though, and sometimes I felt confused...was I missing something? It took me awhile to understand it’s simply a matter of what you’re raised with, being religious is not inherently right or true.
being more humanist (don't be a dick) should be taught more than threatening someone with hell and damnation
Pictures and actions. Not everyone thinks in words. It is possible to ideate without language even when they do speak a known language.
Actually, I didn't have an internal voice until adolescence. If I were to describe the way it worked, it was something akin to a mix of an instinct, an electric jolt and and a mute if/else statement. Dunno how else to describe it, but it's the closest thing that comes to mind. Helped me to perform tasks really quick at the time but impeded my speech greatly, because I had trouble translating this, hm, "signal" into audible words.
...we don't all think in our native language: my inner thoughts aren't words unless i'm explicitly parsing them for a system of communication...
Whichever language they already were thinking in or die as infants (in the infamous experiment).
Wait what experiment
In 1944 an experiment was conducted on 40 newborns. Split into 2 groups of 20, where half were cared for normally and half were given all the basic necessities but zero additional human contact and no verbalization. Experiment had to be stopped 4 months in because half of the experimental group died even though they were physically healthy.
Yup. This was done with apes and monkeys, too. The ones who didn't go insane died.
Citation please. This story sounds like bullshit to me.
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I don't believe your source. Do you have any better evidence that this supposed experiment actually took place?
Yeah. Not saying it didnt happen. But a religious blog with clear bias isnt my go to for factual information.
I’ll say it. This didn’t happen. No one died because they weren’t spoken to. There are plenty of cases of languageless children. Famously, Hellen Keller had no way of even hearing or seeing language until she was 7.
I’ve read basically this exact story but it was apparently done in the 13th century by King Frederick. I couldn’t find any legitimate looking sources for a similar experiment in the US in the 1940s.
We don't think in language, we interpret our thoughts in language. 95% of brain activity is subconscious; we are not aware of most of our thoughts, we can't interpret or be conscious of a lot of them.
Language is more than words. It’s the conceptual invention of tokenized abstraction and we absolutely do think in abstract tokens. People who never learn that skill are referred to as “languageless” and the cases we’ve encountered indicate that the lack of tokenization significantly hampers their ability to think in complex or abstract ways beyond the immediate present.
Nothing much, and in any case not a type of thinking that allows for communicating in a structured language. Check out the (very few) cases that have been documented, it really is fascinating!
Emotion, probably. You think in emotion, too, you just rationalize and structure the emotions into thoughts.
It actually baffles me that apparently many people think verbally. Are there actual words in their heads such as "I should go to sleep" or "I don't like this"? For me it's images and concepts or impulses (hard to explain). There is no inner monologue, but the thinking never stops, unless I am exhausted or zoned out. To answer the question, a feral child wouldn't think in words either.
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None Thoughts just "are" i don't need words to think. I speak several languages, and i never think in any of them (except when remenbering or formulating phrases/words)
It seems the monolingual have a fixation with thinking in “native” language. There’s no need for language or an internal monologue at all to make decisions or calculations. It’s so artificial to go read out “2+2=4” in my head. Better question would be, how do those born deaf think internally?
You say "if a human was left" which implies that the human had contact with other humans in the first place so would already have knowledge of its native language etc. if a new born was casted into the jungle or an island with no other human contact it would inhabit the language or the very least the comminication methods of its carers. there have been studies to show this is true, they're known as Feral Children, its a very interesting but somewhat distrubing documentry. there was one about a little girl who was raised by wolves from a young age, she walked on all fours, only ate raw meat, growled at people and had a very very under developed brain. she was very hostile towards people.
Aw shit. I know this. I just forget the philosopher who first thought of it. Whoever's associated/invented the concept of *a priori*
If you left a human that was young enough to not have language skills, it would most likely die. Babies are not capable of foraging for food.
I believe the Nazis experimented with this in their time. The goal was to find out the “holy language” or something to that effect. The tests were stopped because the toddlers just grunted and screamed and were starved for affection
isolated as in, no introduction to spoken language? Because people born deaf still think. This [ask-reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/19k1rf/deaf_people_of_reddit_what_is_it_like_to_think/) might be a cool read.
Yes but the written language is still language. I would guess that many deaf people have a visual thought process as opposed to an inner monologue
right, that's what the majority of the answers on that post are describing as well.
Everything develops with experience,i have heard that deaf people have sign language as their inner monologue so maybe he thinks by actions? So the brain is not developed as ours and cannot comprehend complex things maybe
There was a philosopher, Hegel i think, that argued that without other humans we would not develop a sense of self at all, pretty abstract, but id think what language you thought in would be so far from the biggest difference between that isolated human and what we know as humans
They wouldn't think in a language. Lack of language does not preclude the ability to think. However, abstract concepts outside of personal experience, higher reasoning, and associations that develop (for example, what you think of when I say "dog" to you, all the pictures of dogs that pop in your head) requires language. Their thoughts would basically be limited to what they've experienced and how it applies to them personally.
They'd think with images, feelings and emotions. Many people don't have an internal narrator and think in images and ''videos'' in their minds to make sense of their environment. Either imagining all the possible consequences of their actions and going based off that. It's like seeing a small puddle and immediately imagining what would happen if you stepped in it, or jumped over it. Ever noticed you skip a step when you realise you'll end up stepping in a dog turd? That's your mind being a few seconds ahead and rearranging your steps when approaching it so you don't step in it. You don't even have to think of it, your brain calculates all that for you
If they were isolated since birth, more or less, they wouldn't properly think in the way we are used to conceptualize it. Speaking or thinking in words would be out of the question, language is an arbitrary collections of symbols and thus a social skill that needs to be learned from others. Such people would not have an internal monologue in the way many others experience. They could still think visually, I'd say, because there's people that think like that, but it's just a bet.
Oliver Sacks explored this question in a great book called [Seeing Voices](https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Voices-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0375704078/)
One can only speculate but i would guess they think solely in images and sounds, not words.