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Answer by Yohan John, Ph.D. in cognitive and neural systems from Boston University:
What a great question! I don’t think neuroscience has much to comment on the matter yet. All we can really do is introspect and speculate about the answer.
I used to be a strong “thought equals language” sort of person, but nowadays I’m not so sure. I widened my definition of thought to include imagistic thinking, such as imagining cogs and gears moving together. I could imagine, say, an engineer thinking directly in terms of mechanical “scenes” without any intervening words. But it’s hard for me to imagine what thinking would be like without words or images. Maybe that’s just a limitation of my own thinking.
I read an extraordinary account of a man named Ildefonso who was deaf and never learned sign language. He reached adulthood without any language at all. Somehow he found a way to survive and even use money, but he had no real concept of what he was doing. The received wisdom was that after a certain age it would be impossible to acquire any sort of language. He eventually met someone who could teach him sign language. She persisted when most others would have given up, and managed eventually to teach him sign language. It’s a really moving story that I highly recommend reading.
Naturally, people wanted to know what his mental life was like prior to learning sign language. But he didn’t want to talk about it at all, Richard Whittaker reports:
Of course, you and I are interested in learning what was it like? 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.
This is of course just one anecdote. It doesn’t mean that anyone whose mind is empty of language is stupid or not thinking. I do find it hard to relate, because I am a highly linguistic thinker.
Based on my own highly subjective introspection, I’ve always wanted to separate “thoughts” from “sense impressions.” I think of sense-impressions as the things going on when we daydream, or when we’re just about to go to sleep. These experiences for me are on the threshold of thought and nonsense. I’ve been thinking that thoughts by contrast are cognitive entities that you can manipulate, repeat, or at least recognize as being the same thought. In other words, if you can say, “I’ve had this thought before,” then that category of mental experience is a thought. (But then I tie myself in knots, because sometimes when I am “thinking” I don’t actually produce any distinct “thoughts.”)
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