What language do we think in? Is it the language we first learned? Is it a language we may have adopted later on? Is it a mix of both? Is it even a human language at all? Do we even use language to think? If we do, then to what extent? Is language just a mode of input for us that goes through a layer of translation to become something more abstract?

Imagine the times you’ve involved yourself in conversations that seek a relatively high degree of engagement. You dive down deep into each and every crevasse of your mind to scrape out bits of relevant information for the conversation. These types of conversations often demand a lot of thought. In conversations like these, you may have noticed yourself taking pauses at times in the course of speaking. Most of these pauses are induced because of 5 cases:

Case I: You do not know what to say.

Case II: You are overwhelmed with the number of things you could say. So, you have a hard time figuring out how to structure and/or link them together.

Case III: You have forgotten what you were about to say.

Case IV: Your pause is a reaction to what the other party said.

Case V: You know exactly what needs to be said, but you just don’t know how to say it.

Cases I through IV are quite trivial and occur due to obvious causes. I am more interested in the mechanics of a situation such as Case V.

If human language is the only tool we use to construct thought, why, in situations such as Case V, would we be in search of words to communicate it? Allow me to further clarify; if we did use only words to think, wouldn’t what need be said in such situations already be present in the mind bearing a linguistic manifestation? This is how we may infer that human language is not the only tool in our mind’s arsenal which we employ to assist the mental process. Contrary to what Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) prosed, the limits of our language may not mean the limits of how we perceive our world.

Employment of Symbolism in Language and its Significance

Let us bring the second sentence of the second paragraph above into the spotlight:

"You dive down deep into each and every crevasse of your mind to scrape out bits of relevant information."

Notice how little effort is required by the mind to understand what the sentence is trying to convey even though it is implying something other than its obvious and immediate meaning. In a literal sense, a crevasse has no relation to the mind. Yet, we are able to form a connection between them. I used a metaphor to symbolize how one might perceive the act of searching for information inside their mind, comparing it with how they might search for physical objects in a crevasse. It seems instinctual for us to develop such visual symbolic phrases when describing certain things. After all, our ability of sight is one of the first sources of inputs we rely on to make perceptual sense of the world, given that they are sufficiently functional. This is how the animogn is born, a mental representation of what has been perceived, is being perceived and/or can be perceived, when visual stimuli become memory.

Analogous to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar where certain structural rules are innate to humans, our ability to form animogns is not limited by the history, quantity and/or quality of the visual stimuli we receive. To understand how, imagine,

I would like to include an analogy theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist Dr. Brian Greene articulated during his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience #1428. At the 00:10:19 mark, Dr. Greene mentions how we humans have very good intuition for space. Imagine somebody threw a bottle of water towards you. You would know how to catch it; you would know where to put your hands. You would not have to sit down with a pen, paper and a calculator to work out its Newtonian trajectory in order to precisely determine its location to know where you would be putting your hand to catch it. This is because our intuition and understanding of motion of such regular objects is learned from the visual stimuli we’ve received throughout our life. However, if someone were to throw a subatomic particle your way, say, an electron, you would not have a quantum intuition about the wave functions and probabilities that govern how a particle like the electron behaves. Since we are born as big creatures, our intuition and understanding were never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave. In the similar way, we do not require effort to think in symbols as this ability is programmed into our psyche around the same time we develop consciousness, it is intuitive.

1. A man climbing some stairs.
2. 19th century Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh climbing the same set of stairs.
3. A refrigerator climbing the same set of stairs.

Chances are you’ve seen someone climb some stairs before. For (1), the man you imagined may not have had a face. The animogn you created in your mind for (1) may have been from memory. It could very well be the case that the entire animogn was not from one single event to refer from memory; the stairs might’ve been from your uncle’s house in Vienna, the details of the man might’ve been from of somebody who's never been to your uncle’s house, and the person’s gait might’ve been of somebody you knew. All these elements combined to give you (1).

For (2), I would bet good money that you have never received visual stimuli of van Gogh climbing stairs, yet you are able to picture him. Perhaps, you were able to substitute the faceless man you envisioned in (1) with van Gogh.

Let us take this a step further into absurdity with (3). It is farce to think of an inanimate household object in voluntary self-induced motion. Yet, you are able to do so. Maybe you pictured it so that it had cartoon legs, maybe it was shimmying its way up, or perhaps it was gliding forward. A substitution in your animogn for the object you imagined in (1) and (2) climbing stairs allowed you to replace it with a refrigerator. So in reality, for all 3 cases above, your animogn contained a symbol for an object making its way up a set of stairs; for (1), you replaced the object with a person, for (2) you replaced it with van Gogh, and for (3) you replaced the object with a refrigerator.

Our proclivity to think in symbols is further evident when we observe history, religion and mythology. In his book Man and His Symbols (1964), Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung wrote how "man is unable to define a 'divine' being. When, with all our intellectual limitations, we call something 'divine,' we have merely given it a name, which may be based on a creed, but never on factual evidence." Jung further goes on to make the case how with divinity, being one of the innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we have found ways to use symbolic terms to represent them, and that is why all religions employ symbolic language or images. This symbolic way of thinking allows us to understand concepts which are inexpressible by human language.

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Throughout time, we have evolved to use language as a tool. We have the capacity to express complex emotions through language. The ability with which we are able to articulate ourselves during this present stage in our linguistic evolution vastly supersedes the ability of articulation possessed even by our neanderthal ancestors. We are able to express love with language, we may write poems and letters to our loved one(s), giving our expression a non-physical essence. If an early neanderthal were to express their feeling of attraction, perhaps they would’ve chosen a more physical route given their feeble linguistic development. I’d argue that language as a tool has allowed for cognitive development.

The Mentalese - Language of Thought (LOT)

[Talk about the work put forth by Dr. Steven Pinker regarding the mentalese.]
[Talk about the layer of translation where symbols turn into words.]
[What does it say about the person who has trouble translating as such?]
[Put forth translation paradoxes.]
[How does poetry and art come into play here?]
[Do we think in language or do we use language in thinking?]
[Make a case for multilingual demographic]
[Am I bounded in my thinking since I am only using English here?]
[Do the concepts we acquire depend on the culture we live in? Or does the aquisition of any language guarantee that we have certain concepts?]
[...]