I can imagine an image in my head (sort of) but I can't not think in words. It's hard for me to even understand what people mean when they say they are thinking but they don't have an internal monologue going on in their head. Brains are weird.
Do you know more then one language? I grew up bilingual from a young age, and I suspect that has something to do with the disconnect between ideas and words.
The simplest proof I have for the fact that I don't think in words is that I quite often forget a word, and can't complete a sentence. I know exactly what I want to express and have thought it through in my mind, but I can't tell it to someone else because I don't remember the serialization of that idea, and am forced to try to work around it by describing the word and hoping someone fills it in for me.
I'm a native English-speaker, and I don't speak anything else fluently, but I speak enough of a few languages to have basic conversations in them (that is, enough to go beyond just using phrases that I learned from a book).
Every now and then, I'll forget a word in English but remember it in another language. My internal monologue tends to be English-ish (especially right now, when I'm composing a post), but if the sounds for a word are missing, the concept will fill its place...or sometimes the closest equivalent of whichever language I've been thinking about lately. I can also think almost completely in wordless concept-strings, but that sometimes feels forced.
Maybe I should mention that I learned a few words in French, German, and Spanish before I was 8, but the first time that I really studied a language in the usual sense was when I was about 12.
Wow, that example is really perfect -- I definitely think in a similar way, but I've had a really hard time explaining that to people. Hopefully this helps.
Do you ever get frustrated trying to explain this? I've had people refuse to believe me, and I end up feeling like I'm not thinking "as well" or "as rigorously" as I might be.
I'm not fluent in any language apart from English and your description fits me exactly. I temporarily forget words, meaning I need to circle around and find another way to describe a concept.
I have a feeling that forgetting words isn't particularly unusual even for native speakers though.
Exactly. I also grew up to be bilingual from a young age, and I didn't learn my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting foreign words with the words you already know from your first language, but in a way a toddler would, just by listening to it and maybe some reading.
After I began to think in English (my second language), I found that I wasn't speaking my first language anymore, I was just translating to it from my second one. And because the two weren't connected in my brain, I started frequently forgeting words and having trouble with phrasing.
> I didn't learn my second language in a way an adult would, by connecting foreign words with the words you already know from your first language
Mildly off-topic, but I never realised until recently how much of a difference this can make. I've used French numbers far more, and for far longer, than I have Japanese numbers [0], but learning that way still results in me going "8 - that's eight, so its huit". Because I learnt the Japanese numbers through usage and without the deliberate English comparison, I go straight to "8 - hachi" without the intermediate step.
It's also weird to me that I can count backwards (say 10 to 1) far easier in Japanese than in French, probably for similar reasons.
[0] Note I'm a long way from fluent in either. I studied French at school, and have picked up a very small amount of Japanese through usage.
I'm bilingual. My thought process is a mixture of words, ideas, and other things that are relevant. The words nowadays are in English, even though English is my second language (Polish is my first). And it definitely does happen sometimes I do forget a word.
This describes issues I have to a tee. I know a few basic words in multiple languages, mostly I use English, but I have noticed I tend to get worse after a long coding session - it's like my English cart gets taken out and replaced with something else.
What is quite scary is that my colleagues now understand from tone and context exactly which "thingy" I am referring to...
There's kind of two layers to how I think - if I'm actively thinking about something (such as writing this post, or imagine a specific event/occurrence), then it is a very defined internal monologue, and is essentially how I would speak about the topic.
If its a more passive thing (such as pondering something whilst actually working on something else), or my language 'skills' for lack of a better word are doing something else (e.g. listening to music with lyrics), then the thoughts are more abstract ideas and images, and the monologue only returns when I come to some sort of conclusion. It's interesting to note that this happens more frequently when I've been using languages other than English.
