Is it possible for humans to think without needing language?

The scientific community believes that words aren't strictly required for logical thinking.

 

Since the dawn of time, people have used language to communicate their ideas, and some estimates placed this practice tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. Because of its significance to our species, several researchers at one time hypothesized that the ability to communicate verbally was the primary trait that distinguished us from other species of animals. And ever since we were able to have a conversation about such topics, we've been curious about the other person's point of view.

 

Russell Hurlburt, a research psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, examines how people create their thoughts: "the 'penny for your thoughts' kind of query is, I think, as ancient as humanity." This is what he said in an interview with Live Science. However, how exactly do researchers investigate the connection between mind and language? How about the ability to think without using words?

 

Over the course of several decades, research has led to the unexpected discovery that the answer is yes. According to a recent post by Live Science, the research conducted by Hurlburt has demonstrated that specific individuals do not have an inner monologue, meaning they do not have a running conversation with themselves inside their thoughts. In addition, additional studies have shown that when people are working on wordless logic problems, the language centres of their brains are not being utilized.

 

However, for many years, scientists believed that the correct response was "no." They believed that intelligent thought was linked to our capacity to construct sentences.

 

According to Evelina Fedorenko, a neurologist and researcher at the McGovern Institute at MIT, "One prominent claim is that the underlying reason language arose was to allow us to think more complicated thoughts." Live Science quotes Fedorenko as saying this. According to Scientific American, this theory received widespread support in the middle of the twentieth century from eminent linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor; however, in recent years, it has begun to lose favour.

 

Due to new findings, researchers have been forced to reevaluate their beliefs regarding how we think and the part that language plays in the process.

 

Unsymbolized thinking is a form of cognitive process that takes place when words are not utilized in the thinking process. After performing decades of research to establish that it was an actual event, Hurlburt and a colleague came up with the name in 2008 and published it in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. According to Hurlburt, the phrase was coined after they verified that it was a genuine phenomenon.

 

Studying language and cognition is notoriously challenging, partly because it is so challenging to describe. According to Hurlburt, "people use the same words to express completely distinct sensations within their heads." For instance, a person might use the exact words to express their non-visual, pink elephant-focused inner monologue as they would use to describe a visual thought about a parade of pink elephants.

 

Another difficulty is that it is not always easy to identify language-free thoughts in the first place. Even people who engage in it typically don't realize that they do it, according to Hurlburt, who noted that most people are unaware that they engage in unsymbolized thinking.

 

And because people are so caught up in their ideas and can't immediately reach the brains of others, it can be tempting to assume that the mental processes that go on inside our heads are universal. This is because we can't directly access the minds of others.

 

Nevertheless, some research facilities, such as Fedorenko's, are creating improved methods to examine and quantify the relationship between language and the mind. Researchers now have a pretty good picture of which parts of the human brain correspond to different functions, thanks to modern technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and microscopy. For instance, scientists now know that the cerebellum is responsible for controlling balance and posture and that the occipital lobe is responsible for most visual perception processing. And inside these more general lobes, neuroscientists have been able to approximate and map more particular functional sections connected with things like long-term memory, spatial reasoning, and speech.

 

The research conducted by Fedorenko takes into account existing brain maps and incorporates an active component.

 

She hypothesized that "if language is important for reasoning, then there ought to be some overlap in cerebral resources when engaging in reasoning." When someone solves a problem using logic, the parts of the brain connected with language processing should be activated because if language is essential for thinking, those parts of the brain should light up.

 

Participants were given a wordless logic problem to answer, such as a sudoku puzzle or a little mathematics, as part of the investigation that she and her colleagues carried out to test the validity of this assertion. After that, the researchers used an fMRI machine to scan the participants' brains while they were working on solving the riddle. The researchers discovered that the individuals' brains did not light up in the regions associated with language when they solved the problems; in other words, they were reasoning without words.

 

The findings of research carried out by Fedorenko, Hurlburt, and others, amongst others, demonstrate that language is not required for human cognition. This is a significant discovery for comprehending some neurological diseases, such as aphasia. According to Fedorenko, "you can kind of take away the linguistic system, and a lot of the reasoning can flow just fine." She pointed out that despite this, "it is not to imply that it wouldn't be easier with language."

Article source : https://www.livescience.com/can-we-think-without-language

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