Internal languages

Phil Graham (pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au)
Fri, 05 Feb 1999 16:02:59 +1000 (EST)

I've been thinking for a while about the many ways people seem to
cognitively metabolise and mentally manipulate the worlds they inhabit.

One of the most well-publicised theorisations about THE way we do this is
that put forward by Steve Pinker (1994, 1997) which is essentially
Chomskyan with a few alterations. In 1994 he talked about "mentalese" and
extrapolated his view in 1997 positing a retrieval "demons" model (which
kind of implies homunculii while trying to refute such a view at the same
time) ... Anyway, needless to say, I don't think much of the
mind-as-computer model - encoding, decoding, all that stuff, strikes me as
complete rot (this might have to do with my "mode" of cognition, I dunno,
this is all speculative stuff). But what strikes me as odd is the many ways
in which people talk about the way they think.

For me, "intellectual" and "social" thought is almost entirely linguistic:
I mostly think in words. When I'm thinking about or composing music,
however, I can "hear" whole arrangements, textures, and so on, and
manipulate these quite easily. I have no ability to "visualise" spatial
concepts, nor can I recall "pictures" very clearly. In fact, colours, to
me, are almost absent from my thinking. Other people have told me that they
think almost entirely in pictures and have to "translate" these into words.
My son (6yo) apparently has a 3-D mind. He manages to build incredible
things in modular form which fit together in quite complicated ways. I
asked him how he does it, because I can't understand it: "Oh, I just see it
in my head", he says.

Now I know that talented physicists like Richard Feynman "see" different
things in their thoughts (or see things differently, whichever), and that
(pure) mathematicians have an entirely different mental weltenschaung and
this, too, has caused arguments between these apparently (from the outside)
similar communities.

Poets, in my experience, have a whole 'nuther experience of cognition. And
drummers!!?? Who knows about drummers? Especially ones who sing.

After 20 odd years of being a music producer, I know that, even in that
narrow field, people think and talk about music in myriad ways. In the
studio, long and short-term cultures emerge (or, worst comes to worst, do
not emerge) from the conversations about the music that's being produced.

Anyway, this is just a little food for thought, and I thought I'd throw it
out for discussion in case anyone's interested.

Phil