Thinking Without Words

Some people can indeed think without words, my hypothetical wife does it all the time. I read something about it once, told my hypothetical wife about what I had read, and she said that she thought everybody thought like that. You know when people say something like. "I can (or can't) picture that."? I had always thought that was just a figure of speech, but it turns out that some people think primary in pictures instead of words. If they hear or read something in words, their mind has to translate that into a picture before they can commit it to memory. I'm just the opposite. If I see a picture or witness a real life event, I have to describe it to myself in words before I can assimilate it. 

Then there are people who have what's called a photographic memory. I took a test once to become a postal worker, and flunked it miserably. We were shown a series of boxes, each containing a dozen or more addresses. We were allowed to study the diagram for five minutes, then the paper was taken away, and we were given a list of all the addresses, in no particular order, and had to say which addresses belonged in which box. The guy sitting next to me had successfully taken this test before and become a substitute mailman for awhile in some city down below. Now he was taking it again because he had moved up here and wanted to do the same work locally. In discussing it afterwards, it became apparent that we each had different ways of processing knowledge. During the five minutes of study, I kept looking for some kind of pattern, and there was none to be found. The other guy said that he just looked at the whole page and, when he closed his eyes during the test, he could see the whole page in his mind like a picture. Okay, in this case it was words and numbers, but it wouldn't have made any difference to him if it had been apples and oranges. If it had been apples and oranges, I would have memorized it by saying to myself, "apple, apple, orange, apple, orange, orange, apple", like that. 

Primitive humans probably thought about what they saw around them and made up words to describe it later so they could tell others about what they had seen. A guy like me would have had a hard before language was invented, because I wouldn't even have been able to talk to myself.