From: (Anonymous)	Date: April 6th, 2005 11:27 am (UTC)		(Link)
thinking in words

While I am in general agreement with pretty much all of what you say in your notes about consciousness the "thinking in words" part does not not tally with my studies and practice.

If you just sit down and try not to think any words you are pretty unlikely to succeed. This is because you aren't doing anything and the mind, which seems to require constant activity will just start doing its own thing.

However, other tasks such as painting, cleaning, playing music, composing music etc. are all activities that are basically non verbal but which do require thinking in the sense of understanding what has happened so far and a decision on what to do next. My experience has been that it is possible to concentrate on these type of tasks exclusively and in retrospect notice that no words occur. It is also possible to do them with a "running commentary" inside the head, this is what would be called not (fully) concentrating.

Stephen Pinker's work also suggests that the words are not really as important as we think and that we actualy think in ideas but seem to get this commentary anyway (experiments with people in cultures with no word for certain colours, shapes or other such things do not have their reasoning impaired compared with people from cultures that do when required to reference them for a mental task).

Try to do some detailed physical activity "without words" it is not easy but it can be done.