You can only think what You can say.

Internal dialogue has intrigued me ever since i was a kid .
Watching my young nephew now go from babbling infant to forming sentences is fascinating to observe.
Through the use of language he can for the first time construct a representation of a series/sequence of events extending his concept of time .
Speech provides a form of extended anticipation, since events can be "planned" in the world of words.

Have you ever tried to describe something ..... by describing what it is not !
............ laying siege to it as it were ?

Fantastic subject to grapple with , even better in a cozy pub , beer in hand with a roaring fire and good company .

You have neglected to mention thought in the form of vibrant animated images, tactile 3 dimensional color movement and shape. Colorful minds eye imagery, against a black backdrop, pulsating with brightness, waves of contrasting colors, gaining an outline with each second of focus.

This is the minds eye friend Despite the fluoride assaults on our pineal gland, it cannot be blinded completely. It is, after all our most sacred of birthrights and with Christ or one of many glorious manifestations of the divine grace in your heart, your third eye both can and will awaken, shattering any calcification suffered in the past. It's called enlightenment homey and it is beyond words

(to be fair, I'm pretty sure it is enlightenment. Or at the very least it is a stepping stone in the conscious and correct direction)

I think you understand it all best when you realize all study, craft or philosophy, science, astrology, religion, etc. is essentially one thing. The pursuit of the divine graces love, and the higher understanding he/she/it/ can give you.

PS. No it's not a trip on shrooms, acid, peyote, '___',micro dots, or whatever, it is a trip in itself, fueled by your understanding that you are a spirit being capable of knowing your real ability. Although, tripping with this knowledge is prolly gonna kick so much ass, yea thats coming up in the next few months i can tell

reply to post by UmbraSumus


I recommend reading
Aldous Huxley's-
Doors of perception.
For further insights to the mechanics of the mind

[edit on 23-9-2008 by Epsillion70]

reply to post by dr_strangecraft

I agree! In the past I have posted in e-prime. Folks seem to misunderstand me though. Things seem either "are" or "are not" for most people. They'll be glad to tell you what "is", even if they haven't checked on the fact in months. So it seems, so it seems to go.

I'm willing to except this theory, but my question to the OP (and any others who would like to chime in) is how, then, did we learn to speak in the first place? If the only things we can think are things we can put into words, then it would have been impossible for us to learn ANYTHING as small children. Heck, we wouldn't have even been able to learn how to speak in the first place.

Until this question is addressed, I still have trouble with this theory.

So what then happens when you take a large dose of mushrooms and expreience something that is ineffable? I've had it hapen and words can't describe, it's alomst hard to even think about.

Originally posted by schrodingers dog

Originally posted by cbass
Not true at all.
I am thinking something right now about this post,
and I can not say it.

I know that you're being funny, but the fact is that if you are aware of your thoughts it is only in a verbal context.

Not so, I suggest you read:

(The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's)
www.amazon.com...

It pretty clearly contradicts your premise. Autistics and those with Aspergers often "think" in pictures and have problems with some of the other areas (verbal / social). The sensory input system is sometimes screwy (visual issues, such as the perception of straight or stationary lines as slightly moving or distorted; auditory issues such as hearing only the consonants but not the vowels of speech).

Another interesting article about Autism:

(The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know)
www.wired.com...

More or less shows that while autistics lack verbal and social skills an many instances, they can excel in spatial, visual and auditory skills. They can communicate, though sometimes only via pictures or images. In some cases, on the aforementioned tasks (visual / spatial, they can actually outperform "neurotypicals").

So, the notion that one can only form thoughts or communicate via language is not correct, on its face. Certainly, thinking [which they *do*] in other terms (pictures, for instance) comes out with a different set of responses and behaviors. But that does not necessarily make it "bad," just different.

Anyway, have a good one!
~Michael Gmirkin

[edit on 24-9-2008 by mgmirkin]

Originally posted by schrodingers dog
This subject might well be one that has research behind it. And I will seek it but this is something that I have believed for as long as I can remember so I wanted to share it with you.

To the degree that we use our brains to process what we sense, analyze it, think about it, and express it, we as humans cannot have a thought that does not have a word assigned to it.

I think and daydream in pictures, concepts and scenarios. When I am trying to work out sums for example I sometimes use visual fractions more than numbers (I hate numbers). I often do have a dialogue playing in my mind where I use words as well but my intellect is not absent without them. We evolved language to express more complicated concepts.. those concepts would still exist without language but they would be much harder to share with eachother.

[edit on 24-9-2008 by riley]

reply to post by schrodingers dog


Surely it's the other way around...you can only say what you can think!

Or if you can only think what you can say ....

How do new words get chosen? They're not "discovered" are they?

Originally posted by paradigm619
I'm willing to except this theory, but my question to the OP (and any others who would like to chime in) is how, then, did we learn to speak in the first place?
Until this question is addressed, I still have trouble with this theory.

You learn to speak piecemeal. You can copy the sounds like a parrot would. But then you begin repeating the sounds back to people to see how they respond. You learn the meaning of the word based SOLELY on how other people respond to it.

We have a baby in the house. It is hilarious to see what he copies. When he is listening to you, he says "right, right" while you talk, mimicing a British friend who was staying with us.

His impression of the meaning of that phrase is based on how the rest of us respond. He could have learned the Russian or the Irish verbal cue; the content is irrelevant to the fact that he has learned how to agree with a speaker in the midst of a conversation. Did he have that thought BEFORE he learned to say "right, right"? If he did, it was nebulous---but now his concept of engaging a speaker without interrupting is a much clearer concept, because he has a tool he can use.

Same with "Goggie." He called all dogs "Goggie," and even some cats! Or at least he did until about a month ago, when he got to spend an afternoon with a cat, and learned that they are a different animal. His learning of the term "Kiiyy Kat" involved learning the ways a kitty cat is different from a doggie.

You can make an adult extension of this conversation with computers. One of the problems with teaching computers to speak is actually involved in teaching them to think. For instance, programmers have great difficulty in explaining the difference between a bench and a chair. . . .

What makes a chair a chair, and not a bench. Either item may have a back or arms. It may have legs, or be a solid block holding up the seat. It cannot be that "a bench is just wider," Because some thrones are wider chairs than a bench in a jail cell is.

Or take "House." Certainly it is usually a place where humans live. But "house" can mean anything from an igloo to a "boat house." And yet, how are those two concepts connected by being a kind of house?

Definitely, the distinctions involved, the semantics, requires nuances of language, which you only acquired in the process of learning to master the words employed to discuss them.

How many tribesmen living in a jungle spontaneously think of either igloos or boathouses??? None, since they possess neither the concept nor the lexical cateory: the two go hand-in-hand.

all the best.

reply to post by dr_strangecraft

You learn to speak piecemeal. You can copy the sounds like a parrot would. But then you begin repeating the sounds back to people to see how they respond. You learn the meaning of the word based SOLELY on how other people respond to it.

Is this really what you have observed?

Kids repeating words like parrots, trying them on different objects and seeing how the people around them respond?

I haven't seen that, and I doubt that many on this thread would say they had, either. If that was how children learnt language, they would take thirty-six years, not thirty-six months, to do it.

Most of us have had the experience of hearing their child or toddling younger sibling utter a word for the very first time, applying it to precisely the right thing - usually with such an air of satisfaction and certainty that it is clear they know beforehand that they are right. Which, of course, they usually are; this kind of occurrence is the rule, not the exception. Compare the size of the average four-year-old's vocabulary and the number of times the child had to be corrected about the meaning of a word in the course of acquiring it.

And vocabulary isn't even the point. Acquiring a vocabulary is the easiest part of language: a mere question of matching labels with objects or concepts, easily done by rote. The hard part of language is making sentences out of those words you've learnt - sentences that will correctly convey your intended meaning to others. This is the province of syntax and grammar, with their frightening complexity, their variable applicability, their endless permutations and idiomatic exceptions. The number of possible combinations of words in grammatical sentences is so vast as to be effectively infinite; rote-learning will get us nowhere here.

Yet learning to speak in grammatical sentences is something small children do rapidly and automatically. They do it so well that even their errors are amusing to us, because when we hear one we instantly recognize how it arises from some innocently misapplied rule of syntax or grammar - which means that they have already understood the rule correctly - understood it without ever having been taught, just by listening to other people speak.

Children learn language like this because evolution, or God if you prefer, has designed the capacity to do so into them. They are born with something you might think of as language-acquisition-and-generation software built into their brains. That software defines the universe of possible human languages because it generates the rules of syntax and grammar for every last one of them. These rules vary from language to language but always remain strictly within the parameters set by the software*. That sounds remarkably like Chomsky's 'generative grammar' to a lot of people.

But whether or not it corresponds to what Chomsky meant by that term or not, some neural facility of this kind clearly exists in children. They emphatically do not learn language like parrots - unless, as Irene Pepperberg thinks, parrots actually learn language like children.

But that is another story.
*This kind of statement demands evidence; I can do no better than refer you to the chapter notes to The Language Instinct and another more recent book by Pinker, The Stuff of Thought. This second book looks in quite close detail at the way the brain turns thoughts - actually not even thoughts, but the primitive components of thought - into words. I found the section on prepositions particularly fascinating. and intuitively convincing as well. It is heavier going than The Language Instinct, however; at least, I found it so.

[edit on 25-9-2008 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by dr_strangecraft



deleting my post after a closer reading of yours.

While my image of how children learn was overly simplistic, I believe your view as presented is problematic for over-stressing how rarely children make semantic and morphological errors, ones which take repeated correction to get right. You have to tell a child that "its 'best,' not goodest," more than once.

And what about non-indo-european languages which are far less dependand upon syntax? Are they learned in less time than languages with complicated syntactical rule?

In short, my personal experience, and indeed, modern critiques of Chomsky's "universal grammar" highlight the high degree to which our world-view is embedded within our language.

all the best.
.

[edit on 25-9-2008 by dr_strangecraft]

[edit on 25-9-2008 by dr_strangecraft]

originally posted by: schrodingers dog
The human brain can only think what it can say.

I think emotions are felt and 'thought' and yet we can't express them with words.

originally posted by: schrodingers dog


Think of it this way. The human brain can only think what it can say. The human experience and feelings are infinite. But as far as thought is concerned we are restricted by our language.

[edit on 9/21/2008 by schrodingers dog]

Certainly not...!

I think you have got it the wrong way round. You should be saying :" You can only say what you can think" NOT "you can only think what you can say"

Language is the use of symbols. Symbols interpret thoughts and feeling. Different countries have used different symbols.

Thought came first and language came after. You seem to be suggesting the opposite.

originally posted by: crowdedskies

originally posted by: schrodingers dog


Think of it this way. The human brain can only think what it can say. The human experience and feelings are infinite. But as far as thought is concerned we are restricted by our language.

[edit on 9/21/2008 by schrodingers dog]

Certainly not...!

I think you have got it the wrong way round. You should be saying :" You can only say what you can think" NOT "you can only think what you can say"

Language is the use of symbols. Symbols interpret thoughts and feeling. Different countries have used different symbols.

Thought came first and language came after. You seem to be suggesting the opposite. How strange !

originally posted by: FlyersFan

originally posted by: schrodingers dog

The human brain can only think what it can say.

I think emotions are felt and 'thought' and yet we can't express them with words.

Maybe the only way to make sense of words is to find the emotion within them. Maybe the only point of words is to express emotions of some type. Each sentence maps directly to a highly complex human "feeling".

So that is completely contradictory to what you are saying.

(What emotion does that statement evoke within you? Good natured humor, I hope.)

a reply to: schrodingers dog

it's good that you draw attention to this issue, as this is the true control mechanism over man. however your argument, though in ignorance, supports the heinous control mechanism of word-thought. those that control/influence the minds of men, need for you to have that inner-dialogue. for you to reason, and accept reasons for motivation, all communicated with words. how else is it that a man can be perverted, intellectually, but by reason/logic/verbal communication? it is not unlike a state of hypnosis. and if you were to compare the two ends of the spectrum: the man possessed by reasons and causes, and the man who cares not at all for them, which is a better candidate for evil?