The Running Conversation in Your Head
Julie Beck,
Pocket, The Atlantic,
Mar 29, 2023
This article follows the thread of a brief Mastodon discussion I had a couple of days ago. It just came out on Pocket today, but was published in the Atlantic in 2016. Charles Fernyhough says, "I think 'thinking' is a tricky word... A certain category of thinking that we call verbal thinking, and that's essentially inner speech, the stuff that we do in words. But I certainly think you can be intelligent and do lots of really clever stuff without language. Babies prove it every day; animals prove it every day... The idea is not that you need language for thinking but that when language comes along, it sure is useful. It changes the way you think, it allows you to operate in different ways because you can use the words as tools."
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