On Thinking

Research into intelligence and genius often mentions Albert Einstein and his style of thinking. Einstein let it be known that his creative thought process, the one responsible for the theory of relativity, was entirely non-verbal, and that he arrived at his theory by manipulating mental images. The biography of the best-known theoretical physicist of the 20th century tells us that Einstein had trouble with language skills. He managed to overcome this deficit, however, thanks to visual and sensory thinking (Einstein also said that his thoughts had a certain taste, which suggests he was endowed with synaesthesia).

My experience is that visual thinking slows down speaking. My thinking is based on a two- and three-dimensional space in which I arrange abstract elements into meaningful relations, which only ex post can I describe in words.

It took me several years to speed this process up to the point where I can hold a conversation in real time. Even so, it still happens to me that when someone asks me something, I work out the answer visually in my head and then answer, rather inadequately, with a single word. Especially when I am tired, I stay with that one word, for I am too lazy to describe the whole thought process that I have long since worked through in my head.

I was quite shocked when I found out, a few years ago, that not everyone thinks in this visual way. Many people have confided to me that their thinking does not exist somewhere in advance, before they start speaking (or writing), but that their thinking equals what they say.

I do not deny that this has many advantages. People who cannot form visual images seem clever, because they can speak and react quickly. Indeed, they can even talk about a given problem for tens of minutes.

You can recognise very verbal people easily. When you ask them something, they immediately start talking without stopping to think for a moment. And that is because their thinking is contained precisely in speaking; they cannot think in any other way outside words.

I, on the contrary, stop for a few seconds before I answer. I build a visual model of what the question is about and what possible solution it has. The answer then appears in my head as a kind of figure, which I try to translate into natural language. It is not an efficient way of thinking if you are supposed to react as quickly as possible; on the other hand, it is an antidote to the clichés and stereotyped answers that all of us, me included, use when we speak and argue with others. We think they are our thoughts, yet to a large extent we are merely parroting what we have heard elsewhere. And that is all right; we cannot be original all the time. The trouble comes when we replace original thoughts, that is, thinking, entirely with a mere passive reaction to what has been said, with a ready-made phrase or slogan.

What would a culture look like that included people who can think only and exclusively verbally? And conversely, what form would a culture take where people think mainly visually? In the first, people would probably read, write and talk a great deal, but it would be very clumsy when it came to building skyscrapers, bridges or experimental physics. The second would be the other way round. It would be strongly oriented towards engineering and art, its art would excel in figurative painting, perhaps calligraphy and typography, but its literary production would not be its strong point.

Such cultures do not exist in this extreme form, but in the real world there are, in my opinion, countries and cultures that, on the basis of their history, cultivated mainly one skill or the other, which then showed itself in the “cognitive mode” of the people and, in turn, in the forms of cultural production of these nations. And that simply because culture is the result of the purposeful, cognitive activity of individuals. A nation full of musical non-talents will not be known as a mecca of music. And similarly, a nation that for three thousand years does nothing but read and write its holy books will have a predisposition to a talent for bookishness, especially if in that culture bookishness was in some way valued by society, say by the biggest bookworm in the village being allowed to marry the daughter of a rich family. And vice versa.

…

It still fascinates me that there are people without the ability to picture images in their heads. It is not illogical to think that these people will excel, as a compensation for their visual deficit, in everything to do with language: they will speak and write well. Only perhaps they will not be good writers of fiction or poetry, because in most successful cases these genres work by evoking mental images in us. Or such people may be writers, and even painters, but I dare to say that their fiction and paintings will show something odd, a certain flatness, an absence of plasticity.

It would be fascinating to explore these questions on a scientific level. Maybe I will get round to it. For now I have to make do with the fact that today I received a message in my university email saying that the abstract of my paper on the Extended Mind and the theorist Marshall McLuhan had been accepted, and that I will be able to talk about it at the conference of doctoral students of philosophy in Olomouc.

So I hope I will not dawdle too much with the images in my head and will be able to speak fluently and, if possible, entertainingly too!