Can we think without using language?

Humans have been using language for a long time. Scientists once thought that the ability for language was the key difference between us and other animals. We have been thinking about each other's thoughts for a long time.

Russell Hurlburt is a research psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies how people formulate thoughts. The relationship between thought and language is studied by scientists. Is it possible to not say anything?

Several decades of research has shown that the answer is yes. Some people don't talk to themselves in their heads because of Hurlburt's studies. People don't use the language parts of their brain when working on logic problems.

Scientists thought for a long time that intelligent thought and our ability to form sentences were related.

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According to Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscience researcher at MIT's McGovern Institute, language came about to allow us to think more complex thoughts. This idea was championed by legendary linguists like Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor in the mid-20th century, but it has begun to fall out of favor in the last few years, according to Scientific American.

Researchers are rethinking their assumptions about how we think and how language plays a part in the process.

"Unsymbolized thinking" is a type of thinking that doesn't use words. Hurlburt and a colleague created the term in 2008 after conducting decades of research to prove that it was a real phenomenon.

Language and cognitive studies are hard to describe. Hurlburt said that people use the same words to describe different things. Someone might use the same words to describe a parade of pink elephants as they would to describe their non-visual, pink elephant-centered inner monologue.

It can be difficult to recognize language-free thought in the beginning. Hurlburt said that most people don't know that they engage in unsymbolized thinking often.

It can be tempting to think that the thought processes that go on inside our own heads are universal because people are so trapped in their own thoughts.

Better ways to observe and measure the connection between language and thought are being developed by some labs. Modern technologies like fMRI and microscopy give researchers a good picture of which parts of the human brain correspond to different functions. Neuroscience has been able to approximate and map functional regions associated with things like speech and long-term memory.

Brain maps are taken into account by Fedorenko's research.

She said that if language is important for reasoning, there should be some overlap in neural resources. Brain regions associated with language processing should light up when someone uses logic to figure out a problem.

She and her team tested this claim by giving participants a word-free logic problem to solve, such as a sudoku puzzle or a bit of math. The researchers used an fMRI machine to work out the puzzle after scanning these people's brains. The researchers found that the brain regions associated with language didn't light up when the participants solved the problems.

Research like Fedorenko's, Hurlburt's and others show that language is not essential for human cognitive functioning, which is important for understanding neurological conditions, such as aphasia. Fedorenko said that a lot of the reasoning can be done without the language system. She said that it wouldn't be easier with language.

It was originally published in live science.