Cogito ergo summat

Do you think in words?

If you're like (I suspect) the vast majority of people, including me, you answered "yes" to that question. Apart from when you're trying to consciously visualise a specific image, be it an object, a place, or a person you probably always think in words. Or so you would suppose.

Wrongly.

Let me share with you this (forgive me, rather lengthy) excerpt from "Confessions of a Philosopher" by Bryan Magee to demonstrate further:

"The fact that we do not necessarily think in words is demonstrated in public as well as private ways. We all have the experience sometimes of not being able to hit on the precise word we we want in order to express something. We hesitate and stutter, and the people we are talking to suggest words to us, perhaps all those that in the thesaurus immediately surround the one we are looking for, but we say 'No'...'No'...to all of them, until at last someone comes out with the right one, and then we exclaim, 'That's it! That's the word I'm looking for!' If we had known less precisely than the focus of language what it was we wanted to say we would have accepted one of the words that were exceedingly close to the one we finally chose. But we did not. And that was because we knew what we wanted to say as exactly and precisely as language can say it, yet without the word; we knew that there was one and one word only that would do, and what is more we knew that it was a word we knew but could not think of at that moment. This shows that we can, and do, think with the utmost precision of which language is capable and yet without the use of the words themselves."

Now, I don't know about you, but this strikes me as exceedingly profound. At the very least, it's....dare I say it?...something to think about.