

Ask HN: What is the nature of deafblind people's and animals' thoughts? - Arun2009

Before you accuse me of not googling, I freely admit that I am lazily information mining here!<p>Onto the questions.<p>When I think, I am simulating speaking to myself - I run over the words and sentences in my head and my internal experience is as if I hear the words pronounced. I am assuming that this is the case with most of us.<p>In contrast to this, what kind of thinking experience do people who have never associated any "utterances" (lip movement, hand signals, sounds) with ideas have?<p>A related question: Assume that animals can think, because they clearly seem to. What would be their thoughts like? Clearly they can't be talking to themselves as we do. Could they be using a lot of pronouns ("I could do that to that which will cause it to do that and that and then I can catch and eat it").<p>My basic motivation is to try to find a meaningful continuity between animals and ourselves in terms of intelligence. Biologically there are a lot of similarities, but it seems that intelligence-wise, there is a marked discontinuity between humans and other living organisms. What is it that causes this?<p>This is mainly for fun speculative thinking on a Saturday morning. I also think there's a need for succinct insights about thinking and consciousness to coagulate in various places on the net so that it may someday be useful to someone.
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tokenadult
Agreed with the first reply. People with normal sensory function have
different habitual thinking styles. Noticing those differences in thinking
styles is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my work as a mathematics
teacher.

What I like to do as a teacher is help my pupils discover that they can learn
new thinking styles and, as I put it, put new tools in their toolboxes. My
wife, perhaps because of her east Asian education, has quite a diverse set of
thinking styles. I've learned some from her, and I hope our kids are learning
our whole repertoire of thinking styles from each of us. We do notice among
our four children some differences in habitual approach. But most people can
learn new ways of thinking, if they are exposed to those.

~~~
Mz
OT: Funny meeting you here. Not that I have any reason to believe you know of
me, but I think I know of you from your website. (At least it seems that way
since the name in the email address, location and other details match up.)

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Mz
Not all people think the way you do. I've spent a lot of time learning about
the different ways different people think and learn in order to effectively
cope with the needs of my sons. My oldest son thinks in pictures (like Temple
Grandin, who wrote the book 'Thinking in Pictures'). He's been very
interesting to raise and live with. He sometimes makes mistakes similar to a
non-native speaker because anything he thinks has to be translated into
English before he can express it and anything he hears has to be translated
into pictures for him to understand it. I have learned to speak in a very
imagery-rich manner because it is a more effective means to communicate with
him. It turns out to be a fairly powerful means to communicate with most
people.

EDIT: He's not deaf-blind but he does have serious eyesight issues and
auditory processing problems.

