Our internal narration
Our internal dialogue has always fascinated me from the time I was young. I have often thought what it would be like if a human grew up in the wild and did not learn a language. What would this person think about?
There would clearly be some social problems and maybe an ethical dilemma or two to work out but this experiment would be incredibly interesting.
This thought experiment took on a whole new level this past year. I have been learning Spanish while living in South America, which is much harder than I anticipated by the way. I’ve often heard, when you begin to think in the new language, you have become truly fluent. Since I clearly want to be conversational as quickly as possible, I actually have been putting in effort specifically to think in Spanish.
Translating Thoughts
At first, I started learning Spanish the way most people do. This involves literally translating words from the new language into the native one and vice versa. That is to say, I think in English sentences, then translate each word of the sentence individually. Once translated in my mind, I then speak the sentence in Spanish out loud. And conversely, when listening to someone. I need them to speak slowly so that I can translate each word into English as the sentence progresses. Seems like a very logical method to me…
After my Spanish became increasingly better, I noticed that I would often “think” the Spanish word first. For example, when I would have the thought that I needed to get something from the store, I would think “Yo necesito…”
At one point, it dawned on me that I wasn’t really thinking in Spanish. Instantaneous thoughts were flashing in my mind, void of ANY language. It was only later that I translated this thought into either English or Spanish.
To say another way, my thoughts existed on their own and I understood them without language. After training my brain to use the Spanish language, I then translated this thought into Spanish rather than English.
Where did the thought come from?
This realization that thoughts were coming to my mind instantaneously without language was very troubling at first. This was contrary to everything I’ve believed about thoughts and how the mind works. It was as if I was receiving a message from someone that was immediately transferred like some alien movie. Then after the message was sent, my conscious brain had to convert this message into a language. Even more troubling, I began to ask the obvious follow up questions. Who was sending this message? Was it still me? Or is there really two people in my brain?