Love, grief, death, and awe, in particular tend to elude language’s grasp. Poetry, which rejects many of the conventions of everyday language, may have the greatest capacity to name the unnameable. And yet, many of us think our most private thoughts in words—our inner monologues galloping an inside track through our minds all day long.
So what is the role of language in thought? This is a subject that MIT cognitive scientist and professor Evelina Fedorenko has spent decades researching. Using studies of behavior, brain imaging, intracranial recordings and stimulation, and computational modeling, she has investigated how people understand and produce language, and where language and thought overlap.
Read more: “How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat?” I recently interviewed Fedorenko via email about the definition of a “thought,” the role of language and culture in perception, attention and memory, and what large language models can teach us about the nature of human reasoning.Is there such a thing as a discrete “thought” with edges, and if so how would you define it or recognize it? This is a tricky one because it really depends on how you define “thought.” There certainly can be discrete thoughts with edges, but there also seem to sometimes be thoughts that are maybe half-formed, like partial intuitions, a glimpse of something that is hard to call discrete. How would you recognize a discrete thought is a hard question, but one possible operational definition is that you can translate it into a symbolic form, be it a sentence or a little piece of a computer program.
What is your best hypothesis about the form of human thoughts? Are they composed of pictures, words, sounds, feelings—all of those things at once? It’s not my hypothesis: I think this is the field’s current best guess.
Much of human, and perhaps non-human, thought and reasoning can be construed as pieces of computer code, what is often referred to as “probabilistic language of thought,” or PLOT. So, actually not pictures or words. And as a side note, I think the fact that this term “language of thought” has been in common use for many years has added to the confusion between language and thinking, but the term does not suggest that we think in language.
In fact, there is now strong evidence that we don’t. It’s also worth noting that there are many different things we think about. We think and reason about the physical world, about other people, about abstract relations—for example, imagine thinking through a way to solve a logic or a math problem.
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