What Is Thinking?
The silent voice, visual thought and the process that prepares our thoughts before we know them
Stop reading for a moment and notice what is happening in your mind.
As your eyes move across these words, are you only seeing them, or are you also silently saying them to yourself?
Most people rarely examine this because the process feels completely natural. We call it reading. We call it thinking. Yet beneath both activities there is often a faint internal voice silently pronouncing the words. It may not produce an audible sound, but it can sometimes be felt as a slight readiness or movement around the tongue, throat or vocal system.
This is silent speak thinking.
It is not exactly the same as speaking aloud, because the words do not fully enter muscular articulation and external sound. But it appears to be a closely related form of the same language process. The brain internally prepares, sequences and experiences words without allowing the complete spoken action to occur.
This gives us a simple experiment.
Read this sentence normally:
The mind may know more than the voice can explain.
Now read it again while noticing the silent voice pronouncing each word.
Next, try to stop that internal pronunciation. Hold back the faint speaking movement, or occupy it with a continuous gentle internal sound, while continuing to look at the written sentence.
The words may remain perfectly visible. You may recognise the letters and even identify each word. Yet following the sentence and receiving its complete meaning may become strangely difficult.
Your eyes have not stopped seeing.
What has been interrupted is the silent verbal process through which the visible symbols are converted into an understandable sequence.
This reveals something important. Seeing written language and understanding written language are not exactly the same operation.
The eyes receive visual patterns. The brain recognises letters and words from previously learned memory. Silent speaking then places those words into an internally experienced sequence. Through that sequence, relationships appear between the words and the sentence becomes meaningful.
It begins to look as though the brain internally speaks the sentence so that it can process what the sentence is saying.
This does not mean that every form of thinking requires words. We can think through spatial relationships, images, sensations, movements, musical forms and whole recognitions that appear before any sentence describes them. But when thought becomes verbal, the brain appears to create an internal version of speech that it can experience without producing an external voice.
In that sense, talking aloud and silent speak thinking may not be entirely separate processes. One continues into sound and actual auditory feedback. The other remains mostly internal.
The surprising possibility is that the inner voice may not be creating the whole thought. It may be receiving, sequencing and explaining something that has already begun to form.
A Harvard study published in 2017 offers an important doorway into this question.
Researchers examined two commonly recognised forms of thought: visual thinking and verbal thinking. Participants were asked to deliberately create either images or sentences using pairs of words. The researchers then asked whether the other form of thought had also appeared unintentionally.
They found an asymmetry.
When people deliberately formed verbal sentences, visual representations still appeared. Yet when they deliberately formed images, clear verbal sentences were less likely to arise automatically. Brain-imaging results also indicated that visual representation remained present even when participants intended to think verbally. The researchers suggested that visual thought may be deeply embedded in the human brain and that language may operate as a later evolutionary addition.
The study did not establish that visual thinking is the same as direct perception. Its participants were often constructing imagined scenes from words, which necessarily involved learned memory. But it demonstrated something that becomes very important once we begin looking at thought through the Brain–Mind model.
Verbal thought is not the whole process of thinking.
Even when a person intends to think in words, something non-verbal remains active.
This changes the question.
Are we thinking because we are silently talking, or are we silently talking so that the brain can examine and understand something that has already begun to form as thought? (Preself processes)
We normally assume that the conscious self produces its thoughts. The voice in the mind says something and we conclude, “I am thinking this.”
But before the sentence appears, the brain has already been processing perception, memory, bodily condition, emotional significance, expectation and relevance. It has already begun determining what matters and what direction the thought is likely to take.
The words do not emerge from an empty space.
They arrive from an organisation already underway.
In the Brain–Mind model, this preparatory organisation belongs to the preself. The preself is not yet the fully narrated person declaring, “This is my thought.” It is the integrated condition from which the next thought, action, perception or response is being prepared.
It brings together many processes at once.
The conscious inner voice, however, can only speak sequentially. It has to arrange thought one word after another. Language is linear because a sentence cannot usually say every part of its meaning simultaneously.
The underlying brain–mind process is different. Colour, movement, memory, bodily sensation, emotional tone, expectation and spatial relation can all be active together. Their integration is multidimensional, but language translates part of that whole into a narrow sequence.
This may be why our understanding of mind has remained so restricted for so long.
We have tried to explain thought through the part of thought that speaks.
Because language proceeds linearly, we have imagined thought as a line. One word follows another. One idea supposedly causes the next. The conscious self appears to stand at the beginning of the line, choosing and constructing every statement.
But the inner voice may be entering after much of the organisational work has already begun.
The sequence may be closer to this:
An encounter occurs.
The wider brain–body system responds.
Memory, sensation, prediction and relevance are brought into relation.
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The preself begins organising a direction.
Silent speaking thinking converts part of that organisation into words.
The conscious self hears the words internally and claims, “This is what I am thinking.”
The self therefore appears to be the author, even though it may also be the receiver and narrator of an already-forming process.
This helps explain an experience almost everyone knows.
Sometimes we understand something before we can explain it.
An answer appears whole. A relationship becomes visible. We recognise that something is wrong or that an idea is correct, but we cannot immediately put the recognition into words.
We say, “I know what I mean, but I cannot explain it yet.”
That statement is extremely revealing.
If knowing (sense of knowing) can appear before explanation, then verbal explanation cannot be the whole of knowing.
The organisation has already formed, but silent speak thinking has not yet translated it into a communicable sequence.
This is where direct perception begins to enter the discussion.
Direct perception does not simply mean visual imagery. Nor does it mean that memory has completely disappeared. It refers to the wider brain–mind process reorganising through the present encounter before the narrative self has completely divided, interpreted and claimed what has appeared.
The preself still contains the past. Memory, conditioning and previous organisation are present within it. But direct perception allows the present encounter to act upon that inherited organisation rather than merely reproducing it.
Something is being updated.
Silent speaking thinking arrives within this process and gives part of it language. It names, compares, explains and places the emerging understanding into the continuity of the self.
This verbal stage is not an enemy of perception. It is necessary for reasoning, communication, reflection and the organisation of complex ideas. Without it, as the reading experiment demonstrates, we may see words while struggling to assemble their meaning.
But confusion begins when silent speak thinking is mistaken for the entire mind.
The internal voice is only the part of thought that can be internally heard.
It may be the spokesperson of thought rather than its original source.
The Harvard research becomes significant here because it shows that verbal thinking does not operate alone. Even when participants intentionally generated inner speech, visual representations continued to arise. Something more than language remained active within the thought process.
The Brain–Mind model extends that observation.
It proposes that beneath and around the silent verbal voice is a distributed process integrating the whole condition of the organism. The preself prepares relations and directions before the narrative self becomes aware of them as complete thoughts.
This does not mean the preself secretly writes a finished sentence and hands it to consciousness. Its organisation may initially be non-verbal: a tendency, recognition, bodily orientation, image, emotional significance or whole direction.
Silent speaking thinking then converts this organised tendency into language.
The brain internally speaks part of what is forming so that it can be examined, sequenced and understood in verbal form.
This gives us a more complete definition of thought.
Thinking is not merely the voice inside the head.
Thinking is the whole brain–body process organising perception, memory, prediction, relevance and response. Silent speak thinking is the verbal expression through which part of that organisation becomes internally audible, examinable and communicable.
The distinction can be tested directly.
Notice the next time you suddenly understand something.
Before explaining it, pause.
Was the understanding already present as a whole?
Did the sentence create the recognition, or did the sentence arrive afterwards to describe it?
Then notice the inner voice as it begins organising that recognition into words.
You may discover that the self does not always begin thought.
It often enters a thought already forming.
The preself has begun bringing the conditions together. Silent speak thinking converts the emerging organisation into a sequence. The conscious self hears that internal sequence and recognises it as its own thought.
The great reversal may therefore be this:
We are not always silently speaking because the conscious self is creating thought.
We may be silently speaking because the wider brain–mind process has already begun thinking, and the self needs language in order to hear, examine and claim what is forming.
The preself prepares the thought.
The silent voice speaks it.
The self hears it and says, “I am thinking.”
Reference:
Visual images often intrude on verbal thinking, study says — Harvard Gazette
