On Thinking and Communicating

When my son was about 16, he asked me out of a blue while I was at the wheel on one of our numerous road trips, “Mom, which language do you think in?”

That took me by surprise. As someone who teaches communication, the answer became so obvious to me I assumed it would be obvious to my son as well, because we talk a lot about being bilingual and often discuss the advantages of knowing languages other than your native one. But he obviously needed an answer. I took a pause and said, “I don’t think in any language. No one does.”

Now it was my son’s turn to be surprised. In his typical teenage fashion, he said, “Huh?” as if I said something atrociously stupid.

“Have you ever caught yourself thinking?” I started to ask the barrage of questions I usually ask of my students in interpersonal communication classes. “Do you REALLY think in words and complete sentences? Or is your thought process more like a bubbling mixture of ideas, images, feelings, and memories? When you think, do you have a name or label for everything you think about or it’s all just flashing by like in a really sped-up movie?”

“Ha!” my son said, thinking. He could certainly understand the movie metaphor. “I guess I never really thought about it that way.”

When we think to ourselves, it’s a pure stream of consciousness. Think, for example, of The Penelope chapter in Ulysses. Joyce did an excellent job of describing Molly Bloom’s thought process: Raw stream of thinking about things, people, ideas, events, and feelings that are related and unrelated, connected and disconnected, exciting and boring at the same time. The whole chapter (a total of 44 pages in my 1961 reprint) is nothing but one looooong sentence broken into 8 torn paragraphs, written with reckless disregard for punctuation and clarity. No exclamation marks, full stops, or even apostrophes in words like Johns for John's or hell for he'll, which, as you can guess, may create a lot of confusion. It is somewhat easier to understand what the heck Molly was thinking about if you read the chapter out loud or imagine "…" when her one thought is interrupted by another. Now stop and think for a second: this is already “dressed up”! Joyce obviously wanted you to read his book so he translated Molly’s inner thoughts into text, using words and phrases. Substitute his (Molly’s) descriptions of people, emotions and ideas with fast pictures of memories and feelings and you will get that magnificent mess you usually have in your head when you think and "talk" to yourself.

In our professional jargon, the process of internal thinking is called ‘intra-personal communication,’ or conversations within our heads, in contrast to, for example, inter-personal communication, when we talk to other people. In a way, thinking in pictures and ideas is a time- and effort-saving device for our brain, a result of evolutionary development. It became necessary because you talk to yourself all the time, your mind never stops thinking, and it is quite a busy monkey sifting and sorting through vast amounts of incoming information. By the way, one of the ways to meditate is to stop that busy monkey of your mind from going various places in all possible directions and focus on something simple, like your own breathing. Even then, you will notice that the mind always wants to run away in its thoughts, go some place fun.

We do think in flashing images, pictures, ideas, feelings, all sorts of shortcuts, memories, dreams, and plans. They are always incomplete, fleeting, and jumpy. It is only when we need to communicate our thoughts to other people or commit them to paper that we dress them up into coherent and complete sentences for easier reference and consumption by our partners in conversation. Trying to achieve shared meaning or common understanding, we use the language for our ideas to take a certain shape and form. Some of us are naturally better in this than others, some learn this as a craft (she is me), while some others are a lot messier and jump all over the place, just as they think. With those people, we may even say that we’ve lost their train of thought because it is never actually the same way as we think: we all have individual thinking patterns, paths and memory schemas. And how many times do we lose our own train of thought?

Knowing all this helps explain why people are still capable of communicating with others when we do not share the language: A lot of human experience is universal, and our emotions are a good example. We all recognize Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Fear, Interest, Surprise, and Happiness (see what I did there? Used SADFISH, a mnemonic to remember all seven universally shared basic human emotions, plus Contempt in some classifications) when we observe them in others’ gestures, facial expressions, interjections, body movements and even expletives. They existed long before humans could talk or communicate with each other using the language, and most of us are also capable of recognizing the emotions in animals, who as we now know are capable of thinking in images as well. I’d love to see real pictures in any dog’s head, not what we imagine them to be in movies about talking dogs where we just transfer our human thought process onto them.

Another myth that can be debunked by this understanding of the connection between thinking and communication is that learning another language is necessarily hard. We’ve got one down – our native language – so we definitely can learn more. If we accept that language is a tool for communication, a means to dress up our thoughts and transmit and maintain our shared culture, we should understand that we are capable of learning any human language. Yes, some languages are harder than others and some people take more time and effort learning than others, but the same applies to any other learning subject. Also, being born into a multi-lingual environment and/or having an opportunity to immerse into another language and culture at a young age helps, of course, and gives an (unfair) advantage compared to those of us who study another language as fully-grown women and men. Your seamlessly bilingual kids are a living proof of that. But we should always strive.

There’s a better way of asking my son’s question of people who you suspect are bilingual or fluent in another language. Instead of “Which language do you think in?” you should ask, “Do you still use your native language to translate when you speak another language?” The ability to put your thoughts into the acquired target language directly, without using your native language as a referent, is the true indicator of fluency and mastery of the language.

And yes, I stopped doing that many years ago. I even remember the exact moment when I realized it. In 1994, I was studying at the Central European University, taking a challenging philosophy-heavy course in international relations. One day in December, I was reading Hegel and caught myself NOT using Russian any more to make sense of what the text was about. Thanks for making us read so much, Dr. Stefano Guzzini! He, by the way, spoke five or six languages fluently and flawlessly, and as a true Italian born in Germany, educated in France and Britain and married to a Swede, all of those languages flew out of him at a speed double that of an average native speaker. Pure brilliance and true inspiration.

But to wrap up with my son’s question: Now, when I communicate with a Russian speaker, I “think” in Russian, and when I communicate with an English speaker, I “think” in English, whereas “think” really means “organize and express my thoughts.” There are words and concepts that I know only in English or only in Russian, and I probably will not be as good in simultaneous interpretation now as I was in the early 1990s when I worked as a professional interpreter, simply because the two languages are independent of each other in my head. And with all that, I will never be able to get rid of my Russian accent in English and will probably never get all those definite and indefinite articles and prepositions right. Still, I’m striving.