Thinking out loud

 There was something that Angie said a few weeks ago that clearly lodged in the back of my brain and made me start thinking, although before we get to that fraught little activity, and the controversy surrounding it, I better say what she said:

She said that someone she knew tended to "do their thinking by talking" but that she did it the other way by listening to a question, or thinking about a problem, for example and then doing all the working out and response and solution or whatever between her ears and only then saying what she thought.

I realised immediately that I seemed to fall into the thinking by talking camp, and I suppose you could describe it crudely this way:

Type 1: When someone asks you a question, or a problem is being discussed in a meeting, you don't really properly think it through until you start to talk.

Type 2: When someone asks you a question, or a problem is being discussed in a meeting, you don't start to talk until you have basically thought about it and decided what you think. 

Crudely, you could say Type 1 thinks with their voice and Type 2 thinks with their brain, though of course even Type 1's mouth is being controlled by their brain. It's just that they can't get round to what they think until they have talked it through. You could also crudely say that Type 1 is mainly men and Type 2 is mainly women, and I'm sure someone has said it, but I bet plenty of both sexes would firmly place themselves in the opposite camp.

Well I can only speak as a 'Thinking it out loud' person, to which I freely admit. It just feels like I cannot structure ideas in a way that I can look at until I have clothed them in words. You see I am even doing it now, because I can feel my ideas developing as I write them down on this screen. When the thoughts are just there between my ears, unexpressed in any form, it feels like I cannot grab them properly; they are slippery, evasive, ghosty.

And obviously it is provably false that you can only think in words, as some philosophers of language tried to maintain. You can prove it false by using Stephen Pinker's idea that if you say something and then you say "No, that's not quite what I mean", then there must be a yet unspoken thought that is clear in your brain but which you have not yet found the right words for. But its existence is surely undeniable. So even I know that when I say I think out loud, there has to be something that exists before I put it into words, at least a set of feelings or reactions or ideas. But to me, it only forms into a proper idea when I speak it out or write it. It doesn't feel like the idea is fully formed when it is still just between my ears. 

I have been talking to a few people about this to get their reaction, and one person did point out that this behaviour, especially by men in meetings, might actually be founded on liking the sound of your own voice. So if you tried a bit harder you could actually develop your idea or opinion or suggestion inwardly and silently and then just deliver it briefly in far fewer words. But the added joy of holding the stage in a group of people makes you too lazy to try. I cannot say that this is something I can completely rule out, and I feel slightly ashamed that maybe I am vain and just not putting the mental mileage in. I cannot say that the phrase "inoculated with a gramophone needle" has only ever been used about people who are not me. 

But my counter to that is that I have written 160,000 words in a journal since Cro's diagnosis and that was never for anybody else's consumption, but only to help my own thinking. So even if grandstanding can't be ruled out, I do need words by whatever means, to think in what I believe is a clear way. 

Another response I have had is that you need to be able to construct your ideas in a way that you can look at them and in some way externalise them. It's a bit like with a picture; you might think it will suit your wall, but the only way to know is to take it to the wall and hold it up. And unless you can look at your idea outside your brain, by saying or writing it down, you can't truly judge if that it what you think. 

Now you will all realise from what I've written that this is not just about talking and thinking. It all fits in with the areas of the study and theory of the brain, and consciousness and cognition that I find so interesting (and which I end up writing about so much). The suspicion (well I'd say very strong suspicion) of brain researchers is that our brains do not work in at all the way that we believe. You could say that we have a convenient model (maybe like the cartoon at the top) which gives us some way of thinking about what is going on between our ears, but that this model is a gross simplification because our brain is still beyond our own understanding. 

It is certainly the case that when we perceive the world around us, and that includes the people around us, what they say, what they believe, then a great part of our understanding is coming from inside our brain and not genuinely from what is coming in from our sense organs (or from our memory, if for example we are interacting with beliefs, writing, politics, other people's thoughts etc). So we are imposing order on what we perceive, including, for example, a question we have been asked. And our understanding of 'the question' is formed from a whole set of assumptions that our brain has layered onto it. 

And the implication for 'thinking out loud' or not is that we may find ourselves reacting to ideas from our own brains for which we do not know the real source. You could say "Well it's still your own thought, because it came from your brain" but if that spoken thought is actually formed of unconscious reactions and biases and schema for how we perceive the world which are semi-automatic, then maybe it is reasonable for us to start thinking out loud when we hear the strange or random ideas that our brains have disgorged. 

And that is something which, as they say, "really make me think"