Reading Our Mind

Have you ever had the experience of waking in the morning convinced you have had a dream but unable to remember anything about it?  Why do you suppose it hasn’t been recorded in your memory?  Could it be because the arbitrarily concocted images we suspect to have been a dream has no currency as language?  Most scholars accept the proposition that we think in language. Could it be said perception divorced from language is nothing to speak of?

  

Imagine if we had no language.  We’d still be living in dark caves bumping into each other.  There wouldn’t be any marvelous paintings on the cave walls, you can be sure of that.  Sure, we probably learnt that fire provides light as well as heat but we need more than light and the right materials to make a painting.  We need language.

Is that difficult to believe?  Look at it this way; remember the time you were showing your infant daughter or granddaughter a picture book?  It was all part of her learning language.  If you’re like me you would point to a picture of a cow and say something like: “See, this is the cow.  Here are the cow’s horns and its ears and here is the white spot on the cow’s back and here is the cow’s tail. Can you say ‘cow’?” 

Two things are happening here; the child is learning language but the child is also learning how to read a picture.  We don’t automatically see pictures as pictures.  Rather, we have learnt a vocabulary that allows us to read them as compositions and there are cultural differences between how pictures are read just as there are cultural differences in language.  The one thing we know about those people who painted those wondrous cave paintings in France and Spain is that they possessed a well developed language.

Now, here is a curious thing.  If we need a language to read a picture or image on a wall or in a book, we also need a language to read a picture or image in our head.  It’s the same process as learning to read a picture book. Perhaps this is why people are urged to write down their dreams immediately on waking.

Some people resist the idea that we think in language.  I’ve met some aphasic types who say they think in pictures or images.   I can’t figure it.   I know there have been children as young as two or three who were unable to speak but who had an eidetic memory and were able to draw detailed pictures of what they have seen but there is no evidence that they knew or could read what they had drawn.  Indeed, it seems that when and if they learn language the eidetic memory tends to vanish along with the ability to draw.   

No doubt the brain can imprint images as neurons which in turn create those seemingly random dreams we are unable to grasp.  Without the aid of language our heads are somewhat mindless.   

Launt Thompson
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