h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Gagdreek: Here's a question: If you could read peoples minds, would you be able to understand someone who speaks another language or would you just hear them thinking in their language?

It depends which part of their mind you're reading.

Gagdreek: Does it? I guess I don't know that much about the human mind.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
I'd guess that you'd be picking up the electrical impulses from the other person's brain before those thoughts were turned into words, so it wouldn't really matter what language they spoke.

Exactly, most of our thought processes are turned into words long after they have happened.Brian scans have shown that people decide on actions before they were aware of them. Our "consious" mind is always trying to catch up with what is going on in you ming. Very little of what we think ever gets "turned into words".
*see: Babel Fish*

That's exactly what I'm thinking!
We think a thought before we turn it into words.
But we often turn it so quikly and automaticaly into words that we don't recognize the real thought. Maybe a Thoughtreader has to be realy fast to be able to read real thoughts and not just words.

C@B

Gagdreek: Of course, if you could read minds there's always so much going on inside someone's head that you wouldn't be able to understand it anyway.

Hmmm... I disagree...

I'm pretty sure I think in English at least 99% of the time. Have you ever tried to stop yourself from using language inside your head - to still the inner monologue, or whatever - 's very difficult. What's more, I find it completely prevents me from doing anything useful.

Added to this the evidence from bilinguals who find some things easier to think about in one language than in the other... simply because of the way different languages treat different concepts in different ways... and it seems fairly likely that, were you to read the mind of someone used to speaking a different language, you'd have more problems than usual.

After all, if thoughts don't take the form of language, what form do they take? It would have to be some other, lower level language... and if we all have one of those, why do we bother with English at all?

26199

Sooooooo.... You disagreeeee....

What should I say?

Maybe you and the bilingual people haven't recogniced, that there is an original thought just a realy realy short time before you think in language.

The other problem is much nicer! How are we thinking our original thoughts? Maybe in pictures?
Think of a house!
You might think of the word "house" as well as of a picture from a house.

CAB

Gagdreek: So instead of hearing someone's thoughts, we would actually be *seeing* their thought?

As I said in my original post; It depends which part of their mind you're reading.

Tap into thier visual cortex and you'll "see" with their eyes.

Could be interesting...

Not directly connected I suppose, but when I think a problem through (or read silently) I hear my a voice in my head (no jokes about asylums please). The thing is, I can't not do it. I think this is quite common. I need to "hear" the word in my mind to conceptualise it. How then do people who have been deaf from birth (and hence do do know what speech sounds like) conceptualise their thoughts? Are there any non-hearing users out there who can explain this in terms which I can understand.

I would imagine they 'hear' their thoughts in terms of the hand movements of their learned sign-language... that's if my view on matters is correct, anyway.

It'd be interesting to find out.

26199

Gagdreek: I've never thought about that. Hmmm...
ow. My brain hurts. That's enough thinking for today.

Well, a nother possibility is, when your reading somebodies thoughts, your're not just "reading" what he thinks at this moment.

Maybe you're diving into a completely different world which contains sound, picture, taste, smell, etc.
And maybe you could even walk around between (or in) his fantasies and stored memories.

CAB

Now *that* is worrying!

*Apologies in advance for nerdy computer references*
It strikes me that by "reading someone's mind" you mean some how reading the impulses going on in the neurons in his or her brain. However, the information you would have (i.e. Neuron 198027 fired) would not correspond to the same thought unless the same neuron represented the same thought to you - which doesn't seem possible. Moreover, a "translator" would need so much metabrain information as to be impractical.
I guess we're stuck at reading the regions of the brain, not the registers.
Perhaps this is why we say "what are you thinking?" when we mean "what are you thinking about?"

The easyest way to speak a languadge is to think in that languadge. But that then raises the question of what languadge to new borns think in?
The other question raised is if you litrally heare what they are thinking or just know it?
If you heare it it will be in the forigne langadge but if you just know it it will be in a languadge you can understand.