Scientists Confirm that Language is Not Required for Thinking

The connection between language and thinking has been a bit of a chicken or an egg debate, but the results are in

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It was long thought that most healthy human brains have the same structure and function, but scientific and technological advancements suggest this is not quite the case. Even a simple discussion between two or more people can reveal the flaws in the assumption.

Consider one of the most basic internal experiences everyone has — thinking. Most people go about their lives assuming everyone else thinks as they do. I don’t mean the content of their thoughts. I’m talking about the form their thoughts take.

Language, specifically, has long been associated with thinking and is even credited with our advanced intelligence, which sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. However, research now suggests language isn’t required for thinking at all.

Initial Debate

Throughout history, many writers and philosophers observed a strong relationship between language and thought. A few examples include Oscar Wilde’s statement that language is “the parent, and not the child, of thought,” or when Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” and Bertrand Russell said that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

Scholars, too, are curious about the link between thought and language and wonder whether language is somehow a prerequisite for thinking.

Yet, one glance at Nature suggests there’s a flaw in our curiosity. After all, countless other animals on Earth think and achieve thought-related actions without words. Many species are even capable of complex problem-solving and demonstrate high levels of cognition — such as chimps that can beat humans in a strategy game and New Caledonian crows that make tools for capturing prey — all without language like ours.

Still, human cognition is undeniably sophisticated and surpasses the rest of Earth’s animal kingdom in many ways. Similarly, human language seems to transcend other animal communication methods (as far as we know). Given this, it seems reasonable that our complex thinking might require language to achieve our species-specific talents, such as solving differential equations or designing and constructing massive structures.

But what about the more physical aspects of language? As Gary Stix of Scientific American asks Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist who studies language at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview:

“Do we require words or syntax as scaffolding to construct the things we think about? Or do the brain’s cognitive regions devise fully baked thoughts that we then convey using words as a medium of communication?”

Fedorenko has spent her career trying to answer these questions, and now she can, but let’s start from the beginning of her story.