If thought were independent of language, we wouldn’t have any use for language, because the whole point of language is to convey ideas. So it’s not independent, but it’s not the same thing as language. We know it’s not the same thing for many reasons. One of them is: how would children learn language to begin with if they were incapable of thinking until they had language? The way that language acquisition has to work is that children have some understanding of the world, of the objects around them, of the intentions of the people that they interact with, and they map them onto the sequences of sounds and gestures that they perceive. Also, we know that there are many forms of thought that are not linguistic, such as visual imagery, spatial cognition, and mental maps, all of which are specialties of Professor Tversky, who I’m sure will enlighten us about those. Even when it comes to the content of language, what we take away after the words have faded is the gist of language, not the words themselves. Within a few seconds after I stop speaking, or a few minutes after you’ve read something, you probably could not reproduce a single sentence verbatim, but hopefully you would come away with the content, the meaning, the gist. And one of the most robust findings in our field, cognitive psychology, is that long-term memory for gist is far more robust than memory for text itself. We know from studies of the brain that there are networks of language in the brain that are not the same as the parts of the brain that light up when people are thinking visually, thinking spatially, or thinking in terms of motion. Again, to go back to one of Professor Tversky’s specializations, we can imagine tying a shoe; we can imagine diving off a board. We have auditory imagery—a song can run through our head—and there are probably other forms of thought that we don’t even have names for. We also know that we sometimes struggle to put our thoughts into words. We write down a sentence, and we realize, no, that’s not what I meant, and rewrite it until the sentence comes out right. Full @IAI_TV video: iai.tv/video/lost-in-thought