#2 Do We Think in Pictures or Words?

Over time, the way we used our tongues to communicate led to a reprogramming of the way we actually thought, and now its hard to say that we still “think in pictures”. It appears to most that we sometimes think in pictures, but soon our minds gravitate back to thinking in words, which is the mainstay, especially when reading! Still, the words we are reading are living descendants of those original pictures that we thought in before we could speak . Our first words were simply descriptions of those images. In our first alphabets, we used actually images to form letters and scripts; hieroglyphics are actual images and Sumerian cuneiform is based on images. Once you understand the logic that generates much of the English language, one can decipher what those first images were by listening carefully to words, categorizing them into families and deciphering their roots.

Its also essential to understand that we thought in pictures much like animals before we spoke and we had been doing this “picture thinking” for 2 million years. Further, we inherited this method of thinking from our simean past, going back much further in time. One can not expect that the infrastructure to think in pictures has just vanished from the human brain. It has not. And we still consciously rely on it from time to time. It may even be that our words are just bridges to those images, and that we still think in pictures, but subconsciously.  Image

#1 The Dawn of Speak

Before human beings spoke, we communicated with body/sign language and thought in pictures, much the way animals do. About 125,000 years ago, a genetic mutation occurred which allowed some humans to control the motions of their tongues. Then, slowly but surely, our body/sign language method of communicating was largely replaced with spoken words.

Before spoken language, we had to lift our arms to convey the concepts of lift, up, high, etc. After we got control of our tongues, we could simply mimic that motion with our tongues. Notice that in English we lift our tongues to say lift, elevator, ceiling, light, helium, etc. The connections to our Stone Age mode of communication are preserved within the English language.

In my book, Deciphering the English Code, the transition from Stone Age body/sign language to modern spoken words is depicted in a way that anyone can understand. New students of English will quickly acquire a grasp for nuts and bolts of the world’s most important language, and seasoned lovers of language will appreciate the new dimension that is added to comprehension when the history of a word is exposed.

“The Bible speaks of a pre-Babel language, common to all men. I believe the core of that first language still lives and its heartbeat can be detected within our English words.”