Hearing sounds vs. hearing language

We don't hear languages the same way they hear sounds. It's not possible. We translate the sounds of spoken words and phrases to their meaning far faster than we realize. Let me prove it.

You know you think faster than you can talk.

You hear faster than you talk, also. Watch a video at 2x speed and you can still follow along just tine. It takes training of hearing familiar patterns of sounds over and over again.

My most convincing experience was my flight to Beijing. I hadn't been studying Mandarin very long, but I was listening closely to the conversations around me and to the Mandarin translations of the announcements, hoping to identify a word here or there. That's where it hit me that not only did I not understand the words, I couldn't even play them back to myself in my head.

The capacity of human short-term memory is commonly cited as 7 "thingies" plus or minus 2. I've heard more recent research suggests this capacity is much more towards the lower end of that range. How can we communicate when we have such a limited short-term memory? Look at any of these sentences. How many have more than 7 words? How many have more than 7 syllables? But are you having a hard time following? Not really. The reason is that we've built up a lifetime of experience using our language. We expect certain phrases to follow others, certain words to follow others, and certain syllables to follow others. The real information conveyed by our language is the series of surprises against that baseline of expectations. As a native English speaker studying Mandarin, I didn't have that any more. I don't even have cognates.

What about music? We can remember melodies longer than 7 notes, along with their rhythms. This is even more true if we have a grounding in music theory, which partially plays a role in compressing the universe of sounds into a chromatic scale of 12 notes followed with patterns of intervals, chords, chord progressions, phrases, etc. This grounding of theory gives our puny human brains the amazing ability to repeat complex melodies verbatim when truncating these sounds to this limited scheme.

Given that we aggressively chunk language into concepts during routine conversation, we can safely move beyond thinking or even reading in words (subvocalization). Speak to communicate. Read to comprehend. Think to explore. The expression in words is not the thought, but how we communicate the thought. The organization of the thought in our minds will depend its relationship to the other thoughts in our minds. Given the physical structure of neurons, this makes sense.

Since we don't think in words to begin with, don't limit yourself to thinking only in words. Think also in diagrams and animations (the right video games can be tremendously good for the brain). Think in terms of other senses.