Roses

You may, or you may not have a visual image of red rose. If you do, you will say, "I think in images." If you don't, you will say, "I think in words." In both cases that's like the sun crossing the sky -- not what's really happening at all. There are no images in the brain. There are no words in the brain. All that's there are neurons and their connections and differential rates and strengths of electrochemical impulses. These provide a substantive sense of words and images. The metamorphosis may seem magical but it's no more magical than "changing colors" of mountains at sunset, likewise produced by processes in your brain.

Perhaps because of this apparently looser structure, and what seems like the basic simplicity of thoughts like "Roses are red," many people assume that we get them for free, so to speak, just by having a brain. And this feeds into another widespread belief, held even by some who accept language as the prime motor of human intelligence, that thoughts are somehow logically prior to sentence, that language arose to express thoughts, that you first have to think something before you can dress it up in words and send it out into the world. Remember, there are not only no images and no words in the brain, there are no thoughts there either -- only a continuous cascade of neural activity, of pulse rates spiking, of impulses going every which way. ~ Page 194 / 195