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When is better to think without words? - by Henrik Karlsson

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Non-verbal, blurry thinking is faster and can search in a broader way, but it is more error-prone than verbal thought.

Portrait of a Man with Glasses I, Francis Bacon, 1963 This essay can be read as a complement to last year’s “How to think in writing.” Thoughts die the moment they are embodied in words. —Schopenhauer In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in…

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