Sigmund Freud Quotes

When I was younger, I didn't even realize the way I think visually is different.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new and complex things in relation to the things we already know... once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.

Without images we can neither think nor understand anything.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

I used to take formal notes in lines of blue, and underline the key words in red, and I realised I needed only the key words and the idea. Then to bring in connections, I drew arrows and put in images and codes. It was a picture outside my head of what was inside my head - 'mind map' is the language my brain spoke.

A thought is an idea in transit.

When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.

The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.

I don't think in words; I think in pictures, in images.

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

Everything I think is in pictures.

There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

We are so numb we don't even know what a direct experience is. We have an experience, then we think about it and we think the thinking about it is the experience.

Thoughts without words… Can that be?

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.