Separating logic and language

This maps with experience taking the anti-seizure medication Topamax in college.

I trialed for a month it as an off-label migraine preventative on recommendation from my neurologist.

Topamax can dampen neuronal activity in the language area of the brain for some people.

It was a terrifying experience, but it was also a valuable one as it changed the way I view intelligence.

About 10 days in, my writing and speech skills had devolved to that of a primary school aged child. I tried to type a text message and struggled to come up with simple words like “and”. My speech slowed down considerably.

The terrifying thing was that my internal world was still as complex and meaningful as it was before. All of the emotions I felt were real and legitimate. My cognition outside of language was intact, I could do math just fine and conceptualize and abstract problems.

In spite of this, I was unable to convey what I was feeling and thinking to the outside world. It felt like I was trapped inside my own body.

After recovering, my intuitive understanding of the link between language and intelligence was changed forever.

See the following for more info on Topamax/Topiramate language impairment: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10072-008-0906-5

My ex-wife doesn't have internal dialogue. Instead, when she is thinking through something she has images in her head of shapes morphing. She told me that she felt having an internal monologue would be horribly annoying and horribly slow.

this must be symbolic of something, nebulous, like how statistics can mean anything that will get more grant funding, but nothing actualy specific or informative. we can see the lesser version of this in click title writing everywhere, so the whole thing is a war for attention, but of course people seem to form some kind of resistance or more often get sucked further and further in, but then become essentialy zero sum partisipants. thats why the quest is to get them young and lock them into lifetime spending routine

Neither do LLMs https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.03502

I grew up speaking 3 languages, and picked up a few more since then. To me it seems innately obvious that language is just a layer on top of the (much more complex) mental activity that goes on underneath all the time.

I do find myself thinking in one language or the other at times, but none is exclusive, often they get mixed together (the "next-token prediction" in my mind allows picking words in other languages that may more accurately describe an idea) and most frequently I do not have any internal dialogue at all.

I am pretty sure this is true for everybody, that the internal dialogue is not something natural but rather something people are so used to that we identify with it. Meditation and flow-state inducing activities (physical excercise, playing music, etc) make me think that this is the default for people, as these allow to access that lower layer of mental activity where internal dialogue disappears, even if briefly.

Am I off base to view this as a strong hint AGI won't arrive through mere LLMs?

Nice explainer. One nuance I’d be careful with: “the brain doesn’t think in words” is broader than what the study seems to establish. The stronger result is that the natural-language network is not necessary for the kinds of inductive and deductive reasoning tested here.

The AI implication is fascinating though. We tend to build systems where the language model is simultaneously the language interface, memory, planner, reasoner and controller. Human cognition may be pointing in the opposite architectural direction: separate persistent state, reasoning/control mechanisms and language, then let language be one tool among several.

That distinction seems more interesting to me than simply asking whether LLMs “reason in language.”

The study tested rule-induction puzzles (number sequences with hidden transformation rules) on two patients whose language networks were destroyed by stroke, plus fMRI on healthy volunteers solving the same puzzles silently. Both lines of evidence point the same way: the language network sits out during reasoning.

I made a 2-minute animated explainer of this study for a small channel I run: https://youtu.be/pzMBygLewZI?si=YBkRi8nP47RfTVhR — feedback on accuracy welcome.