Check this : Which language do you think in?

Sometimes you have a concept in your head but can't think of the right words to explain it, even in your mother tongue. Being at a loss for words is only sometimes not knowing what to say, and other times it's not knowing how to say it.😲 And I think that a lot of the time, the thoughts in our heads are in pure gribbish that we don't bother translating into a language. 😉 Sometimes we do think in English sentences, especially if we're thinking in a check-list fashion, or trying to lay things out very clearly, or rehearsing conversations in our heads. Subjectively, the experience of thinking is like internal speech, couched in natural languages.

Human thinking is very complex. We are constantly simulating various situations and solving many problems at the same time in our brain. The task becomes much easier if we attach symbols to various complex representations.

Mental images - Many people claim that they sometimes think with mental images. It is true that mental images might still be made up of some kind of mental language, but probably not any natural language.

Fine-grained perceptual concepts - We can have thoughts about certain perceptual magnitudes which we do not know how to express in natural languages ("the color of the wall is *that* shade of blue"). Think of knowing by sight the colour or size of an object.

Pre-linguistic infants - If we grant that pre-linguistic infants (or for that matter, animals) can think, then it is likely that there is some thinking that does not rely on natural language. How can we learn a NL if there is no thinking without NL?

Ambiguity - Sentences can be (syntactically, lexically, referentially) ambiguous when the thoughts expressed by the sentences are not.

Our innate language faculty ("I-language") contains two and only two syntactic levels of representation, Logical Form (LF) and Phonological Form (PF). LF interfaces with the conceptual- intention system. PF interfaces with the articulatory-perceptual system (speech).

Conscious thinking is associated with mental imagery. We have visual imagery, motor imagery, etc. The experience of talking to oneself is the result of our thoughts being expressed in verbal imagery, the contents of the imagery being determined by the appropriate PF. In the case of deaf people this might take the form of sign language imagery. So we are never directly conscious of our thoughts but indirectly through their expression in various forms of imagery.😊

Conclusion : It may be that in a few centuries we can accurately break down the brain functions, how they operate together at thousandths of a second to combine the various logical meanings in our head and eventually produce well-formed sentences and sounds that have value and meaning to other speakers of language. At a basic level - yes we can think without language insofar as animals clearly can do it. 👍🏼 However, language allows us to organize information in a particularly expressive and powerful way which has allowed human civilization to flower and technology to proceed in the manner it has.

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