MIT study: People can reason logically without language
Separating logic and language
New research from MIT's McGovern Institute shows that logical reasoning does not require language. In a study published in PNAS, researchers led by Evelina Fedorenko tested two stroke patients with severe language impairments on language-free logic games. Despite their aphasia, they solved problems as well as healthy controls. Brain imaging of healthy adults confirmed that language-processing regions are not engaged during inductive or deductive reasoning. The findings challenge long-held theories about the relationship between language and thought and have implications for understanding aphasia and AI.
It really upends a theory that says that symbolic rule induction is not possible without linguistic capacities.
- Lerando
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.
- ashleyn
Am I off base to view this as a strong hint AGI won't arrive through mere LLMs?
- metalman
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