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Ideas Without Words

By Peter Lloyd

What does it take to have an idea? Do you realize that you’re having an idea every time you have one? I don’t think so. But more perplexing to me—when I form an idea, whom am I informing when I put it into words? Not me, because I already had the idea. So why do I bother to put my idea into words? Is it necessary?

Ideas—having them, holding them, and exchanging them—is so fundamentally important to being human that cognitive linguist George P. Lakoff ranks the Idea of the Idea as “the most basic fully general invention of a mental character.”

Lakoff says in The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years that “It is only with the Idea of an Idea that we get conscious specific intellectual constructions like democracy, science, the number system, the computer, the birth control pill, and so on. The idea of an Idea is the generative notion behind the very notion of an invention and is causally necessary for all specific inventions.”

Ideas can be constructed actively and consciously, but you have to learn how to do build ideas. According to Lakoff, the process does not come naturally.

So How Do We Do It?

Obviously you do not have to use words to have ideas. A composer thinks in sound, creates musical ideas without words, and records them in musical notation. An artist thinks and creates visually and wordlessly. A choreographer conceives ideas as motion and records dance ideas in symbols.

Musicians express ideas in sound just as dancers express ideas with motion. Just as basketball players think and creatively solve onslaughts of challenges while dribbling a ball. Little time for words.

If ideas do not require words in order to arise, why do you think with words? And when you form and define an idea, why do you seen to have to put it into words?

Before an idea occurs as words or in terms of space, sound, image, or motion, what is it? Finally, when you conceive an un-worded idea and form it with words, whom are you informing when you put it into words? Not you, because you already had the idea!

It’s so very confusing to me. It leaves me speechless!

See also:

• The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years by John Brockman
  
• Metaphors We Live By by George P. Lakoff

Songwriter, author, ghostwriter, copywriter, and content provider Peter Lloyd syndicates Right Brain Workouts and blogs for businesses including CoachQuest.

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