Before language, people must have thought without words. I often have the impression that I have a thought fully-formed in my head, yet I wait to listen to it unfold in words before moving on to the next thought. Perhaps I could think much faster if I weren't addicted to words.
Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words?
This would have a little in common with Buddhist practices of emptying your mind, but wouldn't be the same thing. For one thing, Buddhists also try to empty their minds of images. More importantly, they are trying not to think, while I'm trying to think - just not unpack everything into words.
There's this known result that people make decisions intuitively and later come up with verbal rationalizations for them but when all of that gets assembled into a stream of consciousness, it can feel like the rationalizations came first and were the deciding factor. Your experiecne could be something like this, only in the other direction. Or you have a really high-definition number sense. Do you still get correct results if you try to surpress the verbalizations while doing mental arithmetic?
If I don't verbalise the multiplications as I carry them out then I often forget or misremember the running total when I want to add another number to it. I feel like practice would improve this.