How do you know your dog has nightmares? Are you perhaps giving them human qualities? Animals have instincts, think Pavlov's dog. Interpreting a dog's behavior as dreams is your intrpretation.

@tymtravler
Scientific studies have been conducted on dogs in the dream state of sleep. He is correct! Unless the data has changed I believe the studies came out in late 90's but not positive when they came out. Maybe I will try to find them.

pretty sure we think in both images and words. sometimes images of words. sometimes my thoughts are silently verbal. Ie I 'hear' them. sometimes they are simply a series of pictures, much like a how to manual, and other times they appear as text in my minds eyes. I assume its much the same for all of us.

What...? Listen to yourself. No words, only pictures?

@tymtravler Your right. I can't believe I forgot about the inner running monologue. There definately must be an element of both.

@Donotbelieve will do, must play piano for a while, get back to conversation soon. Fascinates me as well ! Thank You.

@Donotbelieve
This is actually a very good and somewhat deep question. Most could care the less over the matter. To understand the aquisition of language and it's relationship with consciousness, we need to look at language and what exactly language is. A communicative format that uses symbols, sounds, inflected tones, harmony, melody, ect.. ect... Perhaps... A comunicative format does not have to use any of the afore metioned concepts. Sign language. No sound at all. However even in the most deafness of emotion, I remember a fellow student who so moved in his communication of sign, would try to vocalize his emotion when signing. How could this be? This human had been deaf since birth. How is it that when trying to symbolize his thoughts through sign, he would express often with a vocal tone? Using sound for communicating thoughts and Ideas extends to the far reaches of our past. Using sound for communication exists within nature itself.

The symbiotic relationship between humans and environment is an exponential equation. How did humans learn language? How did humans create language? Maybe the latter is more fitting. How is that humans have a capacity for thought? What is Consciousness? How do humans communicate consciousness? Do animals not communicate emotion to their offspring?

Dictionaries define words, words define language, language defines Spirit, or better yet Consciousness.

The Great Philosopher and Mathemation Rene Decarte stated, "cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I exist.

The lingustic record holds that the voice box did not evolve till some 2 million years ago. Modern Humans begin around 130k years ago. However recent evidence pushes that number back a couple hundred thousand years. So how did humans communicate and what symbols did they use?

How do children learn? How do puppies learn?

Social Inference or Social Cognitive Inference is a term that refers to how a conscious beings learn or aquire a capacity for language and communication through the given environment. Children do not speak a language with a verbal syntax and grammer. However they do have a means of communicating their thoughts and feelings. Is this stating that enfants do not have a language? I truly do not know. Who does?

What we do know is that even the most basic forms of life communicate. Are these simple life forms using a language and better yet are they thinking without using said language?

What is a language?

Their are some 7 thousand languages on the planet right now. We lose about 250 languages a year. I learned this in 2010. So we are probably closer to 6 thousand.

The act of thought does not require a language. The act of communicating emotion does not require a language. These concepts only exist because we have given symbols(letters), to define the vocal tones that communicate the conscious thought. Just as hand signals and shapes were assigned meaning to communicate emotion, syntax, and grammer.

Do humans not communicate nonverbally?

Are we thinking about and how to use a language when we communicate non verbally?

Are we spelling out terms nonverbally?

If humans learn by means of infering, then I venture to say that it is more reactionary. And it is from this reaction, that humans begin to form a symbiotic relationship with environment. And from this symbiotic relationship, humans formed a language of audible and inflected tones to communicate and or express emotion and or noun verbage syntax grammer, from which mean old ladies with degrees in a language art demand complience unto the properness of speaking that language format.

So to truly answer the question, we must have a complete definition and meaning from the question, of the concept or verb "to think".

Can humans think without language?

Shall we go deeper, or has the question been answered?

@Donotbelieve
For the record I studied classical voice, French, and linguistics. I just read your latest post, nice. It appears we have come to similar conculsions. I have read most of the posts here. My conclusions are formed from my studies and knowledge base. I have been accused of copy pasting from enternet sources, however i only do this when showing the definition of a term. And if I am citing a source, then I show the source.

[en.m.wikipedia.org]

Exactly! That's exactly what you're thinking when your driving or catching a ball. It may be shorthand but your thoughts are words.

No it's not. You move your arms by a certain amount. You don't think "Two degrees to the left."

@novoxguy I can't move my arms 2 degrees to the left nor can you without some way to measure. It could be 3 degrees or it could be 5 degrees. We normally don't think in those terms. Also reflexes aren't thoughts.

@tymtravler if you can't move your arms to specific angles, then how can you reach out and pick something up?

I have to disagree with that. Not having a word for something doesn't mean you can't comprehend it. Language limits your ability to communicate with someone else, but that is different from comprehension. There are plenty of people, who I don't know their name, but recognize their face and know facts about them. Their name is a label, just like the name of an animal in Haitian Creole. I'm sure that if you showed them a picture of an animal they don't have a unique name for it, they could tell you things about it that is unique to it, all the same.

@novoxguy It's something I read about while at the university..our particular learned languages limit our perceptions of the world. For instance, Thai people have several times the number of colors they commonly name.

Not just blue, but "sky blue," or some other shade. I'll point at what I think of as "red" and the children will call it the Thai word for the color orange-red.

Even Europeans didn't "see" the color blue until fairly recently, thinking of the blue ocean and sky as "clear," instead of the color blue.

Also, just learning to read and write can rewire an adult brain. The rural Haitians couldn't even understand a photograph..to them, it was a blob of color dots, although they tried to humor by pretending to "see" what I told them was there.

Learning to read and write rewires adult brain in six months [newscientist.com]

@birdingnut I've read such an article before, and it's nonsense. You know that some scientists once reasoned the Aboriginal children were not as smart as their western counterparts. They gave the same IQ test to both. Problem was, the test involved recognizing household items, like thimbles and buttons. Things which the Aboriginal children were not familiar. But, later the test was repeated, where the items were rocks, seeds and leaves. Give the same test, the Western children would be the ones to do poorly. Haitians don't recognize a photograph? I bet that's an outright lie.