There are many things that are said about Albert Einstein but one of them powerfully caught my attention because it seemed to shed some light on the form of the wise man’s mental processes. I found it in Gerald Holton’s book “Essays on scientific thought in the time of Einstein“. According to what was expressed there, Einstein’s mind navigated directly between images, images that were sometimes difficult to express in words.
Little is known of Einstein’s childhood, but that little tells us that he was a withdrawn, slow-responding, and lonely child. It is said that he did not know, or did not want to, speak until he was three years old. His sister Maja wrote in 1924: “His general development during the childhood years was slow, and speech came with such difficulty that those around him feared that he would never learn to speak.“. Possibly, today, it would attract the attention of many psychologists and psychiatrists.
It often happens that the human brain compensates for the deficiencies of some areas with the excessive development of others and some think that this was the case with the creator of the Theories of Relativity. Gerald Holton suggests that his delay in beginning to speak and, subsequently, his poor ability to handle foreign languages, could indicate a displacement of some of the abilities of the verbal area towards a different area of the brain. And there really was a privileged area in Einstein’s brain, the one capable of making him see the world around him in images rather than words. Einstein himself comments on it in his “Autobiographical Notes”:
What exactly is “thinking”? When, upon receiving sensory impressions, images emerge in memory, this is not yet thinking. And when such images form series, each of whose members evokes another, this is not yet “thinking.” However, when a certain image appears in many of these series, then – precisely because of this repetition – it becomes an ordering element by connecting series that are not themselves connected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept… it is not necessary in any way that a concept be connected with a reproducible and sensorially knowable sign (word)… The nature of all our thinking has this characteristic of free play with concepts… For me there is no doubt that most of our thinking develops without the use of signs (words), even unconsciously to a considerable extent.
Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestat psychology and a friend of Einstein, commented that he had questioned Einstein many times in 1916, when the general theory of relativity was published, about his thought process and he replied:
These thoughts were not presented with any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in terms of words. A thought comes along and you may later try to put it into words. During those years he felt that he was following a line, that he was going straight to something concrete. Of course it’s very difficult to put that feeling into words… But I recognize it from a certain perspective, visually in a way.
Later, Einstein wrote:
I do not believe that words or language, as written or spoken, play any role in my thinking mechanism. The psychic entities that seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs and more or less clear images that can be reproduced and combined at will… But considered from the psychological point of view, this game of combinations seems to be the essential characteristic of productive thought, before there is any connection with logical constructions expressed in words or other signs that can be communicated in other people. The elements that have just been mentioned are, in my case, visual and somewhat muscular. Words or other conventional signs have to be laboriously searched for in a second stage only, after the aforementioned game of associations is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.