There's something primordial, something foundational, about thinking visually

Buddha realizing enlightenment under my striped maple tree: 8/31/12

“Thinking in pictures,” Sigmund Freud once wrote, “stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.”

There is, in other words, something primordial, something foundational, about thinking visually...

Like Freud, Wittgenstein took very seriously indeed the idea that our dreams present us with a series of images, the interpretation of which would reveal the thoughts we have relegated to the unconscious parts of our minds...

It was fundamental to Wittgenstein’s thinking... that not everything we can see and therefore not everything we can mentally grasp can be put into words. *

* The above quotes are from the article, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s passion for looking , not thinking, by Ray Monk in the 8/15/12 edition of the New Statesman