I’m not sure what you mean by format. It sounds kind of like formatting a hard disk or something.
I believe that we tend to think in words. This is mostly because we communicate in words. We also think in images and sound and smell and emotions. I think we are easily aware of the thinking we do in words, but it is harder for us to apprehend our non-verbal thinking. If there are no words, we don’t have a useful way of describing our thoughts, even to ourselves.
Non-verbal thoughts often burst into our consciousness as fully formed insights. It appears as if they are inspirations, or gifts of God, but I think we have been worrying them over in our non-verbal minds, and eventually, these thoughts get transferred to our verbal minds.
I think it may follow that if we think in various ways (not just verbally), then we probably also store memories in various ways. Memory is associative, and it’s not always easy to see how our minds organize the material. Some easy things might come to mind. For example, when I’m with my brother and sister, I often call them by my children’s names and I’ll call my children by their names. This suggests to me that the names of these folks are stored in the same area of my mind—the close male relative and close female relative areas.
Smells seem to bring back powerful memories in people. You smell a turkey roasting and you get memories of Thanksgivings past, and relatives making the food. Other smells bring other memories. Visual cues are often used. I store memories of various vacations in objects (souvenirs) that I’ve brought back from the trip. Pictures usually spark a lot of memory. When we teach people to use a memory palace as an aid to memory, we use a physical image in our minds—an imagined sight as the memory palace, in which we store memories in a more consciously organized fashion.
I think there are different thought “formats” and they are used depending on what we are trying to do. Obviously, if we are communicating with someone, we have to convert our thoughts into symbols that can be communicated. Usually we use words as symbols, but we also use visual hand symbols for the deaf and touchable symbols for the blind. Words can be translated into both visual and aural symbols. However, sometimes we draw pictures or employ music to communicate some ideas that do not do well in words (directions, the location of things in space relative to each other, depictions of emotions, depictions of feelings about things, etc).
I guess, underneath it all, I think we think and remember with symbols. I think we employ all kinds of senses to create, manipulate, and store those symbols. We use all the senses—and some senses are more obvious than others. What are our feeling symbols? That is how emotions are “discussed” or remembered internally. They are often strongly associated with smell. Yet we can’t necessarily communicate with smells, our our feeling language is largely used at a subconscious level.
Feeling language is more often known as body language. It is communicating all kinds of things when we interact in person. Facial expressions and body postures tell us so much, but since it isn’t associated with words, we are not so aware that we are communicating in this way, nor that we are thinking and remembering in this way. I maintain that feeling language is used just as much as verbal language, but that we tend to think it’s not there because it is rarely expressed in words, and words often can not express feelings.
So, I guess to answer your question, thoughts come in many formats. They are acquired, analyzed, remembered and expressed in these various formats. We have a bias towards linguistic symbols when we communicate with others, so we tend to be less aware when we are thinking with smell or feelings/physical sensation/body movements and postures. We are also not used to discussing our communications that bypass words—music and visual art. We can do it, but most of us don’t do it very well, which is why professional music and art philosophers seem to speak in a rarified language.
The implication is that our bias towards word symbols, both as a means of thinking and communicating, tends to make us overlook other ways in which we think and communicate. Thinking and communicating both rely on memories. I think memories are stored in the format in which they are first experienced. I think it is rare for a memory to be translated from a sight or sound or smell or feeling into a word. It’s inefficient, and unnecessary, for the most part. The only people who need to translate non-verbal forms of thought into words are those who make a profession of it—poets and writers. It takes a lot of practice to perform these kinds of transformations well. I don’t think most people need to do it, nor do they want to practice it enough to do it well.
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