I don't agree with all the views promoted in this game, but somebody went to a lot of work to create it; I think it's worth spreading around.
Enjoy.
Ick! Haven't updated this in a while and recently was down for a while because the Internet forgot how to find my server.
Anyway, I'm back and will be posting again soon.
Ever consider if you think in words or in images? I asked my father this once and he was convinced that he thought in words. When contemplating it on my own, I wasn't as sure what my answer was.
My current favorite theory is that we think in a combination of the two, plus more. The extra information is provided by the myriad of systems our brain uses to understand the world. Our spatial understanding, our understanding of the position of our bodies, our sense of our own emotions, etc, all may contribute to our thought processes.
With this broader perspective, it seems that words are just one of many modalities that contribute to thought processes. It seems, however, that many people, like my father, would rate the contribution of words and sentences to their thought processes very highly compared to other modes of thinking.
Here's one example of how you think without language: orienting yourself. Given a place that you are familiar with, say your living space, you are generally able to think about locations around your room relative to objects and landmarks. If I ask you to draw a picture of what the space just above your door frame looks like, you can do that without resorting to language at all (other than processing the instruction to do so). The recall is likely to be restricted to visual thought, imagination, etc.
Ok, so what? Well, there are several schools of thought out there, Zen Buddhism being one of them, which believes that truth is not to be found in thought with words. This interesting idea is explained in detail in Godel, Escher, and Bach, yet another reason to read that book. With Zen, words get in the way of a true understanding of the universe. This is why many of the Zen teachings are cryptic sayings, such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" and "If a tree falls in the forest with no one around, does it make a sound?" These are called Koans, and their purpose is to get a student of Zen to begin to free their minds of thought based rigidly around words.
I think this is pretty interesting given the following model of how language works. There are regions of the brain that scientists believe are primarily responsible for our ability to process language. When those regions are damaged, people are no longer able to process language. Let's look at an extremely over-simplified model and say that for every word a person knows, there is a single neuron within the language region of their brain that "owns" that word. If that neuron dies, the word is forgotten. If that neuron lights up, you will think about that word consciously.
This model supports our understanding of what a word means in the following way. Connections that each word neuron has between other neurons in your brain define the meaning of that word. Word neurons that are connected to pleasure areas of your brain will be those words that describe pleasant things. Words that describe visual things have their neurons connected to other neurons in visual regions. In a nutshell: a word's meaning is determined by what other neurons get stimulated when you think about it.
Given this model, what does it mean to "think with words" versus "think without words". Thinking with words means that those neurons in the language region are themselves being stimulated frequently. You literally are hearing words in your head. Thinking without words means that you aren't stimulating word neurons, but other tasks, like imagining the space above your door, are stimulating neurons in non-language regions. Of course, thinking without words may then lead to thinking with words and vice versa.
Marvin Minsky once said: "Words should be our servants, not our masters". I think this does a good job of summarizing my feelings about the relationship between thought and words. Here is my characterization of someone who is limited by too much reliance on word-based thought: This person believes that words are entities independent of human opinion whose definitions are fixed and concrete. To this person, if there isn't a word for something, it doesn't make any sense and isn't worth thinking about.
On the other hand, someone who treats words as servants realizes that just because humans can make discrete sounds and scratch symbols down on paper does not actually impose boundaries on the things they are describing. Words are a convenient mechanism for passing information around, but their utility ought not obscure the fact that the world is more complicated than the descriptions we make of it. This person is more likely to "think outside the box" because they challenge the description of the problem.