Something I keep running into in my work makes for a really interesting hypothetical. In this post, I'll weave together my answer to the hypothetical with the evidence from the world that leads me to that answer. But the main thing behind this post is just the hypothetical itself: what if a mind's eye for ideas has existed all along, with techniques nobody ever found? What would follow?
The hypothetical
Some people have a mind's eye: they can picture an apple and notice its exact color. Some people have an inner voice: they can hear a tune in their head and notice its pitch. Suppose there's one more inner sense, for concepts. Bring up an idea you know really well but can't easily picture, like the economy or justice, and the whole thing is there at once, not as a picture and not as words. And it has detail you can notice: hold the economy, and you can notice that it's made of people, the same way you notice the color of an imagined apple.
Suppose that, like the mind's eye, it varies: some people have none, some have a faint version, and some have a vivid one.
And suppose that, like every other inner sense, it comes with techniques that make it far more useful. The mind's eye has the memory palace, which people use to memorize a thousand-digit number in an hour. The inner voice has songs, which is why the alphabet song works. If this sense exists, it should have techniques of its own. And suppose those techniques, once you find them, are incredibly powerful for learning and memory in general.
So, if all that were true, this sense and its techniques would have been around for all of human history. Why wouldn't anyone have found them? And if some people did stumble onto them, where would we look?
What I've actually observed: I'm an educator, and for the past month, I've been developing memory techniques for a sense like this. I've talked with a lot of people who say they have it: friends, family, and people from Reddit. People who use the techniques report remembering things for days or weeks without reviewing them.
My answer to the hypothetical
Three hard steps
For someone to have found the mnemonic techniques that use this sense for concepts, three things had to happen:
- Have the sense. You can't build techniques for a sense you don't have.
- Recognize it as a sense, specifically something like vision, but for concepts.
- Build mnemonic techniques for it, on the reasoning that every other inner sense has them, so this one should too.
Plenty of people got to step 1, and a few got about halfway to step 2:
- In 1887, Francis Galton wrote that he thought without words, and that putting his thoughts into language felt like translating.
- In 1890, William James wrote that we have feelings of relations, a feeling of "and" or "but", as real as a feeling of blue.
- Around 1901 to 1910, psychologists in Würzburg reported "imageless thought": thinking with no pictures and no words.
- Eugene Gendlin's "felt sense" came close, but he described it as something felt in the body, not as a sense for concepts. He did build a technique on it, Thinking at the Edge, but it's for developing new ideas, not for memory.
- Russell Hurlburt's experience-sampling research calls it "unsymbolized thinking": thinking without words, images, or any other symbols.
All of them saw the experience. As far as I can find, nobody treated it as a sense you could train, or built mnemonic techniques for it.
Why it wouldn't spread
Talking about inner experience was taboo. The Würzburg findings set off a fight with psychologists led by Edward Titchener, who said imageless thought didn't exist. Neither side could settle it, because each could only report its own experience. That stalemate is a big part of why psychology gave up on introspection and turned to behaviorism, which ruled the field for about fifty years.
Even now, almost nobody talks about inner experience. Aphantasia, having no mind's eye at all, only got a name in 2015, and it's far more intuitive than this. Lacking an inner voice only got a name, anendophasia, in 2024.
It's an unintuitive tool. When a kid learns to multiply in their head or memorize song lyrics, they reach for some inner sense: the inner voice, the mind's eye, something. Unless this sense does the job on its own, they're very unlikely to pick it. It's just a weird thing to use. Some people stumble onto it. One person I talked to has remembered song lyrics this way since she was a kid. But most people who have the sense would barely use it, except when they happened to get lucky once or twice.
Automatic vs. on demand
An inner sense can be automatic, meaning it runs on its own without you deciding to use it, or on demand, meaning it only works when you use it on purpose.
My inner voice is on demand. I can hear sounds in my head, and reason or talk in my head when I want to, but if I stare at a wall, I hear nothing. I have to move it, like an arm. For a lot of people, it's automatic: it runs all the time, as a constant inner monologue.
The mind's eye varies the same way. A friend of mine sees things automatically: if he hears "X is five times Y", he sees X = 5Y written on a chalkboard in his head, whether he wants to or not. Other people I know can picture things when they try, but nothing pops up on its own.
And a few people I've talked to say the sense for concepts is automatic for them. As they read a story, or the rulebook of a board game, the whole thing builds up in concepts by itself.
That's another reason it wouldn't spread: the people who use it automatically wouldn't think it was special. If it happens on its own for you, you'd assume everyone's mind works that way. That's exactly how aphantasia stayed hidden for so long: people assumed "picture an apple" was a figure of speech.
Two roads to using it fully
The techniques I've been developing ask people to link ideas on purpose, within this sense: hold two concepts in your imagination (the same way you'd picture two things in your mind's eye), then say how they relate, so the relation gets stored with both. Do enough of that, and what you've learned becomes one connected web.
If the hypothesis is right, and some people have a sense for concepts with techniques of its own, there are two ways to end up thinking like that.
It happens automatically. A friend of a friend describes exactly this. When he hears that A relates to B in some way, the relation builds by itself in his sense for concepts. All he does consciously is check whether it makes sense, and if it doesn't, he just intends to try again, and a new one shows up. My friend calls him one of the smartest people he's ever met, with an ability to remember huge amounts of information for years. That would fit: everyone I've talked to who uses this sense reports unusually strong retention, so someone it runs automatically for should look like they have a remarkable memory.
You're forced into it. Imagine you have no mind's eye and no inner voice. The world still asks you to add in your head and solve puzzles, and this sense is the only tool you have, so you'd have to learn to use it. Someone like me, with a vivid mind's eye and an inner voice, always has an easier route: I can add on a number line in my head. So people with no mind's eye and no inner voice, but with this sense for concepts, should be far more likely to have found these techniques on their own. And people without a mind's eye or an inner voice already describe their thinking this way. The game designer Jonathan Blow says that when he imagines something, there are no pictures at all, only ideas. The science YouTuber Hank Green, who says he has no inner monologue, describes his thoughts as sticky bubbles: no words, just the things they represent.
Strategy, not IQ
When two people do the same memory task and one does vastly better, the difference is almost never raw intelligence. It's strategy. In a classic experiment, a student known as SF went from remembering 7 digits to nearly 80, just by developing a system. A 2003 study of memory champions found that their brains and general intelligence weren't unusual: nine of the ten used the memory palace.
So if this sense exists, and it's as good for memory as people report, then some people with outlier memories, in history and today, should be using it. Ask them how they do it, and they should say one of three things:
- A known technique, like the memory palace.
- Something like this sense: they just see the concepts, the thoughts are hard to put into words, and it isn't pictures.
- Something else entirely. If thinking always happens in some inner sense, a third answer would mean there's another sense nobody has named yet.
Where to look
History. Look for people with remarkable memories who say they don't picture things. Henri Poincaré, for example, wrote that he was bad at arithmetic and chess, yet never lost track of a long proof, because he could "perceive at a glance the reasoning as a whole", so each step fell into place with no effort of memory.
Blindfold chess. Binet studied blindfold players in 1894, and later accounts of blindfold masters describe them holding several games at once as relations and lines of force, not as pictures of a board.
Memory competitions. A 2023 paper reports that memory champion Nelson Dellis's images thin out at competition speed into something more like an essence. If that's this sense doing the real work under a visual label, it's worth asking.
People around you. Look for anyone who remembers what they read for years without trying, or who has no mind's eye and no inner voice but still memorizes well.
The weak spots
The evidence so far is a handful of people describing their own minds. That's why I'm presenting it as a hypothetical. The argument also rests on the idea that all thinking happens in some inner sense.
So, what would you add to this hypothetical? You might have real-world evidence, from history, from research, or from your own experience. You might be able to add to the story of why nobody found these techniques. Or you might take the hypothetical further: if this were true, what else would be true? What are the other implications?