From Ben Haller
The first paragraph of David Robson’s article on the brain’s inner dialogue contains the phrase: “up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal” (4 September, p 30). What does this mean? Apart from the weasel words “up to” that make the statement almost completely content free, what is a “mental experience” and how are we counting them?
If a mental experience is a discrete percept apparent to my consciousness (the most obvious definition), then I would have to say that raw visual percepts – such as colour – outnumber other kinds of mental experience by orders of magnitude. Every second, I probably process more raw visual percepts than the number of words that go through my mind in an hour. This is not to diminish the importance of words; I enjoyed the rest of the article quite a bit. But this silly and vacuous statement should never have made it past the editor’s pen.
Montreal, Canada
