I’ve recently realized I do the exact same thing with speech — I’ll talk without thinking, forming sentences out of heuristic systems, and process them after the fact. Then tune the sentence slightly, and continue.
In this fashion, I produce sentences without really knowing what I’ve said, until I think about it later. In much the same way that I drive long distances on auto-pilot, and can’t even remember anything of the route by the end of it.
And those sentences often have ideas that I’ve never actually put together intentionally, but I completely agree with, and upon review, are correct to the best of my knowledge.
I don’t know what speech is, but it’s definitely more than vocalization of my thoughts.
Really would like to see that post, as I've been vaguely interested in this very topic for quite a while. Is there a chance that you remember any key words that might've been in the title, so I could plug them into the HN search?
From what I gathered so far, one hypothesis is that language development went hand-in-hand with both consciousness and empathy, i.e. social cognition: as we learned to see the world from the viewpoint of others, we also expanded the abilities to communicate with others and think to ourselves.
On a relevant note: There was a post on HN a while ago which basically was about how using language (and probably, speaking out loud) is actually a `feature' or `technology' of human mind. For long, we have been mocked for speaking our thoughts out load, but turns out, it in fact helps organize thoughts and get to more logical conclusions, free of the `fluid' logic-space of the silent mind. Ironic because sometimes I'm fed up with the load rush of thoughts in my mind.