Stealing from Feynman here (edit, or more accurately his childhood friend Bennie), but most conscious thought is not verbal:

"Thinking is nothing but talking to yourself," said Feynman. "Oh yeah?" said Bennie. "Do you know the crazy shape of a crankshaft in a car? How did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?" http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1079.htm

I don't think that complex language is required for conscious thought, we can reason without language. Complex language is however required for storytelling and storytelling is required to transmit technologies without physically demonstrating them, hence it is required for technological development to spread beyond the limits of "monkey see, monkey do".

However, I think lotsofmangos in the Feynman quote was referring to the process of visualizing a crankshaft, which is most definitely conscious thought. Visualization is often not language in the mind.

Really? I'd have said that it boiled consciousness down to the idea of self-reference (what he calls "strange loops").

EDIT: Perhaps you mean Le Ton Beau de Marot? That one definitely deals with the relationship between language and consciousness.

"The Mind's I", a collaboration with Daniel Dennett, is a more light read than Gödel Escher Bach which also talks about consciousness, emergence and cognition.

"Metamagical Themas" is a collection of fascinating articles he wrote for Scientific American after Martin Gardner stopped publishing his "Mathematical Games" (do you see what he did here?)

I can perceive the influence his ideas have in the way I raise my child, relate to people and act in the world. I would go as far as to say that my spirituality was sparked by his texts, specially those related to Zen and consciousness.

Sure, YMMV -- this is entirely subjective (as everything in life, really).

Lots of people are saying this here. May I ask how it changed your life?

It made me think about various philosophical topics such as holism vs reductionism and syntax vs semantics, the meaning of "meaning", intelligence, cognition...

...and then absolutely blew them all with the Zen approach to life.

[1] http://themindi.blogspot.com.br/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-a...

This book set me down a line of really thinking and investigating and filling in the gaps that god was hiding in. Now I'm nonreligious.

This book might not change the median person's life, but it changed mine

That as we evolve our understanding and discover the next great secret that the universe holds for us, we will be continually and profoundly affected by how beautiful and blessed we are to simply have the opportunity to exist!

Reading GEB felt like reading the Cliff Notes to an entire college education especially tailored for the kind of person I didn't yet realize I already was.

Thomas Pynchon's "V." had the same effect.

For me, at 17 when I read it, math was just a bunch of symbols and exercises. It introduced me to logic and reasoning, made me think about the world differently.

It's like the real red pill in the matrix that's not just something you swallow. You think about it, and you start wondering what else you think you knew about math and the world can be challenged.

It made me a braver man. In that sense, it did change my life.

I think if your mind isn't changed after reading about these figures, then you haven't really gotten it.

Hofstadter isn't necessarily the main attraction here. He created a framework (ie the structure of the book) where these subjects can be reasoned about.

Admittedly, I read it in formative years, but until I read GEB, I didn't really grok what "genius" meant. Understanding strange loops in context of great thinkers who expressed it, and seeing strange loops as the nature of consciousness, and wondering how it could be expressed in software... blew my mind, in several senses of the phrase.