A thought on thoughts

[Angrboda]

When I did math when I was younger, it was without any explicit thinking. One step would just follow the next like something physical.

I'm told that people without language still imagine God, so I imagine it's more common than not. It's a valid question whether we think in words or instead in some sort of mentalese. I suspect more the latter, except when we're mentally rehearsing for some future encounter, and then it's still like math, we fumble towards our thoughts without prior deliberation. We may at times think verbally, but verbalism itself isn't visible; it's as intuitive and unbidden as anything else silent. We're forced to simply depend on our ability to form good thoughts based on talent and intelligence. We can't "think our way" to good thinking.

Things like this always make me wonder what the thought process of people who don't manage to think successfully is like and if it differs any from that of more successful thinking from the perspective of the thinker. We urge people to become critical thinkers, but what do we do if our ability to think about our thinking is defective? How do we figure out that it is defective in the first place? I think the conventional answer is to depend upon external validation of our ability to think, but is someone who doesn't think well going to appeal to that rather than internal evidence, such as their beliefs about how successful they have been in the past, which are themselves based on faulty information? I guess I'm wondering if you can fix stupid. Probably a futile goal, but worth considering.