I once heard somebody casually say that a deaf-mute or autistic person could not possibly be thinking or understanding anything, because they didn't know any words. Without words, what would they be thinking? Nothing! It would be like a newborn baby's brain.
My first reaction was that this is nonsense. Don't people often have thoughts without words? (Isn't that what intuition is supposed to be like?) And when we were babies, were we not thinking? We were admitedly thinking in a different way than after we learned speaking. Don't babies think a lot about edibility and patterns and senses?
So, does anybody remember what thinking without words is like, and can put it in words? (I know I know, it's as bad as "googling for google", the world will implode!) 
I would spontaneously describe it as a Venn diagram of memories.
And by "memory" I don't mean one word, rather... an associated set of sensory information, which may include moods/emotions, but not necessarily time. And by Venn diagram I mean thoughts such as "A and B can/must happen together" or "A and C rarely/never happen together".
Hard to describe, I'm not satisfied with my description. Anyone have anything better?
