Feeling like I'm being guided by a small synchronicity toward a small realization.   This  realization is given the focus by the synchronicity of reading two passages in different e-books I purchased for my Kindle, and also perhaps the heightened mode of perception brought on by the novelty of the Kindle experience to me.

As I recall, the first notion which stuck was the concept that animals should be considered to have some sophistication to their inner lives.   The memory and associations express themselves, however, without the benefit of language.   The modality of animal intelligence is sensory in nature: visual, tactile, auditory.   This came from one of Temple Grandin's books on animal intelligence that I had on my Amazon "wish list" and being that I now have a Kindle I just went and impulse bought the e-book version.

Just this moment I was reading the ebook version of Oliver Sach's latest book, in which he recounts a number of cases of aphasia in medical professionals who go on to produce quite erudite and insightful first person accounts of this particular neuropathology.  The synchronicity that struck me was that these people described having full retention of their mental capacity despite temporarily lose the ability not only to speak and understand speech, but to even use speech in their thought processes.  It would seem these two writers have taken a moment to support each other in communicating the idea of non-verbal intelligence and its continuity up through the animal kingdom.   Perhaps aphasics in one sense have been given an opportunity to live mentally as our animal brethren.  Grandin posits as much with her claim that her own particular neurologic deficit, autism, gives her insight into animal thought.