There's a reason we have expressions like "train of thought". Going from one idea to another is pretty much how we think. Much like going from one token to another.

Not true in 2 particular ways:

1. "Eureka moments" often pop up almost out of nowhere, this suggests that there's processing going on at a non-verbal, non-token level.

2. The fact that we think in language is an evolutionarily new phenomenon. Plenty of "smart" animals are capable of complex behaviors and learning without any kind of language "tokens". There's no reason to think that human reasoning is different and somehow confined to "tokens" instead of being a broader system. Consider language itself. The human species created it somehow out of nothing. We "tokenized" our cognition to be able to communicate. But I would argue this was driven by our social needs, not our cognitive needs and the human ability to think does not require tokens at all.

Edit:

Finally, consider how limited language really is. Even for something simple, like pain, we don't even have a way to communicate objective reality to another person. We can say "it hurts" and use metaphors: "stabbing pain", "dull pain", etc. But the experience of pain can't really be communicated to another person. It's even worse once you remove non-verbal cues like facial expressions and body language - pain just becomes a vague concept on the page.

Meanwhile, our brain is perfectly capable of perceiving the slightest changes in pain and altering our behavior accordingly. Now extend this to other human experience.

I think the best analogy here is that treating human cognition as a problem of processing "tokens" is confusing the map for the territory.