Do they just think about the same fuckin' thing forever?
Do they just think about the same fuckin' thing forever?
100 comments
-
Let me tell you how my mum's brain works:
- Me: "So how was your day?"
- Mum: "We had a session with Sasha and the report she mentioned to Jenny my boss, cos the whole department was axed, as you remember the last election, and maybe you should start looking for a job around there, and so the report came back empty and...."
- Me (used to her tangents), a report was made between her and Sasha, given to Jenny the boss, but the report was ignored and sent back, most likely due to lack of personell because the department was axed by the Tories in the last election, and she fears it might happen to me too and that I should look for a job in that potential vacuum.
-
This extends to being an expert in your field as well. We've done an experiment and the result is both incredible and obvious. To me.
The struggle is then to connect and explain these things I am seeing to other people who are themselves also extremely intelligent but don't have the same exact brand of autism.
-
this has nothing to do with neurodivergence. it's just how brains work. necessarily, in fact. your dad's just an idiot.
by the way it's not the same thing but one thing I enjoyed doing when i was younger and talked with my dad for long enough, we would stop at a point and think "wait how did we even get here?" and trace back the conversation to several topics ago.
we both have diverse interests, maybe that's why things we talked about would keep chaining to random other things. now that i think of it, my dad used to buy lots of encyclopedias before the internet, and we'd just randomly browse them. even on our computer we had multiple versions of Encarta. and now we use wikipedia and it's so easy to jump from one article to another.
so i guess what we did all those years ago wasn't far off from wiki surfing verbally.
-
Not everyone's brain works like that. My girlfriend, for one. She struggles to make those arbitrary jumps
-
-
I always assumed that most people do this just much slower. Hence why they would switch fewer topics.
-
I'm pretty sure this is how all humans think..things relate to one another.
-
Thank you. I was freaking out. Isn't this what they call a stream of consciousness?
-
-
Building off this, im fully capable of having 2 entirely different conversations at once.
Ive been talking to one person at work, stop mid sentence to correct the other crew, and go back to what I was saying with a small reminder.
-
I've had two conversations with the same person at the same time.
Really common with text chatting, since they reply to conversation 1 while I'm replying to conversation 2, then we switch.
-
-
Could somebody please explain to me how somebody can not think like this? I always thought this is the normal way to think. There are people who don't think like this?
-
I think people generally think in paths like this. The difference is the impulsive conversation topic change, not the train of thought. Some neruotypicals (like my wife) can find it jarring.
-
Neurotypical here and yeah my brain often works this way and I believe it does for many others. What’s missing in this vignette are social skills from both parties.
Abruptly shifting topics like that often works better in a conversation with some sort of segue or acknowledgment of the shift: “This is off of that topic but I have a random question.”
The second party could reasonably be confused but when the thought process was explained to them they could have just accepted it and moved on without being denigrating.
So they both just need better social skills is all that I see.
-
This seems right. Their mind wanders, too, but they don't mention the tangents that come up, or if they do, they specifically state why they're now thinking about the new topic.
-
I never would have thought that a random post would chance my world view. I am genuinely stumped.
-
-
David Hume wrote about this exact thing in (I think) an enquiry concerning human understanding.
Essentially he said all thoughts come from 3 processes:
Cause and effect - think of smoke so think of fire etc.
Continuity in time and/or place - think of kettle so think of toaster etc.
Resemblance - think of a photo so think of the person etc.
The above example would be continuity in place, the carnival lead to thoughts in the same place.
Also cause and effect...why do bees die but wasps not?
Actually possibly resemblance too, as bees and wasps look similar.
-
I wish I could remember more, it's been about 20 years since I last read it though.
-
I'm going to look into it. Thank you.
-
-
My instinct would be to think that they do that too, but at a much slower speed, and are less aware of how they got there. So when you explain a train of thought clearly the speed which u topic switched and the number of times it happened feels overwhelming to them. We also tend to intellectualize a lot of stuff and others do not, so they have probably never internally studied how their own thoughts connect before, so it would seem forieng when explained.
But I'm speaking from instinct here, no evidence.
-
AFAIK I'm neurotypical... No, trains of thought like these are common (see also other respondents on here), and they can also happen in the blink of an eye. It's just that when the question or comment has formed, I'll make a mental note to either ask/mention it later after the current topic has concluded, if I think the other person also has interest in hearing it, or to google it later if not. Or to just drop the thought if I come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter all that much to myself either.
-
-
Pretty sure everyone does, but they will take you through it first, not drop the topic change without context.
Also it's considered weird and off topic, so even if they think it they don't bring it up
-
I think something like 40% of people don't have an internal monologue at all, so...
-
-
I think most people don't think about what they think about.
-
First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those.
Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those.
Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.
-
Even without attribution or ever reading this quote before, I just knew it had to be Sir Terry Pratchett and I was right.
That man was unmatchable in his wit and wisdom and how he packaged life lessons on simply being good people into entertaining stories. The world is lesser without him.
-
RIP Terry Pratchett ❤️
-
TIL that I am a witch.
J/k... I've known that for a long time. 😹
-
-
And it shows.
-
I was told “still waters run deep” but sometimes still waters are just… still.
-
-
Imagine being an NT person and just bumping into one topic after another like a moth, I'd much rather know how I got to wherever I ended up. 😅
-
I’m NT, and “thinking about thinking” is how my brain works. A lot of “normal” brains do, but there’s a HUGE spectrum of how introspective people are.
-
-
explains a lot
-
Then what do they do?
Life must be so boring to them.
-
On the contrary, I imagine them being constantly slightly surprised by things, like they're along for the ride. Sounds relaxing.
-
-
Just that first part ... most people don't think
-
-
-
If the other person can't follow your train of thought, it can feel as though the emotional and cognitive connection/trust that was built in the conversation was abandoned along with the previous context. This can happen when there is a non-trivial jump in context between ideas.
Steering the conversation can be done by introducing intermediary steps that are connected to the previous topic in a self-evident way. This maintains that cognitive and emotional connection/trust because you are showing that you value the other person's understanding and participation.
Figuring out what "non-trivial" or "self-evident" means is probably the hard part but you'd probably want to consider each step in, for example:
Grass, meadow, forest, tree, timber, log truck, mill, paper, exports, shipping dock, ocean, ice caps, ice bergs, titantic, James Cameron, Michael bay, transformers.
You could probably go from each one to the next trivially, steering the conversation from grass to meadow and so on through the list. But to go from grass to transformers without intermediate ideas truly makes absolutely no sense.
-
Bees don't die when they sting. They have a barbed stinger, human skin is elastic and that's why they get stuck. Our first reaction is to swat or swipe on the site of stinging which rips their stinger off by force. If you leave the bee alone, it will wiggle and twirl around, trying to get itself unstuck and sometimes that is successful, sometimes they're fucked. The bee didn't really commit suicide when stinging, you killed it.
Also, did you know that the queen bee has almost full control over their offspring? It works like this: The queen bee only mates once in her life during the nuptial flight and stores the sperm in her spermatheca (like a sperm sac), the drone usually dies in the process because mating tears their endophallus off and the trauma kills him. After founding a colony the queen can now choose whether to fertilize her eggs or not and if she does, a female larva will hatch from the fertilized egg, else a drone larva will hatch through a process called haploid parthenogenesis.
The destiny of becoming a queen or a worker depends entirely on the diet the female larva is fed: all larvae are fed royal jelly (a special secretion from worker bees) for a few days and then worker bees are switched to what is called bee bread which is a mix of pollen and nectar while future queens stay on the royal jelly diet. The royal jelly lets the bees develop their ovaries, making them capable of laying eggs. Technically, all worker bees can lay eggs (which could only produce drones), but in a healthy colony, they will be switched off the royal jelly soon enough so that this rarely occurs.
So, in a way, worker bees can stage a mutiny if they are unhappy with their current queen by feeding a larva royal jelly, rearing a new queen.
Bees are awesome.
-
Is there anything that a bee would sting that it's barbed stinger wouldn't get stuck in? It seems like most anything would result in stinger detachment
-
The barb is mostly meant to aid in sstaying attached while injecting venom and is meant to still be able to release by twisting
-
Other insects, thats the primary use of their stinger
-
-
woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
-
Love it, thank you for this.
Do they isolate the queen larva to prevent other larva from eating its food? Or is it like a baby bird scenario where they're just fed directly from bee to bee? Are mistakes sometimes made, and if so do they "correct" the mistake?
-
My understanding is that while they can make a new queen under the radar, hypothetically, the slightly different scent of her eggs/haploid larva is seen as a hostile invasion and it’s quickly dispatched by loyalists, which is why non-main-queen offspring rarely happens.
Something like because they are all essentially genetically identical, they all have the same pheromones, but the next generation won’t.
-
-
As soon as I saw "carnival" and "wasps," I understood the connection immediately.
-
We call them "fair bees"; they are drunk and aggressively non-violent about drinking your daiquiri, as well as rummaging through every trash can. Never been stung by one, but they can be aggravating sometimes cause they won't leave me or my drink alone... like any obnoxious drunk, really
So I can see how you can get to thinking about wasps from "carnival". The "fair bees" definitely remind me of wasps being assholes
-
Yeah, any outdoor environment with food involved immediately brings to mind yellowjacket/bee/wasp type insects not leaving sugary drinks alone.
-
-
-
ime they simply don’t think
-
I've always found calling people NPCs pretty degrading, but what do you call someone who has no internal dialogue? They're just... husks?
-
-
I have written several proposals for my employer based on this kind of thinking. We have some kind of issue, I push it to the back of my mind, weeks later the issue still exists and I'm listening to a totally unrelated podcast and something the host or guest says triggers a series of seemingly unrelated thoughts and suddenly I have a solution to the issue.
My department head once asked me how I come up with these solutions, I smiled and said I have ADHD and listen to podcasts. He just looked at me with a blank stare then said that doesn't make sense. I just laughed a little and said, I know but it's hard to explain how things connect in my mind, the podcasts just help me brainstorm. He just smiled, shook his head, and said well what ever works I guess.
-
I'd recommend reading Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I'm not sure that all the claims hold up to scrutiny, but it's nice to see a book that notes the way I like to think has real world application.
Somethings I suspect you're doing are:
- Analogical Thinking of Deep Structures to create an Outside View (Chapter 5)
- Spacing which gives time away from a problem and asks part of the mind to re-collect the issue so you know those deeper structures well. This is presented in the chapter on learning, but I suspect it's relevant here (Chapter 4)
Oddly enough, if your boss wants to foster creative problem solving for novel problems, this book might convince him to give you more latitude and resources to do your thing.
-
So I just got done reading up on this book and ordered a copy. Thanks, I might also grab the audiobook since I sometimes have problems focusing on reading, and listening to a book is the only way I can finish it.
Funnily enough the boss is extremely open to new ideas and recognizes that I'm ready to move on. He's already told me that he's petitioning for extra budget now that we have surplus money company wide so that he can move me and two others up into low level management in project management roles. As he said the project management title will be fluid since each of you will be doing wildly different things based on your strengths.
I'm down for it since the majority of the things he says he wants to assign me are things I want to do. Sure there's a few things I'm not crazy about, but they aren't anywhere near deal breakers.
-
Wow, this also helps me with thinking! Just hearing people talk helps me think. Music is focus too much on it and can't work.
-
Yeah it's weird, you would think it would distract you but it doesn't. On the music thing, I've found that classical music helps me focus but other types don't. To be specific piano and violin music seems to work best for me. But that's really only when I'm writing, when I'm working on a problem podcasts, audiobooks, and music I've heard a million times already work just fine, new music will distract me though, it has to be stuff I already know.
-
-
-
I didn't realize this wasn't normal... I always considered it "thinking a few steps ahead." As explained it is connected, it's just a few steps away.
I've done this many times, but I reflect on what I'm going to say first so I pretty much always recognize that just coming out with the final thought is strange so I explain how I got to where I want to be first and then I ask the question or say the thing lol
-
Associative thinking is very normal. This is just another post in the ongoing trend of common things being called out as divergent.
-
It feels like describing 7 degrees of Kevin bacon but for your train of thought. "Then I clicked on this link which took me to the page on been stings, then I clicked on the link for insects with stingers"...etc
-
-
My wife regularly has rogue "brain trains" like this. Keeps things fun :)
-
My GF sometimes has to ask me what I'm talking about because I ask her a question with no context, but most of the time now she knows, not sure if she just knows me well enough or if she has found a way to join me on my "brain train".
-
My wife likes including me in the middle of conversations that she started in her head.
I have to occasionally remind her that I need a little context.
-
-
-
I've been wondering a lot recently if neurotypical people can literally just control their own thoughts in ways I can't even conceive of. Like can they actually choose what they like instead of just liking or not liking things? Can they choose what to think about without struggling to grab the thing you're trying to think about out of the sea of interconnected thoughts flowing into one another all the time? Are their minds just totally blank until tasked with thinking?
-
From what I can gather, it seems that NT people are more interested in finding similarities they have with others in their in-group, than with finding the differences that set them apart from their group.
If they have a personal disagreement from the dominant opinion, they’re more likely to either suppress it or reconsider it - like thinking a fashion is tacky when it’s brand new, but joining in on it later once it becomes popular. Individual opinions aren’t held firmly, but are swayed to fit whatever others agree with.
It’s all about that social cohesion, that drive to be part of the protected herd. Many neurotypicals will promptly shed their individualities if it means attaining higher social standing. They don’t want to “stick out,” as that threatens their personal connection with the group identity.
-
Yes, as a NT personally, both options are available depending on what I need to accomplish. For my brain to have no thoughts I have to actively meditate, and that’s really hard and has taken a lot of training and practice.
As for what I like or not, there’s some degree of control over it, but what’s key for me is an awareness of why I have likes / dislikes and the level of tolerance for them along a spectrum.
-
-
My wife and I call this "Goldbluming", after Jeff Goldblum in the "Canceled" South Park episode.
Wait a minute: chaos theory! Chaos theory, it was first thought of in the '60s. Sixty. That's the number of episodes they made of Punky Brewster before it was cancelled. Cancelled... Don't you see? The show is over! The aliens are cancelling Earth!
-
Neurotypicals don’t have “trains of thought” they have “teleporters of thought”
-
It may be more extreme, but fairly often with conversations with my wife, after a while we’re like: “How did we end up at this topic” and then we can backtrack it a number of steps to see how we got at a completely different topic.
It’s kind of like clicking through Wikipedia, you open a page and a few subpages, some of those have different interesting subjects and somehow you went from pollination to ancient Mesopotamian mythology.
I think we’re both fairly “NT” but just curious.
-
It wasn't a carnival, it was a candy themed amusement park, and one of the stands was "make your own lolipop", and I wasn't looking, and fuck - I got stung on my tongue by a wasp.
That's probably the easiest connection for me to make if I had been part of that conversation.
It's not a "hack" per se, but at least I got lots of free icecream following. Until my parents got to thinking that ice cubes are free..
-
It's unclear if the above comment is agreeing or disagreeing with the lower one.
-
Never in my life have I had a situation with a bee. Wasps on the other hand…
-
No, their thoughts terminate at the natural end point and neurodivergent people’s brains do not seem to do this.
-
This implies an endpoint to a thought process, that cant be right.
Edit: oh god we're all recursive with unknown exit conditions
-
as i child i used to play a mind game with myself when i was bored. i'd think of two random things and try to find a string of associations that connect the two. i was born being a nerd, playing the wikipedia game before i knew how to read
my thoughts simply do not stop
-
Right, it can vary but I think most people in this example would stop at thinking about how the fairgrounds were used for the rodeo.
-
I see it more about the level of curiosity one has, rather than a typical / atypical division.
-
-
100 comments