Like, people will call this neurodivergent but this is literally how all brains work.
The neurodivergence is in failing to read the social queues of your dad, who was clearly very invested in talking to you about the carnival.
I followed that like a train tracks.
https://imgur.com/a/brain-is-annoying-alHOPXC
Thread that explains it pretty well.
I think the “why can you concentrate on video games?” thing is really missing the whole point of TV as a medium. The sight/sound combo, particularly with bright colors and crisp volume and lots of rapid movements (graphics, camera work, etc) is explicitly designed to grab and hold your attention.
Asking why a TV/game can hold your attention but casual conversation / dry educational instruction cannot is like asking why you got here faster on a car than by hiking with a broken leg. Or asking why you can eat a gallon of ice cream or a bucket of fried chicken, but shy away from canned spinach. Like, ffs, that’s the whole reason the thing exists.
I often find myself in restaurants or bars, forcing myself back to focus on the people I’m there with even when the TV playing in the background is showing something I viscerally do not want to watch. It can be total slop, but I’m still drawn to it, because it is bright and loud and attention-demanding.
Video games adding a kinetic aspect only amplify the problem. Now you’re “juggling” an extra thing (manual control inputs). And the fun is that the sights/sounds/engagement all point you in the same direction - often with a gameplay loop that provides stimulus reward on continuous interaction. Normal life doesn’t provide that. Perhaps it shouldn’t, because the sensation overload can (and often does, via F2P games) be so easily exploited.
That’s just how brains work, nothing to do with neurodivergent.
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
arbitraryabstract jumps
Funny thing is, sometimes I’ll do this out of the blue days later and my wife picks up on it immediately.
I think most people don’t think about what they think about.
And it shows.
I was told “still waters run deep” but sometimes still waters are just… still.
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.
i think the world is brighter for having had him. i don’t want to mourn him, i want to celebrate what he’s given us
RIP Terry Pratchett ❤️
TIL that I am a witch.
J/k… I’ve known that for a long time. 😹
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.
Therefore they aren’t.
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
explains a lot
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I’m pretty sure this is how all humans think…things relate to one another.
I think if this experience is related to having ADHD, the part that is relevant is the lack of ability to acknowledge that you’ve made a jump at all. In the example it’s a perfectly valid train of thought, but I’d expect an average person to make an effort to bring the other up to speed. Because most people generally expect to continue conversation in the same topic, you spend mental effort trying to keep tethered to that topic and have to share that rope with the other person.
Thank you. I was freaking out. Isn’t this what they call a stream of consciousness?
The real skill is to go back and add new branches to those thoughts. That takes effort.
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
Other insects mostly. Technically also birds, but birds are too quick and too strong so the fight is usually over before the bee can sting.
The barb is mostly meant to aid in staying attached while injecting venom and is meant to still be able to release by twisting
Human skin is more elastic than bee’s typical adversaries and the singer becomes stuck when they try to release. It you wait a while and let them try to pull it out carefully without hurting themselves, they might end up going in circles until it works its way free
Other insects, thats the primary use of their stinger
woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
Damn right I liked it, that sting still lives rent free in my brain 25 years later!
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?
Royal jelly for queens is stored in special compartments that are constructed specifically to rear a new queen and they drop the larvae in there. Wikipedia has a pic.
Thanks! That was an awesome little read!
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.
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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.
I have a friend who’s the same age as me and we are both ADHD. He pointed out to me once that we were having three different conversations at the same time. I guess that’s a little strange for neurotypical people.
I think it’s also the speed and number of connections leading to the topic change. I think many neurotypicals would jump from the carnival to the rodeo, or to the bee story, but they wouldn’t jump all the way to wondering about wasps from talking about the carnival in one go.
From the outside, the topic change is so different that neurotypicals can’t follow the connections.
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.
You mean you’re able to, gasp, use filters on your thought and exert self-control? What is this dark magic, get outta here
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 guess some people also can’t imagine things which seems so odd to me.
This is actually the case. It’s called aphantasia. Most people can think of a cup and an image of a cup will appear in their mind. People with aphantasia can’t do that.
They still might get a mental concept of a cup pop up though, just not a mental image if that makes sense.
I probably have aphantasia, or at least very close to having it. If someone mentions a cup I can still think about a cup, I just don’t “see” it
I think it’s kind of hard to describe if you can’t do it. I don’t literally see the cup; I’m imagining that I can see the cup. Can you imagine other senses? For example, can you imagine how chocolate tastes, or what it sounds like when somebody’s knocking on a door?
Some people can get very vivid mental images though, with lots of details. If you think it’s hard to describe if you can’t do it, then maybe you’re actually in the same or similar boat as me. I never realised I can’t actually get “mental images” because I assumed whatever pops up in my head is what people were talking about. Just thought it was what people ended up calling the mental concepts, didn’t consider that most people can probably actually “see” mental images to some degree.
And no, I wouldn’t say I can imagine tastes or smells but I can imagine sounds somewhat.
Edit: when I say “see” I mean having an image pop up in your head, like you mentioned in an earlier comment. I don’t get images popping up. I get concepts of something, with kinda attribute labels attached to it. I know a rainbow is a curved shape with the spectrum of visual colours and so on but I don’t get an image of one in my head. I just remember stuff about it.
I’m in the same boat as the other commenter. I can imagine smells just fine, sounds alright. But images I stick to a general concept of a thing.
It kinda goes with an aphotographic memory as well. I can’t describe what people look like for example and if I try I get it wrong.
I can’t imagine smells much, but sounds I can imagine somewhat.
Oh yes I’m also terrible at describing what people look like. Unless I happened to notice very specific things about them so my mind “took notes” of attributes. But even then I can get it wrong.
I think something like 40% of people don’t have an internal monologue at all, so…
Metacognition and usage of an inner monologue have nothing to do with each other. I don’t need to talk myself through things to conceptualise.
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.
same exact
brand of autism.information set. You are describing knowledge, not process.
I always assumed that most people do this just much slower. Hence why they would switch fewer topics.
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
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.
Awesome. I’ve been feeding the ebook into a text to speech reader. It’s been working for me.
I’m glad to hear you have a boss that’s open to your mode of thinking. Good luck and I wish you well!
Text to speech is a good idea but it would have to be natural sounding, I find the typical ones are robotic sounding and distracting, for me at least.
Yeah he’s a good guy, we actually graduated together but were just casual acquaintances at that time. A few years back I was covering a holiday and it was just the two of us, nothing going on so we sat at my desk and started talking about highschool, after a while we got to talking about what we saw as the future of the department (he had just been promoted to head the department) and we found out we shared a bunch of ideas. He’s never said anything but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s had to slow roll my promotion because of the highschool ties.
Check out elevenlabs. They used to do a reader I liked, Omnivore. It’s pretty natural sounding. As of now, it’s free, but I like it.
Glad you two clicked. It’s nice knowing someone out there has similar ideas and a different way of solving problems.
I tried to get an ADHD diagnosis a year ago. The practitioner basically said no but it was hard for her because I was so on the line. But when I hear the litany of behaviors by a subset of people with ADHD, it can bring me to tears because it’s nice to see I’m not the only one.
PM work can be fun for sure.
I actually recently checked out elevenlabs, the free tier seemed so limited it didn’t seem like it would work, maybe I’ll have to check them out again and dig a little deeper. Thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah I lucked out with him for sure. The guy he replaced was good, but still operated with an old school corporate mindset.
I got lucky with my diagnosis, my doctor also had ADHD and even though I still had to do the testing to be sure he basically diagnosed me on our first visit. He was also able to teach me how to manage my impulses and channel the energy into projects I can get passionate about. If you are right on the edge I’d seek a second opinion, I’m not knocking the previous doctor but a different one might pick up on something that would put you over the threshold.
If nothing else research coping strategies on your own. Check out this ADHD life, I connected with him years ago through comedy podcast we both listened to and he’s got some great resources.
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.
About the same ! Classical kind of works. But yeah can’t listen to anything new either or I focus on it
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.
