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.
Ehh, all brains kinda work like that, though
Everyone pees, but if you pee 50 times a day see a doctor.
They do, but not all the time. Most people can stay on one subject. With some ND individuals, particularly those with ADHD, one subject is every subject depending on what you are thinking at the time.
Carnivals could have easily become candy making videos, because spinning cotton candy is like the process of candy making on a tiny level, but hey, have you seen them break a candy bubble in this vid?
Candy like that is actually really hot and I bet those burns suck if you get one. I grabbed a stick in the fire once and didn't see the hot coal on the end, so I could only imagine what molten candy would do to you.
Its basically molding edible magma. Speaking of magma, did you know that Old Faithful is an underground volcano and if it erupted it would probably destroy half of North America? At least, that's what I heard.
From here we could go onto apocalypse talk, National Parks, or even the Yellowstone TV series. The world is your oyster and your brain will not stop.
That’s just how brains work, nothing to do with neurodivergent.
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
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. 😅
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.
I followed that like a train tracks.
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~~ abstract jumps
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 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
woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I need you to interpret my thoughts too
To be honest, I talk like this too when I'm under duress or havent quite processed something - jumping from fragment to fragment to try and keep the whole in mind.
As my understanding of my day-to-day has increased and my work and life have somewhat settled, I'm able to better predict and summarize things that happen to me using my day-to-day as a stable baseline to reference from:
I can tell you the important bits because I'm aware of what the humdrum bits are.
I think my mum's world is way more stressful and uncertain than mine is, so her mind tries to capture everything because it has no stable reference to build from
Funny thing is, sometimes I'll do this out of the blue days later and my wife picks up on it immediately.
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
As soon as I saw "carnival" and "wasps," I understood the connection immediately.
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 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'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?
The lighter side of ADHD
