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.
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.
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’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.
I think most people don’t think about what they think about.
Therefore they aren’t.
Then what do they do?
Life must be so boring to them.
Just that first part … most people don’t think
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.
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.
TIL that I am a witch.
J/k… I’ve known that for a long time. 😹
RIP Terry Pratchett ❤️
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
GNU Terry Pratchett
Never knew what this meant, just looked it up. I should read Going Postal.
You absolutely should, assuming that you are a nerd it’s IMO his best book. I have a lovely hard cover edition.
explains a lot
And it shows.
I was told “still waters run deep” but sometimes still waters are just… still.
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…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.
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.
No, their thoughts terminate at the natural end point and neurodivergent people’s brains do not seem to do this.
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
My game was sorta the opposite. After letting my mind wander for an undetermined amount of time, I would try and backtrack as far back as I could. I didn’t usually make it back more than a few steps, but finding that “first” thought was always satisfying.
I have this wonderful habit of coming to a satisfactory conclusion, only to find I’ve forgotten what the topic I was contemplating was. 10/10, awesome way to live life.
Task failed successfully.
The feeling of satisfaction is nice to think back on, even if you have can’t remember what it was for or about anymore
You’d probably love psilocybin.
I mean, my last sentence was pure sarcasm, but I’m sure I would.
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.
Oh my god you people sound so boring
seemingly random arbitrary endpoints**
Its also different from person to person, let alone any notion of what’s typical
fixed it for you.
Typicality can be demonstrated through commonality
You’ll find an average, median, or “common range”, and good luck hammering out your criteria. Even self-reporting would likely get you varying results from the same person by their categories of interest.
Yes, we would expect a range and where it is most concentrated would be where we find the most typical people. That is how ranges like this work.
This implies an endpoint to a thought process, that cant be right.
I always assumed that most people do this just much slower. Hence why they would switch fewer topics.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Bees are awesome.
Damn right I liked it, that sting still lives rent free in my brain 25 years later!
woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
Thanks! That was an awesome little read!
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, thats the primary use of their stinger
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 mostly. Technically also birds, but birds are too quick and too strong so the fight is usually over before the bee can sting.
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.
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.
