The lighter side of ADHD
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Never in my life have I had a situation with a bee. Wasps on the other hand…
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.
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
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?
woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
Neurotypicals don’t have “trains of thought” they have “teleporters of thought”
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 think most people don't think about what they think about.
explains a lot
Just that first part ... most people don't think
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. 😹
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. 😅
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.
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.