Yes, that’s not fun. After coping for years on my own, I discovered sleep audio recordings. I usually use earphones, though comfortable sleep earphones are hard to find. I think they are miraculous for falling asleep or going back to sleep if I become wakeful. The Calm app has programs in many languages (but maybe not Russian currently). I also find sleep audio casts I like in Apple podcasts.
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Doing my own thinking seems more like speaking the words in my head than reading. I’m having trouble with one of the words I need to use to identify, as I have no idea how to pronounce Cnidarians (jellyfish). In my head, they are currently see-ens. If I learn how to pronounce it properly, I probably won’t be able to spell it.
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Ny- DARE - ee- ens, as I recall. The C is silent.
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I do both. Also, since I stutter, I’ve learned to self censor what I say, substituting easy words for hard ones. I believe - and I have not talked to anyone about this - that I have two conversations going on in my head at the same time. I’ve got the thoughts about what I am writing just now, as well as some music that I heard earlier this morning running at the same time. I can tune one out, but it’s always there. Oddly, when I really focus, say in moth identification, I don’t believe both layers of thought are there.
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I have a form of synesthesia where I “see” time as a three-dimensional form or object. I can visualize and draw the months of a year all at once because they are cyclical. But I haven’t been able to manage all of past and future time because it’s not linear and I mentally always have my back toward some of it. When I’m trying to remember when something happened, it helps if I look toward when that was.
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Oh, that is a curious one; sounds useful to me. I don’t always have a good grasp of time, sometimes get a bit lost in it. If I’m really, really focused or into something, time fades away.
I have a very insignificant form synesthesia. If I see raindrops, I may feel water droplets on my hands, legs or nose no matter how covered up I am. I could be walking in the rain with full rain gear but feel rain drops on my covered up ankles and hands. Even if it is ~impossible~ for the drops to reach me, my brain truly thinks I got wet. E.g., if I’m in a car when it’s raining, seeing rain on the windshield triggers the sensation. I try to wipe away the water, but of course my skin is dry. The sensory input is very convincing. This happens even if I’m wearing pants or stockings, boots and gloves.
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IIRC, the late Oliver Sacks, who wrote a number of interesting books on the clinical manifestations of neurology (and had the good taste to be a fern fancier as well), discovered he was prosopagnosic rather late in life.
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Yes! It’s like my brain is on constant dialogue mode. It reads “out loud” when I’m reading something but also verbalizes my thoughts
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That must get pretty busy in there.
I have just the one talker but every so often I also get a blast of guitar music. I’m not even a big fan of guitar as I prefer classical music but there it is rocking away in my head.
I’m going to try to pay attention next time I’m working on an ID. Yours is an interesting observation and may explain why I like working on IDs here on iNat - it quiets my brain down.
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I learned the word from an Australian professor and now in my head her accent is perminantly attached
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There is pretty much always a song in my head (unless I’m listening to music). It loops again and again and often I will stim (an autism thing) Along with it.
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I have read about that one, it seems facinating. I have some vague notion that the past is literally behind me, but I think that is a cultural thing and not how my brain is wired.
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Latin has quite straightforward pronounciation, easier than English from my perspective, people still arguing if “c” is [ts] or [k]. From listening to teachers another problem is diphtongs, not everyone understands that in endings like -eae you shouldn’t pronounce each letter, and word stress is usually on penult syllable (people tend do make accents all over the words).
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I apologize if this is off-topic, as it really doesn’t have much to do with iNaturalist, since it’s about speaking. My question is whether anyone is familiar with “circumstantial speech” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532945/ and, more specifically, what it is like from the speaker’s perspective, and if there is anything an ordinary non-professional listener can do that would help.
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Sorry about going further off topic… message me if you want to communicate further about it. This describes my elderly neighbor very well. She is intelligent, but talks incessantly with long tangential digressions and a flight of consciousness way of relating her stories. She rarely gets to the point of a story. I recall once she was trying to tell me something about her niece. And I never did get to hear anything about the niece because she started telling me what the experience was like driving to her niece’s house, including the garage door colors and each turn and landmark along the way.
Even though it seems I can never get a word in edgewise, even to ask for clarification, she seems rather perceptive and understands things about me that I think we’ve never talked about.
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You’ve just inadavertently likely described the experience of most of my conversation partners…I do come around to the point, sometimes. I’m not sure what the origin of this is for me. I haven’t heard the term before but I assume my version is a combo of compulsive prefacing/explaining, info-dumping, over-excitement and a bit of genuine passion and a desire to share and teach things. I apologize constantly (whole other issue) but this helps people at least understand I have an awareness. Hilariously, I’m rather impatient when I’m on the receiving end. To bring it back to iNaturalist: I wonder if there are some of us who do this is writing in the description or comments of observations?
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Interesting how it’s just a “progressed” version of how we all talk, it’s often hard to focus on one story and usually one extends to another one that also can bring memories of something else, etc. I guess when it’s not a specific condition it’s a result of a person trying to share not the story itself but their own feelings about it and at one point it overweights the story so the person flips to something relevant to the theme and more emotionally important at the moments. I spent hours of my life telling myself in thoughts about certain incidents in details, and as in verbal speech thoughts are even easier going somewhere away, but also trying to tell someone same words can be harder without slipping in unneeded details. Those conditions are working the same, person can’t focus their thoughts on one subject, that’s why their speech isn’t focused either, and to add to original @sgene question I don’t think the person recognises that something isn’t right (at least in the moment), they’re following the thought and ok with it, don’t know what an interlocutor should do, it depends on the point of a talk.
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i definitely do the long, wandering conversation and text thing, i think it is probably a neurodivergent thing in my case but can be other things too. I definitely infodump
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Just to be clear, I believe that the ‘second voice’ arose from the mental gymnastics involved in speaking. One forms the thoughts I want to say, the second simultaneously searches for substitute words.
Also, I would like to restate that no one has a ‘normal’ brain. There is no objective standard to hold ourselves up to - brain connections, chemistry, all interact with our experiences through life to form who we are right now. There certainly are extremes that we are likely born with, but it’s not always certain if they will be developed and expressed. As an example, children, most people go through a stuttering phase. In a few of us it persists for life. But everyone on this thread seems to be functioning ok, which, if you think about it, is encouraging.
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