@IrelandTorin: I see my thoughts and emotions visually as threads in a tapestry. It isn't like a medieval tapestry on a castle wall but a circle/hoop with activity buzzing on the circumference in 3D, if that makes sense. A number of them are completely involuntary, mostly calculations, evaluations, connections, and possibilities, all of which I can isolate and follow backwards and view and compare-and-contrast to other if need be. Other threads I drive or at least corral and attend to. I can...

@IrelandTorin: ...jump from one to another mostly easily, depending on the environment and immediate active engagements/stressors. I wouldn't say I "layer" them, though I'm not sure how you mean "layer" in context.

There can be up to five active trains for things, like conversations, research, speculation and extrapolation, synthesis, and memory-mining, and then there's one that is passive and permanent which is entirely my mind/intelligence/id or whatever playing.

The caveat, I reckon...

@IrelandTorin: ...one could call it, is that substantive "pressure to perform" specific tasks by parents, teachers, employers, and even colleagues can and frequently does trigger what has been nominally designated Oppositional Defiance Disorder in me. My friends in the past gave me a nickname in college, undergrad and my attempt at grad school, because of it: "Dr. Lecter". (I wasn't that bad, certainly. It was just that the movie had won the Oscars and was big in the public consciousness.)

@IrelandTorin: My then therapist, Dr. Bohaski, said it was rather a feline instinct. "I played with my food," she said. (I was much less sedate and chill back then and substantially more energetic.)

To conduct all the trains at once is not a thing I can do. I can consciously attend two, sometimes three at a time, and that requires rather a lot of energy. That said, I really like it when I get a chance to fire on that many thrusters at once. I rarely ever do, alas.

@thedisasterautist Eh, everyone has their personality quirks!

Hmm, I think that could make sense - my mind seems to have made some extreme trade-offs between certain types of memory and processing. Can't remember crap, but once I get into the right state my processing speed is absolutely ludicrous.

My reading speed, for example, tops out at over 1400 WPM. This speed is reached by reading diagonally, leveraging peripheral vision & short-term memory to stitch sentences together on-the-fly.

@thedisasterautist For perspective, 1400 WPM equates to an average of under 43 milliseconds per word, or just over 23 words per second.

If reading linearly, the physiology of the eye is said to limit reading speed to under 1000 WPM.

@IrelandTorin: I figure I'm certainly under 1,000, especially since my baby cataracts showed up, not to mention the eye floaters. (I dunno, really, how to measure reading WPM.) I read two or three books a week, though.

@IrelandTorin: I don't read that rapidly, though I do the leveraging of peripheral vision and ST memory. I don't read diagonally but in sweeps, if that term makes sense, and then jumping back quickly to note keys. Sometimes, however, I like to read aloud, not in my head but aloud aloud.

One of my favorite things when reading nonfiction is when there's SO MUCH DATA, as in theoretical physics, in a short space, that I have to put the book down and let my mind buzz and work to digest it all.

@thedisasterautist Whoa, that's WAY more state information than I work with. The way I think feels *almost* stateless... pretty much the only information I'm keeping in memory are mood and current focus. Nothing else is there until I go looking for it.

Has pros and cons. Pro: excellent focus. Con: completely oblivious to just about everything.

I've been known to forget... um, actually, it'd be easier to give you a list of things I can't forget,

because there's nothing on it.

@IrelandTorin: Alas, the list of things I don't, can't, and wish I could forget is way longer than what I have forgotten. That said, they're not all stored linearly but rather in the memory palace. Some things come to recall instantly, often involuntarily. Other things have to be jogged, and some things have to be sought by tracing other memories, playing the Six Degrees Game, or jumping associationally.

@thedisasterautist That's very interesting. Much more complex than the thought representations I work with... primarily written, verbal, and... quasi-kinesthetic?

The last one is interesting because ideas are represented not as pictures or sound, but in a silent, non-visual, "pure", static form. Thinking that way feels odd; it's like your thoughts turn to thick, heavy, glacially slow-moving pitch... doesn't really feel like thinking at all, more like the absence of it, but it is still thought.