: In January of 2007 my therapist sent this novel to me with this line highlighted, among others.

She'd been my therapist since 1998, and in the card received with the book she quipped-asked if I'd ever spoken with Thomas Harris. (I hadn't, but his college roommate was my Philosophy prof and good friend for years.)

She asked because of my six trains, one of which is always just for me.

#neurallyatypical #actuallyautistic #residentalien #theweirdkid

@thedisasterautist So, does that mean you can layer several simultaneous thoughts on top of each other?

I can, although it takes very intense concentration. The most I've ever managed was eight simultaneous threads, but that necessitated what was essentially a deep meditative state... and I'm very susceptible to losing them with the slightest distraction.

@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.