The Tangents

The best way to describe how I think is that every thought is compared and contrasted through analogies. My favorite high school English teacher always said that I had an abnormally original brain. It’s like my brain is on overdrive solving serially linked crimes. Every thought is accompanied by ‘where have I seen this before?’

This comes in handy for programming or consulting. These tasks involve pattern matching past problems and modeling the solutions to those aforementioned problems to new ones that arise. Add in a little creativity and logic, and I can combine the wisdom of the past with reasoning to solve anything. I think this is how most people function; it’s why firms hire based on experience. It’s why, when a company hires an executive, the selected candidate experienced a problem that a company currently has and implemented a solution that seems promising in the current situation for the firm.

During a conversation, every sentence announced triggers some pattern matching in my brain against my knowledge or experiences. This overclocking is quite fun, but my brain isn’t following the point of the discussion. A discussion usually centers around a point being made. A thesis. Discussion points are about trying to collaboratively narrow down to some conclusions. Whenever I talk, I’m never directly responding to my predecessor’s point. Instead, I usually blurt out whatever analogy popped in my head. It’s like waiting to pee. I just have to share the connection I’ve made. Many times, my analogies do respond directly to a previous comment. It just doesn’t come in the form of a counterpoint; the thesis of whatever counterpoint I should say is instead skipped in favor of just mentioning whatever genius connection my stupid brain came up with.

I’m overexaggerating how overclocked (and how small my bladder) is, but the cause for confusion in conversations with me stems from this overdrive.

The Voice in my Head

Other times, my analogies make no sense. When one makes comparisons or analogies, there’s a clear linkage to demonstrate a pattern by comparing a common, very noticeable or understandable trait. When I make an analogy, the common trait between two things is non-obvious — to put it generously — because I find very minor, common traits to make a comparison. That, or how outlandish these analogies can be.

Here’s an example. Note: the following sounds conspiratorial, but I was just joking around. The context is my friend and I were talking about Candace Owens and her recent claim about Macron wanting to assassinate her:

I was chatting about how the VK/Telegram founder was arrested by the French government… and I had a sudden thought that maybe Candace Owens wanted to shine a spotlight on herself for ego/media purposes by drawing inspiration from the Telegram arrest and claiming that Macron wanted to assassinate her. That she felt like she was losing audience presence and wanted to shine a light on herself to draw more people in.

Apparently, this was a hard connection to understand for my close friend who knows how outlandish I can be. Not only does the connection not make sense on first read (or any read), but also this is paraphrased exactly how I said it to my friend. There was no thought on how to frame my thinking to the audience to understand my perspective. And I applaud you if you get it. Here’s the linkage:

• The VK/Telegram founder was arrested by the French government, generating international news coverage. (I intentionally omitted mentioning the massive news coverage initially because, in conversation, I just didn’t mention it. I wanted to recreate the confusion).
• Candace Owens was losing her audience which leans conspiratorial
• For marketing purposes, she needed a spotlight on her. Something to generate press.
• Because the French government was in the news cycle, she claimed someone in the French government wanted to murder her, specifically, to make it as large of a spotlight as possible, Macron

In this case, the minor, common trait was press coverage. It’s not noticeable at first glance because I didn’t mention the common trait that I saw between my claim about Owens and what happened with the Telegram founder. With all the context and the common trait laid out, it’s not a bad analogy. The interesting part of my brain was making the analogy in the first place to the Telegram founder’s dilemma. There was no mention of it at all during my hours long chat. But My brain found a common trait (press coverage) and made the analogy.

I trace the way I think to when I first discovered programming through Scratch, the online block-based code platform from a digital education class in middle school. I loved the logic. But logic in the form of programming can only make sense with context. Coders make sure that the data they’re manipulating is manipulated correctly based on context.

Most people don’t think verbally in their head as much as I do. When I read, I hear myself in my head (and it makes reading relatively, painfully slow). When I think, I hear myself in my head. When someone’s talking to me, I don’t think; the voices flood my brain. Then, I respond like an LLM using the words that entered my brain as a prompt (with no reasoning tokens) to output words. Subconsciously, there is some form of thought going on; I am able to generate intellectual responses. However, I stumble when elaborating those connections. My mouth can only speak so fast. My brain’s faulty short-term memory can only remember context for so long before a memory leak or running out of context to output more output tokens (short-term memory loss is genetic in my family). So I ramble statements and confuse my audience by completely omitting context on how I made connections. I make arguments but forget my thesis and start fumbling tangential statements.

It’s the mixture of losing track of what I’m saying from speaking in analogies too much and a bad short-term memory, my brain’s processing power being hindered due to the voice in my head, my likely above-average pattern matching ability, and my horrible personality trait of always feeling the urge to input whatever stupid thought come to my head makes for confusing conversations.

Funny Quote

For my future funny bone’s sake, here’s something random I jotted in my journal:

So [my gf] and I were laying opposite on the couch, and I was like “lemme be an alien” and “transmit” information. I saw there was alignment between the nostrils.

You know how you plug in a power cord into an old desktop, and it’s like 2 prong-ed. Ok, so that’s how I was thinking of “transmitting information” between the nose; because they perfectly fit sort of like plugging in a cord. But also, think about how you would do it; obviously you need to be lying down and one person’s nostril must face upward to actually have the two holes fit. So you would need to do some kind of Spiderman kiss but by noses. Finally, to transmit, you shoot your protein into the other person by sneezing. Because snot contains DNA, right?

If I have kids, and you’re reading this, here’s where your creativity, if you have some, partially come from. My craziness genetically come from my dad like the enormous usage of sticky notes which everyone but mom in the family does without each other noticing.

Concluding Thoughts

There’s more to how my brain functions, and a tad bit of my analysis of my brain shouldn’t be taken as consistently true. I believe my thinking is primarily subconscious and not aloud in my head, but I do think I think almost like an LLM. I invented a biohack on myself where, if I feel like I’m unable to respond, or I’m in a pressure cooker conversation, just saying any real word (except um) will kickstart my brain into thinking.

This blog is a memoir on my conversational and thinking problems before I eradicate them.

I’m slowly fixing my conversational skill through writing. I find writing therapeutic in that, as I improve through edits, I notice that the way I converse over time is becoming smoother. Recall that I hear my voice in my head when reading. Every word is audible not only when I read but also when I write. Thankfully, I’m not hindered when I write; it’s also how I know my thinking speed isn’t limited by the audible voice in my head since my typing is faster than what I’m saying aloud or vice versa occasionally.

I find it fascinating that I still read aloud in my head. It’s something you’re taught in kindergarten that I never graduated out of, apparently. I liked reading a lot growing up, so I’m not sure why the switch to subconscious, blocked reading never became canon.

A brief history on how the tangents may have come to be: I also liked YouTube, specifically infotainment. I’m no trivia nerd, but I did like learning about the most random facts in life in multiple topics (though not all). To this day, I’m learning random facts across dozens of YouTube channels weekly. Back when my Dad hogged the family-shared computer, I would read textbooks for fun. I’d read them over and over again until I memorized every little detail. I think that spirit of just reading something partially contributed to my habit of taking in as much information as possible to attain an ability to pattern match efficiently.

Speaking of efficiency, I also have hyperhidrosis which causes me to sweat a lot, making me prone to heat exhaustion. To reduce the discomfort, I seemed to like pattern matching, a shortcut for the brain to avoid having to think. I find the smartest friends of mine are those who are extremely logical, though oftentimes to the detriment of having a full spectrum of emotions. But their ability to think logically combined with a genetically predisposed, fast brain processing power not only makes them more able to be smart and formulate smart conclusions but also avoids the shortcuts that I take where I can trip over arguments by missing logical steps.

It’s just food for thought. I do think logically, but they come in the form of stacked, proven analogous stories. I think pattern matching is an inherent human trait that I have on overdrive and many smart people have muted.