I think most people don't think about what they think about.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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And it shows.
I was told “still waters run deep” but sometimes still waters are just… still.
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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
The barb is mostly meant to aid in staying attached while injecting venom and is meant to still be able to release by twisting
Human skin is more elastic than bee's typical adversaries and the singer becomes stuck when they try to release. It you wait a while and let them try to pull it out carefully without hurting themselves, they might end up going in circles until it works its way free
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woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
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?
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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.
Neurotypical here and yeah my brain often works this way and I believe it does for many others. What’s missing in this vignette are social skills from both parties.
Abruptly shifting topics like that often works better in a conversation with some sort of segue or acknowledgment of the shift: “This is off of that topic but I have a random question.”
The second party could reasonably be confused but when the thought process was explained to them they could have just accepted it and moved on without being denigrating.
So they both just need better social skills is all that I see.
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This seems right. Their mind wanders, too, but they don't mention the tangents that come up, or if they do, they specifically state why they're now thinking about the new topic.
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David Hume wrote about this exact thing in (I think) an enquiry concerning human understanding.
Essentially he said all thoughts come from 3 processes:
Cause and effect - think of smoke so think of fire etc.
Continuity in time and/or place - think of kettle so think of toaster etc.
Resemblance - think of a photo so think of the person etc.
The above example would be continuity in place, the carnival lead to thoughts in the same place.
Also cause and effect...why do bees die but wasps not?
Actually possibly resemblance too, as bees and wasps look similar.
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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.
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I'm pretty sure this is how all humans think..things relate to one another.
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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
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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.
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.
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As soon as I saw "carnival" and "wasps," I understood the connection immediately.
We call them "fair bees"; they are drunk and aggressively non-violent about drinking your daiquiri, as well as rummaging through every trash can. Never been stung by one, but they can be aggravating sometimes cause they won't leave me or my drink alone... like any obnoxious drunk, really
So I can see how you can get to thinking about wasps from "carnival". The "fair bees" definitely remind me of wasps being assholes
Yeah, any outdoor environment with food involved immediately brings to mind yellowjacket/bee/wasp type insects not leaving sugary drinks alone.
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?
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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!