This may not apply to everyone - I know I’m not the only one who is constantly reviewing recent conversations and having hypothetical new ones in my head. I realized today that the amount of these mental ‘threads’ I might be thinking about over the course of, say, any given half an hour in the day, seems pretty high. In addition, I’m sometimes thinking about discussions here on the board, dialogue from movies or books, things that happened many years ago, or just flights of fancy. Friends have indicated similar tendencies.
I’m curious how familiar this sounds to y’all, and what the structure/depth/amount of your mental conversational threads is like. I’d say I probably think hard about at least five conversations a day, and think at all about dozens of others, if not more.
I’ve probably got 5 going at any given time. Parenting, School, Work, Bills, Friends, Cooking, SDMB, Books, Movies, Household Repairs, Etc, Etc, on and on and on. I’ve got what Pop Psychologists call Restless Mind Syndrom. The old bean just keeps going and going and going, non-stop. Every waking moment. It usually takes me a couple hours to fall asleep, if I wake at night, it can take me hours to get back to sleep. I just can’t stop thinking about… well… everything.
When I’m at work, I’m usually thinking about two things: what I’m actually doing, and what I’d rather be doing. I talk on the phone a lot, and I can carry on entire conversations, with polite jokes!, while the whole time thinking about something else that sometimes includes hypothetical conversations.
At home I tend to have maybe three total, adding maybe thinking about wnaboy or books or something else to cooking dinner and thinking about what I’m going to do the rest of the night.
I also usually have two songs stuck in my head, either one over the other, or them switching off back and forth.
And yes, sometimes they are conversation based. But it doesn’t sound like I think like you, b/c I don’t do very many of those. You sound like you might think a little bit more before you speak than me. Not that that would be any great accomplishment, as I have foot-in-mouth disease.
I’d say quite a few, switching back and forth often. If I had to catalogue them: What I’m doing, what I want to be doing, what I will be doing and whatever conversation I’m in. I tend to blurt out non sequiturs all the time, so I know my brain isn’t following the same smooth path as everyone else.
Wearing hearing aids helps a lot, in that I can tune out what’s around me.
Yeah, there’s always a few. I’d say at least two hypothetical 'I might possibly have this conversation one day’, one 'a good chance I’ll be having a conversation like this sometime soon’, a few more random 'just-me conversations with imaginary people because it’s unlikely I’ll ever actually have them’ plus some re-hashes of conversations past.
This can also include things like ‘what I would post in that SD thread I read this morning (if I weren’t so lazy) and the possible responses’.
