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Overflowing with thoughts; at a loss for words

This is the first of hopefully multiple posts describing how I’ve experienced my brain change throughout my late twenties. Around the time I turned 26, I started to feel like I was getting dumber. Needless to say, this precipitated many a panicked Google search about “mid 20s declining neuroplasticity” and so forth. As I’ve gained more life experience, I’ve recontextualized a lot of these changes in more value-neutral terms, while also realizing they are more descriptively interesting than mere “cognitive decline.” I remember wishing other people had written more about their personal experiences figuring out their brains, so here’s mine.

My flute teacher always joked that I was “never at a loss for words.” In college, my first-year advisor urged me to declare an English major after reading my papers. When I was contemplating the possibility of repeating tenth grade, my dismal adolescent self-worth was held together by effusive encouragement from a handful of debate coaches who believed I had talent, the first affirmation I’d received from any high school educator.

Since I was a child, people have generally read me as a heavily verbal, cerebral person: it turns out that if you speak quickly enough, with a sufficiently diverse vocabulary, and have not-insipid things to say, observers will conclude that you must be operating some kind of robot brain with great command of language. Often, communicative precision gets mistaken for rationality: therapists routinely worry I am overintellectualizing problems, coworkers tap me for a dispassionate perspective, one of my clinical evaluations describes my “limited affective range.” Unsurprisingly, I accepted and identified with all of these labels from a young age, and all of my metacognitive reflections tacitly assumed my own preference for cerebral, verbal processing modalities.

As I get older, I am starting to realize these typologies do not really describe my grown-up thought process. Even calling it a “thought process” feels premature, since it more closely resembles some kind of deeply-embodied fountain of feeling-thought-plasma than any kind of structured internal monologue. Whenever I talk to people, or read a paper, or form judgments of any kind, the fountain immediately starts spewing feeling-thought-plasma everywhere, and it’s up to me to capture some volume before it all condenses back into recirculation (here I am presuming a great deal about how both fountains and plasma work). But even if I manage to grab some of the plasma, it’s nowhere close to the kind of “solid” matter that I could present to another party for consideration. I am not impugning the clarity of my ideas, or their degree of comprehensibility/refinement. I mean that I quite literally have no clue how to turn this fully-formed congealment of thoughts and feelings into any medium with a measurable information content.

I don’t know how this works for everyone else, so here’s an example: suppose I’m engaged in a back-and-forth with a knowledgeable interlocutor on a reasonably nuanced topic, say, baseball or the desired behavior of a particular programming language construct or why a particular person we both know behaves the way they do. Or suppose I’m reading a blog post that lays out a multifaceted argument in favor of some proposal. As soon as I understand what the person is saying (which is very much not a given), an entire response—at once enthusiastic partial agreement, hesitant elaboration, and multi-subpoint refutation framed by indignation—materializes all at once within my body in pre-linguistic form, and I feel overwhelmed trying to even capture it for myself, let alone convey it to another party. In practice, this usually manifests as me staring into space while speaking comically slowly, or stammering and replacing words with noises which, in my head, capture the underlying emotion and therefore both denotation and connotation, but to everyone else just sound like a person pretending to be a bird. A far cry from the supposedly “articulate” communication my teachers once commended!

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to describe my experience as “word brain atrophied and this ruined everything.” Instead, I am trying to capture a more qualitative shift in how I think, or at least my awareness of how I think, from “mostly verbal” to “mostly pre-linguistic and actually quite demanding to render linguistic.” It’s been neither strictly positive nor negative: when I am working through concepts in my own head, with no arrears to legibility, I really enjoy the sense of fluidity conferred by the pre-linguistic phase. My brain moves fast. I still get stuck quite a bit, but generally due to valid misconceptions or the inherent difficulty of the material, rather than the viscosity of the medium.

On the other hand, there are a lot of functional challenges with this style of thinking. Since each thought is fully-formed, complex, and (dis)appears at the slightest perturbation or within milliseconds, whichever is sooner, it’s impossible to process anything without sacrificing enormous nuance and/or dropping the last 30-70% of the thought entirely. (I once spoke on a panel answering various questions about early-career decisionmaking. Afterwards, one student approached me to ask why I always numbered my answers into two distinct points. I hadn’t noticed this at all, but eventually realized that the numbering was a desperate attempt to preserve the structure of my response as it originally materialized, while stopping at “two” reflected my inability to remember anything past that.) Moreover, oftentimes the thought in its primitive form is so structurally convoluted that simply taking the first 30% yields something completely unintelligible, not just a sentence fragment but closer to a malformed tree. Now I’ve lost the train before it has even left the station, but the original thought in all its richness tantalizes me from the aether, and it becomes an obsession like a word on the tip of one’s tongue—a relentless fixation, a source of near-dysphoria.

Speaking of emotions, they’re really hard to disentangle from the “thoughts,” to the extent such a separation is even possible. For better or worse, I tend to experience both positive and negative emotions much more intensely than others I’ve asked. Here, the intensity plays a critical function: it’s hard to translate thoughts into words, but easier to translate into feelings, which are also more memorable. Unfortunately, if I only retain the feelings but not the constitutive thoughts, I wind up frustrated: grasping at a phantom limb, mildly embarrassed about how strongly I feel without any explanation (even for myself)—and, naturally, unable to explain any of this to the person I’m speaking to :)

All of this presents surprising difficulty when participating in conversations (especially, counterintuitively, the ones where I have relevant expertise), gossiping about a complex social dynamic, or even answering the question “how have you been?” which is the easiest way to stunlock me. In fact, this kind of overwhelmed inability to verbalize—and I mean this in a general sense, not just “vocalize” or “write” but to formulate using language—has increasingly become the norm since I graduated college, which is why I rarely blog or write threads or answer other people’s questions even when I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time pondering them. As much as I’ve tried to avoid value judgments in this post, I do really rue this communicative barrier, because it limits my ability to contribute in the way I’d like: as a researcher, specialist overthinker, and general digitally-mediated quasi-recluse. I want to see the internet as a borderless platform for the dissemination and exchange of conceptual richness. Instead, I mostly produce 160-character shitposts.

Oddly, when push comes to shove, I can still produce quite decent writing in both scientific and more ornate (“English major-y”) styles, and every now and again someone will remark on the eloquence of an in-person contribution of mine. I haven’t completely lost my tongue, to the assured chagrin of my haters. But more and more, I spend the bulk of my waking hours consumed by ideas, tickled by and gallivanting in their magnificence, then struggling to externalize them. Even this blog post took ages to write, despite consisting exclusively of navel-gazing that I’ve had ample time to contemplate over the years.

A few miscellaneous concluding observations:

Recency bias is always possible, but I definitely think this phenomenon has become more pronounced over time. I can’t tell whether it’s because my command of language is eroding (making it harder to shape the slurry of instincts, feelings, and plasma into something cogent), my thoughts have simply become more complex as I grow up and learn more about the world, or a combination of both.
Rehearsal (not necessarily speaking, just mental verbalization of ideas) drastically mitigates the problem, so my oral presentations are generally unaffected, while casual conversations are tactically nuked. Between these two mediums, I’m actually not sure which one I’d rather retain.
Novel thoughts produce exponentially more verbal hesitation. So, affective frustration notwithstanding, it’s actually a good sign for me if I’m finding myself frequently at a loss for words—it means the conversation is pushing me to enunciate ideas I don’t have a lot of practice enunciating! Typically this means I’m formulating new ideas or thinking about something I hadn’t heretofore considered. Of course, this is a one-sided view, because my lack of responsiveness is probably much worse for my conversational partner.
I think the “plasma fountain” style of cognition is a big part of why I get along with mathematicians, despite my own paltry background. Moreso than other disciplines I’ve encountered, mathematics has a distinctly vibes-driven terroir, and everyone implicitly knows this. So I don’t have to spend time re-explaining myself, and generally there’s much less of an impedance mismatch.