I've always thought of myself as really slow mentally. It always baffles me when I see and hear people in an oral discussion come up with interesting thoughts while they are talking. For me it always takes a couple of days of silent contemplation to see the interesting implications of something.
When people talk to me I sometimes just can't hear what they're saying, but whatever it is I stash the sound of it somewhere in my head so I can focus on processing it once they stop talking. The problem is of course that often people don't stop talking and the stack gets higher and higher until the bottom falls out and I stop paying attention completely. And if there's a TV in the room, it'll suck me in before anyone even says a word, and they'll have to yell and wave to get me back.
But when it does work out, I can recall their entire monologue word for word. I can still recall some of the things people have told me as much as 15 years ago, word for word. (My memory is a total sieve for other things though.)
Regardless, I'm pretty capable of thinking "big thoughts", say a recurring closure and how it affects/relates to the scope chain, the call stack, the namespace chain (Ruby is weird this way), and maybe a couple other complicating dimensions. It just takes a while to think big thoughts (though I've developed a gut feel for navigating scopes and such by now and it's pretty much instant).
All that said, I'm pretty sure it works this way for more people.
Don't fret, some believe Da Vinci and Einstein were the same way.
It's people like you that come up with the most worthwhile and well thought out ideas.
People like me (rapid prototyping/speedy hashers of ideas) are mostly useless. It's beyond words difficult for me to put feet to floor and completely formulate, systematize, and write out a philosophical idea.
I come up with neat ideas, but they die just as quickly.
I systematized the entirety of order and chaos once, connected it with primitive human origins, and have mostly let it lie and do nothing for example.
When people talk to me I sometimes just can't hear what they're saying, but whatever it is I stash the sound of it somewhere in my head so I can focus on processing it once they stop talking. The problem is of course that often people don't stop talking and the stack gets higher and higher until the bottom falls out and I stop paying attention completely. And if there's a TV in the room, it'll suck me in before anyone even says a word, and they'll have to yell and wave to get me back.
But when it does work out, I can recall their entire monologue word for word. I can still recall some of the things people have told me as much as 15 years ago, word for word. (My memory is a total sieve for other things though.)
Regardless, I'm pretty capable of thinking "big thoughts", say a recurring closure and how it affects/relates to the scope chain, the call stack, the namespace chain (Ruby is weird this way), and maybe a couple other complicating dimensions. It just takes a while to think big thoughts (though I've developed a gut feel for navigating scopes and such by now and it's pretty much instant).
All that said, I'm pretty sure it works this way for more people.