I’m not sure whether you have this kind of experience. You are a Mandarin native speaker, and you are also a person who has ADHD. You feel like your thinking speed is like lightning fast. It was like so fast that your tongue or your hand cannot even capture your thinking. Your mind was like a genie, or frankly, like a fly, flying in your mother’s kitchen. You are chasing it hard, but you can hardly be close to it. You can’t even hear the voice.
As a Mandarin native speaker, also an ADHD child, this is my everyday experience. I get a lot of ideas every single day, but it’s so hard for me to capture them all. It’s kind of like a vibe, or even a series of music. They’re so beautiful, but when you want to share that music with your friends, you can’t even describe it, or even hum them out. It’s too abstract and too… multi-dimensional. You can only show your friend one side of it, but the size of the “document” is too big, so your friend, in every single time,can’t get your idea.
I tried to jot those ideas down in Mandarin, but the same problem. My hands are too slow. Even with Typeless, I actually only need to type by chatting to my laptop. My hands and tongue are still too slow for me. My mind generates content too fast, too fast for me to write them down at all once, in a classic newsletter format. Nobody else can ever know what I am writing, even myself. Even I got generative AI as my tool, kind of like RuYi. It’s a scratching stick held by Buddha, for him to scratch his back. After the existence of generative AI, I love using AI to generate articles, journals, or even essays. The experience is just too nice, too good to be true. It helps my writing rephrase 80% of my thinking.
I create a lot of pieces of work (you can call it AI slops lol) using generative AI. But I still think that there’s something wrong. It’s getting weird for me to keep creating with generative AI. Until Iran drops a bomb on the AWS server in the Gulf States, it shuts down Anthropic’s Claude service all of a sudden, I feel like I’m so fragile when I’m doing creation. But at the same time, I realized that it’s a great opportunity for me to rethink my creative process. What is the main problem?
I’ve just finished my shower, and I just did a tiny experiment for myself. My hypothesis is that the reason that my creations by my hand can’t fully represent my feelings and expressions in my mind is that my thinking is too fast.
I’m currently reading a book called “More Than Words” by Maryellen Macdonald. Her claim is that the world that each of us perceives is unique; everyone’s “world” is different; “world” in our head is compiled by our thinking, and thinking is being compiled by “talking”. Talking plays an interesting role in this kind of situation because she said that our mind “talks” all the time throughout our life. When you’re reading, even if you didn’t make any sound, the brain parts that are in charge of talking are still working. So the exhaustion of reading is actually the same as talking, also the same as thinking.
Following this point, the pain point that I’m currently facing is that my thinking speed is too fast; that also means that my brain is always talking, talking too fast. So why not just slow down my thinking speed and the problem will naturally be solved?
It’s such a great idea. Now I just have to find a way to slow down my thinking speed. At the same time, my friend just said that he’s going to take the IELTS test this spring. It reminds me that I should prepare for the IELTS test since I want to study abroad in the future, but I always procrastinate it because writing and speaking always challenge me a lot. I can’t even write down a paragraph on the test paper. According to the book by McDonald PhD, I think I found the reason why because my thinking is too fast, and my thinking is processed in Mandarin. It takes me a lot of effort to translate it into the English alphabet. I even cannot handwrite a proper article in Mandarin. How can I write down a proper article in English?
So I just did an experiment during my shower, and that is “replace my thinking language from Mandarin to English”. Surprisingly, it works pretty well! My thinking is being slower than normal. I can capture my thinking by using my tongue and hands, entirely with context, without AI slops! My hands eventually can reach the speed of my thinking, thankfully. Although there’re still lots of mistakes like grammar, phrases, and vocabularies, I don’t even think that I can earn a band 7 by submitting this article. But I think it’s a good start!
When you think that you’re thinking too fast, maybe you can try switching your thinking language or just talking in a different language in your mind.