A bit tangential, but for the longest time I've had a lexical gap for 'the personality trait which psychoticism sounds like it should mean but doesn't'; I'm pleased to learn there's an actual word I can use!
One of the things that always strikes me with questions about how you think or perceive the world is that most people have no comparison point - and to the extent that one can kind of compare with other people, the nature of bubbles mean that you won't ever be comparing yourself to an "average" person - your family shares your genes and your friends are probably actively selected for being "like you" in some way.
How rich is an inner world, 'normally'? How complex and meaningful are other people's thoughts?
I think people tend to get loose impressions of these things (I recall you doing so in the past). The "richness/complexity" questions are a little intentionally leaning-into-it -- they should load on having a very *high* self-image/thinking especially *well* of the way you think, which ime seems pretty common for people who think in unusual ways but that scales tend to veer right in the opposite direction of ("do you wish you could change all your terrible and useless thoughts, you useless piece of shit?"). At the very least, people's impressions of how Rich and Meaningful their thoughts are seem to correlate with other measures of creativity/internal complexity/etc.
In particular, it does broadly seem the case that very neurodivergent people end up with "I guess everyone else's world is just Not Good Enough compared to mine, and they're all jealous of my far more meaningful and sophisticated reality" ideas. This gets e.g. memetically mocked as the kind of autistic person who basically thinks anyone who uses subtext ever has simply just not ascended to the superiority of never using subtext ever. In the schizotypal variant, "I guess it's just that other people are sheep and insufficiently creative and unique", uh, checks out as a perception people end up having or expressing, independently of its real-world accuracy.
"Traits with extreme interpersonal variance across a fairly consistent spectrum, and also rarely extreme *intra*personal variance for sometimes-understood and sometimes-not reasons" is a hell of a thing, yeah. The non-hallucinatory experiences all sound disorganized (they all sound like things I'm internally familiar with) in ways that I'm not sure are easily distinguished in people who have any given one of them regularly. Psychology's big problem is this lack of phenomenology -- the biomedical-model "revolution" of the mid-20th century really strangled the opportunity for a good phenomenological idea of psychiatric labels before we had the right tools for it. Internally, though, enough disparate descriptions *seem* fitting -- people who score very high or low on one scale for something weird and subjective (like schizotypy) seem to do so on others, and all your different descriptions track to things that feel "broad-cluster disorganization" first-hand when I phenomenalize myself that way.
Given not everyone who has a psychotic or near-psychotic experience is unambiguously "a schizotype", there do seem to be multiple paths, but schizotypy is the classic one. I think current standards misdiagnose most drug-induced psychosis as schizophrenia or bipolar, especially in the DSM-5 era, which totally dropped the last vestiges of "maybe we shouldn't profligately diagnose everyone with mania".
Re personal anecdotes, this reminds me that I used to (or once believed that I previously had, we're well into mories of memories here), as a child, have multiple simultaneous trains of thought, of which I was only ever conscious of one at a time, but if I switched tracks after eg. 10 mins then I'd be 10 mins further along the new train of thought, they kept going while not in focus. This was quite useful for egm solving puzzles - I could read the problem, think about something else, then switch back to the puzzle though chain and just have the solution waiting for me.
I think schooling actively destroyed this IMO useful ability, because the insistence on writing down every step of the working rather than just skipping to the (correct) answer was incompatible with letting my consciousness switch to a different thought track
A bit tangential, but for the longest time I've had a lexical gap for 'the personality trait which psychoticism sounds like it should mean but doesn't'; I'm pleased to learn there's an actual word I can use!
One of the things that always strikes me with questions about how you think or perceive the world is that most people have no comparison point - and to the extent that one can kind of compare with other people, the nature of bubbles mean that you won't ever be comparing yourself to an "average" person - your family shares your genes and your friends are probably actively selected for being "like you" in some way.
How rich is an inner world, 'normally'? How complex and meaningful are other people's thoughts?
I think people tend to get loose impressions of these things (I recall you doing so in the past). The "richness/complexity" questions are a little intentionally leaning-into-it -- they should load on having a very *high* self-image/thinking especially *well* of the way you think, which ime seems pretty common for people who think in unusual ways but that scales tend to veer right in the opposite direction of ("do you wish you could change all your terrible and useless thoughts, you useless piece of shit?"). At the very least, people's impressions of how Rich and Meaningful their thoughts are seem to correlate with other measures of creativity/internal complexity/etc.
In particular, it does broadly seem the case that very neurodivergent people end up with "I guess everyone else's world is just Not Good Enough compared to mine, and they're all jealous of my far more meaningful and sophisticated reality" ideas. This gets e.g. memetically mocked as the kind of autistic person who basically thinks anyone who uses subtext ever has simply just not ascended to the superiority of never using subtext ever. In the schizotypal variant, "I guess it's just that other people are sheep and insufficiently creative and unique", uh, checks out as a perception people end up having or expressing, independently of its real-world accuracy.
"Traits with extreme interpersonal variance across a fairly consistent spectrum, and also rarely extreme *intra*personal variance for sometimes-understood and sometimes-not reasons" is a hell of a thing, yeah. The non-hallucinatory experiences all sound disorganized (they all sound like things I'm internally familiar with) in ways that I'm not sure are easily distinguished in people who have any given one of them regularly. Psychology's big problem is this lack of phenomenology -- the biomedical-model "revolution" of the mid-20th century really strangled the opportunity for a good phenomenological idea of psychiatric labels before we had the right tools for it. Internally, though, enough disparate descriptions *seem* fitting -- people who score very high or low on one scale for something weird and subjective (like schizotypy) seem to do so on others, and all your different descriptions track to things that feel "broad-cluster disorganization" first-hand when I phenomenalize myself that way.
Given not everyone who has a psychotic or near-psychotic experience is unambiguously "a schizotype", there do seem to be multiple paths, but schizotypy is the classic one. I think current standards misdiagnose most drug-induced psychosis as schizophrenia or bipolar, especially in the DSM-5 era, which totally dropped the last vestiges of "maybe we shouldn't profligately diagnose everyone with mania".
Re personal anecdotes, this reminds me that I used to (or once believed that I previously had, we're well into mories of memories here), as a child, have multiple simultaneous trains of thought, of which I was only ever conscious of one at a time, but if I switched tracks after eg. 10 mins then I'd be 10 mins further along the new train of thought, they kept going while not in focus. This was quite useful for egm solving puzzles - I could read the problem, think about something else, then switch back to the puzzle though chain and just have the solution waiting for me.
I think schooling actively destroyed this IMO useful ability, because the insistence on writing down every step of the working rather than just skipping to the (correct) answer was incompatible with letting my consciousness switch to a different thought track