4 ms·
I definitely have an issue where composing English sentences takes a little bit of working memory, and if I'm concentrating on a task that can't spare that one
by KMag 4y ago
I definitely have an issue where composing English sentences takes a little bit of working memory, and if I'm concentrating on a task that can't spare that one or two items of working memory, and someone insists on talking to me, I end up speaking a jumble of English words (and sometimes non-word English sounds) back to them and waving my hands to indicate I can't be distracted, and I'm aware that I'm not making sense. It's the only way I have come up with to try and convey that I'm not ignoring them to try and be rude, but composing a meaningful utterance will force me to throw away a lot of mental work.
In college, I was once concentrating on some Mechanical Engineering homework in the fraternity library late at night. One of my fraternity brothers asked me "What did you just say?". Me: "nothing. I'm working". Him: "No, you said 'Noun?' and you said it like a question.". I'd apparently had a language center missfire while co-opting some language working memory to work on a 3d spatial reasoning problem.