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Comment by a_gopher | Hacker News Reader

If reading aloud a children story, you may notice you are able to maintain an independent unrelated train of thought. While doing so, I notice that occasionally extra mistakes can "leak" into the story telling - e.g. you read a single word incorrectly, maybe substituting a word from your other train of thought.

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When I was a kid, my dad (a physicist) would often read stories to me and my brother. He would sometimes fall asleep while reading, and we could tell when that was coming because suddenly our children's story would stop making sense and get filled with all these big physics terms.

Somewhat related, but when I was sleep deprived and falling asleep during a general relativity lecture in college, I caught myself reasoning through the series of equations written by the professor on the board, and agreeing as to their validity with the explanation in my mind being that my parents are in a foreign country. My brain was convinced it had logically checked the progression and that it made sense, but it was based on this irrelevant fact. The experience always makes me wonder what falsehoods we individually or collectively use to convince ourselves of things being true.

Oh yeah, I have been sleep deprived so much that the things that I said made no sense. I still formulated sentences but they did not have any meaning. In fact, I noticed this myself and I was like "fuck, what I just said made no sense". This happened a few times. It is a pretty interesting experience.

I had the same experience after almost 4+ days going without sleep. A friend came to check up on me after I fell asleep, I woke up and started telling him a whole story that made no sense, but I said it with such importance that for a week he was asking me to explain to him what I meant...which I don't remember exactly, but it was important.

So, sleep deprivation leads to temporary schizophrenia? Who could have foreseen this?

Sleep scientists and drill instructors!

This sometimes happens to me when I get a migraine.

A sentence can be coherent in the formulaic sense, but complete nonsense as far as words. I immediately notice that it's incorrect, but I don't have the ability to fix it at that moment.

Yes! I immediately noticed that what I said was wrong (even though the word I said still felt somehow connected to the thought I was trying to communicate). I was really worried at first when it happened because at the first time I had no idea sleep deprivation would cause this, or that I would experience it.

I had no idea migraine causes this as well, interesting.

That is an amazing sleep indicator: once the rabbit starts discussing thermodynamics, dad has left the building

The ability of the brain to do that gives me 15 min of quiet time to think about problems each evening. But you cannot follow the story in that mode, and the whole facade will collapse on a single innocent question...

> "Dad, why did he steal the biycle?!?!"

> ".... what?"

In school, our teachers made us take turns reading the textbook. When it was my turn, I focused entirely on how my voice sounded, trying to match my cadence and tone to the punctuation. The moment I finished the paragraph, I would have to quickly re-read it in silence just to understand what it actually said.

I think I still can't read a non-trivial text aloud while trying to make sense of it at the same time. I need the two streams just for one text.

I can do that, and i notice that i kinda stop thinking about the reading and put more "brain resources" into the independent train of thought. Then i realize i was reading all the time without putting any effort in it

Yeah it's like I suddenly realise I haven't been thinking about the reading and I'm near the bottom of the next page somehow.

I am reading dozens of books to my children (mostly of Enid Blyton) and I am able to simultaneously think about something else (work stuff, household, HN subjects etc). It lasts a few minutes during which I don't follow what I am reading and I come back and need to start again. Definitely the phonological loop (eyes...mouth) functions independently from the memory-processing-executive cognitive pathway.

I learned at a young age the best way for me to be a good out-loud reader was to think about something else while I'm reading aloud. If I concentrate on the words and the reading aloud I screw up but if I think about other things, even HOW I'm doing while reading or thinking about what I'm reading and going to say NEXT, then I can read aloud flawlessly.

I can have an internal monologue about something completely unrelated to the story while reading it out aloud, but I won't be able to follow the story. I don't think I make mistakes, but I probably fail to put the correct intonation on sentences which require higher order thinking to infer the emotions of the characters in the story.

Interlinked.

Well, perhaps sadly, I maintain trains of thought unrelated to my environment all the time. It's because the default state of the world is so incredibly.. bland I really, really cannot take it without something going on.

The reading task can stay largely automatic until both streams try to use the same speech-production machinery at once

or any other reading for that matter!

I definitely cannot do that. Crazy.

The ability may take time to develop. If you have a couple under-5 children handy, who'd love the ritual of having the same ultra-simplistic and repetitive books read to them every night, night after night after night, when your head is probably full of grownup stuff that you gotta get done...

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