I'll preface this by saying I know this may sound entirely made up, unscientific, anecdotal, naive, or adolescent even, but luckily nobody has to believe me...
A few weeks back I was in that limbo state where you're neither fully awake nor fully asleep and for some reason I got into a cycle where I could notice my fast-thinking brain spitting out words/concepts in what felt like the speed of light before my slow-thinking brain would take those and turn them into actual sentences
It was like I was seeing my chain of thought as a list of ideas that was filled impossibly fast before it got summarized into a proper "thought" as a carefully selected list of words
I have since believed, as others have suggested in much more cogent arguments before me, that what we perceive as our thoughts are, indeed, a curated output of the brainstormy process that immediately precedes it
A few weeks back I was in that limbo state where you're neither fully awake nor fully asleep and for some reason I got into a cycle where I could notice my fast-thinking brain spitting out words/concepts in what felt like the speed of light before my slow-thinking brain would take those and turn them into actual sentences
It was like I was seeing my chain of thought as a list of ideas that was filled impossibly fast before it got summarized into a proper "thought" as a carefully selected list of words
I have since believed, as others have suggested in much more cogent arguments before me, that what we perceive as our thoughts are, indeed, a curated output of the brainstormy process that immediately precedes it