I Must Be Crazy - Tumblr Posts

"Say that again...?"

You know those moments when someone says something and you're not paying attention? My brain somehow has a fix for that. Obviously the easy way is to ask what the person said and wait for an answer, but of course I'm weird and I don't just do that. When I say "What?" I'm not always looking for an answer; it's usually buffer time so I can reconstruct the sentence in my head.

What my brain does is actually timeshift the input and play it back again within the span of a few milliseconds. I'm essentially rehearing it, even if I wasn't paying full attention the first time. I'm not quite sure how my brain does this, considering it often couldn't hear/wasn't listening at the time - where does it get the memory from? Even if I missed the whole sentence and not just part of it, it can still miraculously reconstruct it.

If the process succeeds, then, to the person I'm talking to, it seems like I just said "What?" and answered like nothing happened. If it doesn't succeed, and I end up with pieces and parts of a sentence, my brain keeps trying (usually three or four times) until the other person answers me.

I don't know why or how I do this, but it even affects repeat offenses; if I didn't hear it again, then I wait longer to ask, so that I have more time to reconstruct it. I don't like asking more than once, because I feel like it's annoying the other person, so I try harder to reconstruct so that it's not necessary to ask twice.

This is all automatic by the way - I'm not actively doing this. But I can't be the only one who does this, right? I'm not crazy, right? Right?