Brain thinking without telling me?

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Sometimes I notice how some part of me works away at a problem or analyzes a situation while I am concentrating my conscious thoughts on something else entirely. Those "deep-level" thought processes seem to take place very slowly but they are generally those that yield the most valuable insights to me.

It is a bit similar to my laptop being busy with processing the forums, some game I keep to the side, the newsfeed and a number of other things and still managing to snatch a bit of a Windows update whenever some ressources are available for doing so, but only notifying me about that update once it's downloaded completely.

I really get the impression that my brain does a good bit of thinking without involving me and only feeding the results to me when it is done. Sometimes I can feel that there is some thought process going on in the background, taking hours or days to complete while I am going on with my life, but sometimes new insights seem to pop up out of nowhere.

Has anyone here made similar experiences and would like to share them?

Yeah. This skill let me to speak the prayers in the church and analyse those fascinating angles in the windows or to make statistics in the same time. And somewhere deep inside my mind processed another thoughts without my consciousness. And when it had a conclusion, it let me know.

Yes and it is a thought without words, as soon as we try to describe anything it comes to the foreground. I deeply rely on that way of thinking

I know the more detached i become from certain things the more I'm able to handle. I don't necessaryly try to detach it is somewhat an automatic response. I know that in times of stress I'm not sure what i am thinking or feeling at all... then all of the sudden there is a solution, realization, or new perspective that hits me quite suddenly out of nowhere.
That is a very interesting concept... if i understood it correctly.

I have noticed myself that those deep-lying thoughts need their time to be completed and that the less I try to poke at them the more effective my brain will work on this level. Trying to put those thoughts into words before the time for it has come can completely disrupt the process and destroy all the results that have been gained up to that point. It's almost as if this special kind of thoughts can be scared away by too much attention.

Like I tried to express above, it is almost as if my brain and me were working in parallel, exchanging things and helping each other with processing the input from the outside world. Sometimes it is almost like my brain and me were two independent entities sharing the same body and living in a very productive symbiosis.

Pretty normal for me, if I need to think of something which happend a long time back it takes a while before my brain gets back on that - It's like it has to look in the archives and needs time to sort it out.

I suppose it has to do with long-term and short-term memory. I think Information you use regularly or are a priority to you is "preloaded" so you don't have to ponder constantly to get the direly needed information.
Information collected in your youth is better fixed then collected later, I like to compare it to aging cheese: The older it gets, the tougher it gets to form new addition on it.

I take a while to digest new information, the more fundamental to my being it goes the longer it takes to digest.

I would have said: we play with our own fear not to tap into these thoughts. It's kind of funny actually

I think it has something to do with our memory. When I was studying, I was able to memorize lots of complex information (like the full Krebs Cycle) by reading it twice with an extreme structured attention. I was then trying not to think of it at all, I would bring what I memorized back at the moment I needed. The information always went out perfectly well, but I could extract it within 2 days. After two days it was completely forgotten.

FluffyDog, are you aware of the input before the process?

Actually I think one problem we spectrum people tend to have is doing too much conscious thinking.

Most of the time I become aware of the deeper thinking processes only after they have started, but I can figure out what general subject they are about. I cannot, however, put my finger on which piece of input triggered this particular thought. It seems like my brain mostly processes information that has been collected earlier and/or over a longer period of time that now gets ruminated over. Seems my brain has some similarities to a cow.
But like rumination in a cow I don't think I could draw the same amount of information and insights from the input processed in the deep-level thoughts.

I'd say that I am mostly aware of an input that is likely to trigger a deep-level thought (in many cases it is situations where I make a social mistake or get confused by what is going on around me), but my brain only starts to work away on that input (and in many cases other individual bits of experiences I have made that are in some way related to the specific input) a while later, so there is no obvious connection between the thought and the trigger until afterwards when I get the results handed to me by my brain and I can then puzzle out where this particular insight came from.

Mostly, I am aware of my deep-level thoughts in the form of "Oh, I am working on how I was so very insecure when I was talking to my prof about that homework that's nearing it's deadline." Maybe later I will get the information that I dislike the person who wrote the paper I used for that homework and that was what made it difficult to keep working on it and I will come to see how this is an issue I have been dealing with in the past as well and that has significally hampered my academic progress and that I had better simply use the paper and ignore the information of who has written it. The trigger in this case might have been another student mentioning that he doesn't even know whether the author of the paper is a Brit or an American. Just to give you an example of the kinds of insights that get provided by my brain.

Whenever I play a game, I'll have other thoughts going on in my head and I'll almost be playing the game on autopilot. Funnily enough, I almost always play better like that.

I believe that a brain, which always speaks up, would be more on the schizo end of the spectrum.

The Angry Archiver

So it is not what I was thinking of.

I really tried to remember when I had this buzzing sound of my mind thinking of something I was not aware of. That are the only cases I can think of:
- When I have a deep sense that something is wrong and I don't know why, it comes back and forth until I get an hypothesis
- I have no answer to something specific, but I don't care and I almost forget it until something else reminds me of an hypothesis
- Clearly asking a question or stating a sentence and throwing it to my subconscious, an answer or a reminder may pop anytime (my favorite, bombarding the brain with questions)
But none of this has been significant enough to realize it was existing until now.

This comes to my mind:
If something does not come to your conscious thinking, (and it is not a trauma) it just means that the knowledge of the processing is completely useless at the moment. So it would make sense.
For the memory, it is certain that anything that we experience and sense takes at most 20 minutes to be processed and stored in the long term memory, maybe it takes some significance when an experience is replaced in context? But that is pure speculation

Sometimes, I'm fixating unconsciously and feel great relief at the eureka moment.

At other times, I hear things I don't want to hear.

While I have awkward social graces without great effort, I have usually been sane enough to know what should seem like a hallucination.

When I was much younger, i wasn't worried about my mind, but thought my eyes would need to be operated on.

I'm of the opinion that normal calm, detached trance, dissociation, and loss of ego all probably exist somewhere on the same spectrum.

Just to be clear on this point, I do not perceive my brain as actually talking to me. Neither are there any voices in my head.

It is more like my brain takes care of the day-to-day running of the body, like keeping the body temperature constant and making me aware that it's high time to put some food into my stomach and it does that mostly nonverbal deep-level thinking. Then there is me as I perceive myself as a person. I would also agree to call this part the mind. I make the decisions, I do most of the conscious thinking, I decide which activities to partake in and thus I am more or less responsible for getting input to keep me and my brain busy.
Every now and then some bit of information my brain has worked out happens to be transferred into my thoughts. It's more like a file being moved to a different directory than actual direct communication.

I would say my brain is the hardware setup and such programm components as the BIOS, but that I (my mind, whatever...) am running the applications. I could not survive without all those silent little services my brain provides for me, but if I were removed from the body, the brain and the body could probably live on in a state much closer to an animal than our present state.
I don't feel like a mere passenger in my body either; my brain and me work together quite smoothly and I acutally appreciate the information my brain provides me with. It really is like sharing the body with another, very friendly entity. It's not as if I were worried about this, I simply wanted to know how common this kind of self-perception is.

What SuperApsie wrote is very similar to my own thoughts on the matter. I think those are some additional aspects of the whole thing.

Brain thinking without telling me? Yes, have experienced that. A number of years ago the process was simplified a great deal to the terms: the conscious mind vs the subconscious mind. There is a slogan - "Sleep on it" - which means that some persons can go to sleep with a question to solve and then awake in the morning with the right answer. It's a completely natural mechanism and how the brain/mind works for many persons. That's my understanding.