Rambling vs. Weaving

Donald Trump has described his type of rambling when speaking as "weaving." He weaves different threads together, jumping between them as he speaks. I have no problem understanding or following Trump's “weaves”—I can keep the different threads in my mind, although it can sometimes get boring if he goes off on certain tangents too long. But there's another type of rambling that is impossible to follow, and it's a type of rambling I've noticed with podcasters, specifically those who have openly talked about their use of psychedelics.

Correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, but I suspect there might be some link between heavy psychedelic use and this type of scattershot thinking that results in rambling speech that is difficult to understand or follow. It's worth contrasting to Donald Trump's type of rambling because he has not used psychedelics. That would serve as evidence that it's not merely a case of genetics, with certain people being born with this other type of rambling—it may indeed be linked to psychedelic use. Unfortunately, I don't have audio recordings of those podcasters before they used psychedelics to compare it to.

To contrast the two types of rambling: Trump jumps from topic to topic, but he at least will finish his sentences before skipping to another topic. Whereas the psychedelic users cannot complete a sentence—they jump off to a tangent in the middle of a thought to another thought, and they never complete the original loop. They just keep doing that over and over again, so that they never complete a single thought. They can go on for 20 minutes without speaking a single complete sentence. It's just a series of half-thought tangents built upon more half-thought tangents. It's like a schizophrenic monologue of a thousand different threads, but they're never woven together like Trump. They're much more schizophrenic, diverging without weaving together coherently.

"Schizophrenic" is the key adjective because schizophrenia has been tied to psychedelic use. I wouldn't go so far as to say that these people have schizophrenia. They still seem somewhat sane—they are successful podcasters after all. But they are veering towards schizophrenia, and with more psychedelic use they may veer further until they become completely incoherent. I don't know if it's truly the cause of such rambling thought patterns, but it has deterred me from wanting to use psychedelics.