Collecting thoughts
The past several days of my life were eaten by a take-home test from this semester's DiffEQ class. It turns out that the professor used more than one equation that's simple to handle with integration by parts, and completely horrible with any other method. Guess which math technique is rarely taught well enough for the student to use it on their own?
Oh well. Partial credit is still something.
There's a quote in goldfish about how ADHDers on stimulant medications showed the greatest persistance on a problem-solving task when given a puzzle that was designed to be unsolvable. I've been pondering that one on-and-off since reading about it (not least because the author seemed oddly enthusiastic about the results), and think I've finally caught the phenomenon happening to me.
When stressed, grumpy, and frustrated over a test question yesterday, I noticed that it had abruptly become easier for me to think. I was still quite irritated with the problem for being intractable, but the aspect of frustration that makes it hard to deal productively with its object (as opposed to, say, tossing the assignment in the recycleables and going to do something else) had evaporated. A glance at the clock showed that it was about the right time for the second half of the generic two-stage ritalin I'd taken to be ramping up. Hardly a rigorous experiment, but interesting.
If that is an effect of the medication rather than coincidence or placebo effect, then combined with the known tendency for stimulants to encourage me to stay heavily tracked into a single topic, it certainly does seem like a recipe for unreasonable task perseverance. I'm not exactly interested in running off to tackle frustrating activities for the sake of more data, though.
Oh well. Partial credit is still something.
There's a quote in goldfish about how ADHDers on stimulant medications showed the greatest persistance on a problem-solving task when given a puzzle that was designed to be unsolvable. I've been pondering that one on-and-off since reading about it (not least because the author seemed oddly enthusiastic about the results), and think I've finally caught the phenomenon happening to me.
When stressed, grumpy, and frustrated over a test question yesterday, I noticed that it had abruptly become easier for me to think. I was still quite irritated with the problem for being intractable, but the aspect of frustration that makes it hard to deal productively with its object (as opposed to, say, tossing the assignment in the recycleables and going to do something else) had evaporated. A glance at the clock showed that it was about the right time for the second half of the generic two-stage ritalin I'd taken to be ramping up. Hardly a rigorous experiment, but interesting.
If that is an effect of the medication rather than coincidence or placebo effect, then combined with the known tendency for stimulants to encourage me to stay heavily tracked into a single topic, it certainly does seem like a recipe for unreasonable task perseverance. I'm not exactly interested in running off to tackle frustrating activities for the sake of more data, though.