ADHD x.x
I went to Los Angeles for two weeks recently on a business trip. While I was there, the only beverage available in the office was coffee, and it was GOOD coffee, so I drank a lot of it.
After getting home, I've been drinking a more reasonable amount.
Thursday, the caffeine withdrawal finally got to me, which triggered my attention deficit. For four straight days I was really messed up. I didn't even realize it was the caffeine until I stopped to think about what might have changed in my system.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the REAL effects of ADHD, let me describe, because common perception of the disorder is really quite incorrect for the majority of cases. We aren't actually all that much more hyperactive than our peers, on average. Yes, there are very hyperactive individuals among us, but there are also very hyperactive individuals that DON'T have ADHD.
ADHD is actually characterized by a failure of the brain's ability to filter and prioritize stimuli. Whereas most people will be able to disregard background noise or motion in the periphery, we can't. That's why we seem so easily distracted -- our preconscious processes bring a lot of things to our attention that most people can ignore. We can subsequently make a CONSCIOUS choice to disregard them, but it's taxing, and can often lead to a complete loss of multitasking as at times the only way to get anything done is to choose to disregard everything but what you're working on to avoid overload and short-term memory loss. As an added drawback, these misprioritized stimuli (like kids playing on the other side of the house or the charge LED on a battery charger blinking) can also trigger the same set of reactions as extreme stimuli (like loud noise or harsh lights), including the perception of pain even though there isn't actually any. (Which means painkillers do nothing!)
The filter can also get locked into a certain set of priorities, causing what is referred to as "hyperfocus". A certain set of stimuli and interactions get all of the priority and everything else is preconsciously set to zero priority. To the outside world, it seems that the person is ignoring everything and everyone, which is true but it's not willfully done. This is considered to be the "neurodiversity bonus" of ADHD by many people, including myself, because it DOES enable some very effective bursts of productivity during those times, and I hear that some people have learned how to trigger it voluntarily. (I haven't.)
There's another failure mode where the filter fails to give ANY stimuli priority; this characterizes the "primarily inattentive" subtype of ADHD. Such individuals seem to be "spaced out" frequently because of a preconscious loss of the current topic of attention. This isn't my subtype, so I can't speak much more on it.
Since Thursday, my brain has been in the first failure mode, made worse by caffeine withdrawal causing fatigue. The whole "can hold seven things in short-term memory" thing dropped down to about three. Processing speech, then, ejects more important things out of some of those limited slots, and parsing sentences spoken by others typically requires ejecting two of those and possibly all three to handle complex ideas (like a list of things that need to be done). If I don't have some physical cues to indicate what it was I was thinking about previously, it's lost.
PAIN. IN. THE. NECK.
After getting home, I've been drinking a more reasonable amount.
Thursday, the caffeine withdrawal finally got to me, which triggered my attention deficit. For four straight days I was really messed up. I didn't even realize it was the caffeine until I stopped to think about what might have changed in my system.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the REAL effects of ADHD, let me describe, because common perception of the disorder is really quite incorrect for the majority of cases. We aren't actually all that much more hyperactive than our peers, on average. Yes, there are very hyperactive individuals among us, but there are also very hyperactive individuals that DON'T have ADHD.
ADHD is actually characterized by a failure of the brain's ability to filter and prioritize stimuli. Whereas most people will be able to disregard background noise or motion in the periphery, we can't. That's why we seem so easily distracted -- our preconscious processes bring a lot of things to our attention that most people can ignore. We can subsequently make a CONSCIOUS choice to disregard them, but it's taxing, and can often lead to a complete loss of multitasking as at times the only way to get anything done is to choose to disregard everything but what you're working on to avoid overload and short-term memory loss. As an added drawback, these misprioritized stimuli (like kids playing on the other side of the house or the charge LED on a battery charger blinking) can also trigger the same set of reactions as extreme stimuli (like loud noise or harsh lights), including the perception of pain even though there isn't actually any. (Which means painkillers do nothing!)
The filter can also get locked into a certain set of priorities, causing what is referred to as "hyperfocus". A certain set of stimuli and interactions get all of the priority and everything else is preconsciously set to zero priority. To the outside world, it seems that the person is ignoring everything and everyone, which is true but it's not willfully done. This is considered to be the "neurodiversity bonus" of ADHD by many people, including myself, because it DOES enable some very effective bursts of productivity during those times, and I hear that some people have learned how to trigger it voluntarily. (I haven't.)
There's another failure mode where the filter fails to give ANY stimuli priority; this characterizes the "primarily inattentive" subtype of ADHD. Such individuals seem to be "spaced out" frequently because of a preconscious loss of the current topic of attention. This isn't my subtype, so I can't speak much more on it.
Since Thursday, my brain has been in the first failure mode, made worse by caffeine withdrawal causing fatigue. The whole "can hold seven things in short-term memory" thing dropped down to about three. Processing speech, then, ejects more important things out of some of those limited slots, and parsing sentences spoken by others typically requires ejecting two of those and possibly all three to handle complex ideas (like a list of things that need to be done). If I don't have some physical cues to indicate what it was I was thinking about previously, it's lost.
PAIN. IN. THE. NECK.