For what it’s worth, I have indeed been diagnosed with ADD by mental health professionals (I don’t remember what kind). And yeah, I’m not saying that the reader has ADD; I’m just pretending I know that they do. (And this article is for my own personal use, to some extent.)
Is difficulty with stopping interesting activities an ADD trait? My mom says it’s an Asperger syndrome thing, but maybe she’s wrong.
As for ugh fields, I sort of intended to address those with the paragraph about “figuring out the next task”. Ideally, choosing the next task in an intelligent manner will help puncture an ugh field. If you don’t have a to-do list, then the undesirable activity is a “have to think about this, but not necessarily now”, which you’ll end up avoiding for a very long time. If you do have a to-do list, then the activity starts out as “don’t have to think about this”, but at some point reaches the top of your list, and thus turns into “have to think about this and deal with it right now”. Breaking through ugh fields ought to be easier when you’re focusing all of your effort on a single activity.
Is difficulty with stopping interesting activities an ADD trait?
People with ADD are indeed prone to internet addiction, and addiction in general.
Your prefrontal cortex is connected to every other part of your brain. The act of consciously shifting attention away from X and onto Y is basically your prefrontal cortex inhibiting your brain’s representation of X and exciting your representation of Y. ADD is thought to be a result of less prefrontal cortex inhibition. That’s why you tend to have more stray thoughts at any given moment, and also why you are more distracted by irrelevant things in your environment.
So you can see why it would be especially difficult for you to. wrench yourself away from the pleasurable, attention-grabbing stimuli X and onto the dull, uninteresting stimuli Y.
The general difficulties with generating extrinsic motivation is related. Reward, motivation, inhibition, self control, and attention share many of the same dopaminergic pathways.
In different settings, there’s differing ideal levels of dopaminergic activity to have. Lots of alleles floating around, some downregulating dopaminergic activity and others upregulating it. Balancing selection keeps them all in the mix. ADHD involves having alleles associated with less dopaminergic activity (not always though—brain damage can do it too). This which is why dopamine reuptake inhibitors are usually the treatment.
(everything i said here is super oversimplified in the interest of my time and some of it is on partial evidence, but if some particular topic catches someones interests I can un-simplify and cite later)
ADHD is a relatively simple disorder. Aspergers is extremely complex and still poorly understood, and seems to vary a lot more between individuals.
Diagnostically, yes that is the major difference, but Aspergers, Autism, and ADHD are just symptomatic descriptors. There might be all sorts of differences that aren’t captured by the symptomatic description. In the original context, I can be fairly confident that “difficulty using self control to stop doing interesting activities” is true for many people who have ADHD (for individualized values of “interesting”), but I can’t make broad statements like that about autism/aspergers.
What I meant that biological basis is less understood—as in, the various mechanisms which cause the syndrome, which structures are affected, and why those structures behave differently is less well understood for autism/aspergers than for adhd. Part of this is because Autism/Aspergers effects multiple structures, which is not the case for many diseases (Parkinson’s is primarily the basil ganglia, ADHD is primarily the dlPFC, sociopathy is (probably) primarily the amygdala and vmPFC, and so on)
I quite agree with that, but it’s news to me that ADHD has been well-connected to underlying biological issues. I thought it was another label for a collection of symptoms (albeit with a few known pharmaceutical ways to ameliorate it).
Is difficulty with stopping interesting activities an ADD trait?
Yes, it is. The phenomenon is frequently called “hyperfocus”. It’s worth exploiting by trying to induce an overlap between interesting and useful things.
For what it’s worth, I have indeed been diagnosed with ADD by mental health professionals (I don’t remember what kind). And yeah, I’m not saying that the reader has ADD; I’m just pretending I know that they do. (And this article is for my own personal use, to some extent.)
Is difficulty with stopping interesting activities an ADD trait? My mom says it’s an Asperger syndrome thing, but maybe she’s wrong.
As for ugh fields, I sort of intended to address those with the paragraph about “figuring out the next task”. Ideally, choosing the next task in an intelligent manner will help puncture an ugh field. If you don’t have a to-do list, then the undesirable activity is a “have to think about this, but not necessarily now”, which you’ll end up avoiding for a very long time. If you do have a to-do list, then the activity starts out as “don’t have to think about this”, but at some point reaches the top of your list, and thus turns into “have to think about this and deal with it right now”. Breaking through ugh fields ought to be easier when you’re focusing all of your effort on a single activity.
People with ADD are indeed prone to internet addiction, and addiction in general.
Your prefrontal cortex is connected to every other part of your brain. The act of consciously shifting attention away from X and onto Y is basically your prefrontal cortex inhibiting your brain’s representation of X and exciting your representation of Y. ADD is thought to be a result of less prefrontal cortex inhibition. That’s why you tend to have more stray thoughts at any given moment, and also why you are more distracted by irrelevant things in your environment.
So you can see why it would be especially difficult for you to. wrench yourself away from the pleasurable, attention-grabbing stimuli X and onto the dull, uninteresting stimuli Y.
The general difficulties with generating extrinsic motivation is related. Reward, motivation, inhibition, self control, and attention share many of the same dopaminergic pathways.
In different settings, there’s differing ideal levels of dopaminergic activity to have. Lots of alleles floating around, some downregulating dopaminergic activity and others upregulating it. Balancing selection keeps them all in the mix. ADHD involves having alleles associated with less dopaminergic activity (not always though—brain damage can do it too). This which is why dopamine reuptake inhibitors are usually the treatment.
(everything i said here is super oversimplified in the interest of my time and some of it is on partial evidence, but if some particular topic catches someones interests I can un-simplify and cite later)
ADHD is a relatively simple disorder. Aspergers is extremely complex and still poorly understood, and seems to vary a lot more between individuals.
Is Asperger’s anything other than high-functioning autism spectrum without speech delay?
Diagnostically, yes that is the major difference, but Aspergers, Autism, and ADHD are just symptomatic descriptors. There might be all sorts of differences that aren’t captured by the symptomatic description. In the original context, I can be fairly confident that “difficulty using self control to stop doing interesting activities” is true for many people who have ADHD (for individualized values of “interesting”), but I can’t make broad statements like that about autism/aspergers.
What I meant that biological basis is less understood—as in, the various mechanisms which cause the syndrome, which structures are affected, and why those structures behave differently is less well understood for autism/aspergers than for adhd. Part of this is because Autism/Aspergers effects multiple structures, which is not the case for many diseases (Parkinson’s is primarily the basil ganglia, ADHD is primarily the dlPFC, sociopathy is (probably) primarily the amygdala and vmPFC, and so on)
I quite agree with that, but it’s news to me that ADHD has been well-connected to underlying biological issues. I thought it was another label for a collection of symptoms (albeit with a few known pharmaceutical ways to ameliorate it).
Yes, it is. The phenomenon is frequently called “hyperfocus”. It’s worth exploiting by trying to induce an overlap between interesting and useful things.