I mean it’s a “water is wet” kind of “discovery” for anyone who has or understands ADHD, but it’s nice to see it spelled out in an accessible way for laymen. Many types of neurodivergence have advantages, it’s just that those advantages are not as impactful as the disadvantages because they the disadvantages break societal norms. Just like a person in a wheelchair breaks the societal norm of stairs. Unless accommodations are made, they disabled person is unable to participate in society and thus they are unable to use or sometimes even show their advantages.
TBF, we’re the ones who’ve always known “water” isn’t “wet”, it does the wettening. 🤷🏼♂️
It doesn’t help that we have a fundamentally broken society to begin with.
Society hyperoptimized on
productivityprofit such that taking time to enjoy a side quest is frowned upon…
“And she often obsessed over random projects before abruptly abandoning them.”
Preach.
I think most people who have it figure this out pretty quickly. NT normies feel like they accept the world completely at face value by comparison and it can cause a lot of friction
I was regularly told to stop asking “too many” questions in class when I was a kid.
When I was in the army, my sergeant’s favorite phrase was " elucubra, don’t think", which looking back is kind of ironic, as I was in a scout unit, and we were expected to go behind enemy lines and think outside the box to find ways for the company to breach the lines.
Got slammed for asking why for context. Ended up in the O room for “being too smart”
Funny thing is, this has helped me enormously in my career. Everyone else is simply trudging along on assumptions and I swoop in with a dozen edge cases that we simply aren’t handling.
Schooling beats a specific kind of “curiosity” into you, while beating out a much more general “what if this assumption isn’t the case.”
You know the saying: Hypercuriosity hyperkilled the hypercat.
Alas, I have the ‘nothing at all gives me dopamine’ ADHD. I thought it was just depression for years, but turns out it was ADHD. I struggle to see any benefits that come from my condition.
ADHD can correlate with depression. You still need to treat the depression though. Untreated depression will indeed blind you to anything positive about anything.
I’m offended by the attention deficit and the disorder part. I don’t have a deficit, I have an abundance of attention, it’s just not linear. I have parallel attention, not serial. In my close circle I’m the guy people often go for answers, because I often have them, albeit often somewhat superficial, because it’s near impossible to go deep in any subject, unless hyperfocus kicks in.
“When you look at the way people with ADHD learn, and especially if they are hypercurious, they start reading something and they’re like, ‘Ooh what is that? I want to learn about this. What is that? Does it connect to that?’ It looks a lot more like a messy mind map rather than a straight [line],” Le Cunff says. “The problem is when there’s no space for exploration.”
I cannot express to you how much this captures my experience reading. It can sometimes take days for me to get past a page when I’m constantly stopping to look up other things a passage made me think of or write down ideas and questions.
I feel this too when I play video games. I like to open every box, go through every door, listen to all the recordings etc. When I play coop with my husband it drives him a bit nuts when he wants to focus on a specific quest and I’m exploring.
Oh yes and on games I often pause them to look up some random question like which skill is the best to inherit or something. I do soo much research on games I play despite my best intentions to just be in the moment.
