ADHD isn't a personality quirk and also, it is fundamentally a disorder of regulation not attention. The education system (for all its drawbacks and inflexibility) works for most because they're able to regulate the urge to get up and climb random shit when they can't figure out how to start writing the answer to Q1 on the worksheet..I also think its cope to take a disorder where a specific part of the brain tasked with very specific functions is physically less dense and performs than other people and go "ADHD isnt real he's just quirky!1"
nathan_compton|6 months ago
1. a lot of these studies suck. Brain imaging is very hard, the interpretation and analysis of the results involves lots of degrees of freedom, the study sizes are typically not as big as you'd like, and most of the results are only really visible in aggregate. I do not give much credence to them, as a scientist. One way to think of this is that if someone separates two groups of people into "ADHD" and "NOT ADHD" and you average their MRIs you might detect a difference in the two groups. But one person's MRI would be almost useless to assign them to one of the two groups. You could certainly try it, but it would not be very effective.
2. Literally every difference in behavior between two people or between a person and themselves at a different time is necessarily reflected in a difference in brain behavior, at least if you buy the materialist paradigm that brain -> mind or at least brain == mind. Thus, you would expect differences in personality to show up in MRI scans as well as differences which rise to the level of "disorder."
3. The brain isn't made up of "specific parts with specific functions." While its certainly true that we can roughly map different areas to different functions, its really not separable in any way that (for example) a human designed machine might be. We cannot remove and replace your "attention center" and it doesn't really mean anything to talk about it without all the rest of your brain. The part/whole relation is bullshit in all contexts (in my opinion as a mereological nihilist) but especially in neuroscience.
I guess its sort of a useful rhetorical frame to point to physical differences between brains as some kind of determination of the distinction between "mere" personality differences and "disorders" but I just don't think it makes sense in a fundamental way.
I'm a person with ADHD and Autism diagnoses and I think they are handy things to use from time to time, I think of them as entirely relational descriptions pertaining to my position with respect to the world, not fundamental ontological categories. On the other hand, I think of essentially everything as relational and I don't really believe in fundamental ontological categories so maybe I'm the fucked up one.
matheusmoreira|6 months ago
I claimed it's not the "attention deficit" people think it is. People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them. That's a huge contradiction. The truth is probably that school is way too boring for them.
I think signal to noise ratio is a good analogy. People with ADHD are easily distracted by noisy stimuli and need disproportionally high signal to focus. Society consistently fails to provide high enough SNR then labels neurodivergent people as problematic.
ADHD discussions always remind me of this article:
https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html
I think the bipolar diagnosis is off the mark. Substitute bipolar with ADHD though and the profile fits quite well.
alphydan|6 months ago
"interesting enough" is not a sufficient condition. You may be super interested, very motivated, and yet completely unable to start. That is one of the most frustrating parts of ADHD to me. When and how hyperfocus kicks in seems to be mostly outside of your control.
dingnuts|6 months ago
Stop spreading medical misinformation. You're extremely uninformed.
Here are some lectures, go educate yourself: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKF2Eq0eYbbrNLoJjFpWG_U...