by questioneverything » Sun Jun 28, 2020 1:15 pm
Well, I definitely do have ADHD,.and I would definitely be willing to give it a try.
I'm not a psychologist, but what I can tell you about attention deficit is that the normal filters most people have to screen out non-essential information (do I REALLY need to be aware of the car passing by outside my house right now, or the pressure of the chair against my back?) are either non-existent or non functional for the person with the deficit. It's not that nothing gets through for these people, it's that EVERYTHING gets through. In school, I was labeled as distracted and inattentive. They were half right. I was severely distracted, but I was very acutely attentive to every sensory stimulus, which made focusing on any one of them virtually impossible. The result was that I could process information as other people did, but it was much slower for me, because I had so much more information to sift through. There is a book on the subject called "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?" by Kate Kelly that addresses this. I did come off to most people as lazy, slow, stupid or just plain nuts, when in fact I was simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data my brain was trying to process.
That's the AD component, The HD is that some (not all) people with attention deficits are also hyperactive. They fidget, can't sit still and act out when they get frustrated. That was me. When I was in the 2nd grade, I was so behavioral that they put me in the 3rd grade room, because the 3rd grade teacher was built like a football player and could physically restrain me when necessary.
I hope that helps explain the ADHD process. Over the years, I have learned coping skills, so I work around the disorder (it never goes away - it's how the brain is wired). And for some reason, it affects males far more frequently than females.
So if you want an ADHD guy to experiment on, I'm more than qualified.