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Thank you. None of what you say is intuitive or obvious to me. I have no way of working out what goes on without these candid insights you shared. Thank you

Thank you. None of what you say is intuitive or obvious to me. I have no way of working out what goes on without these candid insights you shared. Thank you so much. What you say seems to fit with what I witnessed in my colleague so at last I have something to go on. > the ADHD brain needs reassurance and dopamine hits. She wasn't getting ANY from herself That sounds like the core deficit. > but everyone pretty much with ADHD is a failure in their head. no matter how successful we are. no matter how many little wins we structure for ourselves. at the end of the day we are broken, physiologically, our brains aren't giving us what we need from the tasks we do. I see. OK. I would not have dared assume that. At last I have a model to work with, of the voice in my colleague's head. > "ugh i know i have all these fun hobbies and projects that i myself have set up for myself to do but i cant do anything. no i'm not depressed. i have absolutely zero in the tank for even enjoyable things. i have no volition left." Zero in the tank, OK. So, if that's the case, I can't expect her to bootstrap or therapy herself. I need something else. At the time, I couldn't do as much for her as you suggest - giving her praise, stepping in to organise and structure her tasks. I wasn't available for that. But what you're saying, is that without the external assistance, the result will be failure. > do you know what is the most fun for people on the ADHD spectrum (and i think just engineers in general but there is a critical difference)? planning out a thing. making that list. coming up with ideas. sketching it out. Yeah, she loves that. So do a lot of people. > everything up until DOING THE ACTUAL THING. This seems to be where we fork. Other people learn how to get rewards from the doing and the completion of tasks. The rewards take time to manifest, so nobody learns straight away. It takes time and repetition and faith. Before we can learn, we have to learn how to learn. But most people learn eventually, because the rewards for KPI manifestation are the biggest of all. But it sounds like you are saying ADHD people can't go through this process.

Ancapistani 5y ago
> […] most people learn eventually, because the rewards for KPI manifestation are the biggest of all. I don’t feel that way at all. My greatest reward, by far, is the moment when the all the pieces “click into place” - the moment of understanding a process or system. I feel absolutely no positive reward at all for getting things done. At best, I feel a bit of relief from the rapidly increasing pressure of a looming deadline.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  I was thinking of the concept of getting paid for completing a job! For example, mowing a lawn and getting paid. Serving a table and earning a tip. Have you ever had a job that works like that? A design or engineering job doesn't have such an immediate connection with the completion/reward nexus. I wonder if experience with the earlier mentioned type of work could help to build an expectation circuit that reinforces completion.
  - spiralx 5y ago
    A friend of mine has ADHD and is a street performer in Covent Garden in London, and it fits him to a tee - 15 minutes of hyper-focus on doing the show and interacting with the audience then an immediate reward of gratification and money, which he has to do two or three times a day. It wouldn't fit my ADHD but it fits his perfectly.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    What you're missing is the basic fact that the ADD is a disorder of the reward system. That's why you can use a drug that increases dopamine activity (amphetamines) and thereby fix the ADD. Without the exogenous dopamine source, the dopamine synapses in the brain do not fire. Without those synapses firing, the causal emotional chain is broken. The feeling is absent. The very same feeling that would be there in other people JUST IS NOT THERE. Nobody "learns" how to fire their dopamine synapses. They either fire or do not fire. You either have a feeling or not.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      The reward system is functioning in ADHD subjects in some circumstances, just not in others. If that were not the case, ADHD subjects could never learn anything, and that clearly isn't the case. My friend gets excited about conceiving projects and beginning tasks. She has problems with completing them. My friend is perfectly able to learn new procedures, including complex procedures. On occasion, she performs them with hurricane enthusiasm, such as the time she whipped up a dog carrier backpack for my small dog with her sewing machine in 15 minutes flat. She was amazing on that occasion. And then, for 3 weeks, she couldn't bring herself to hem a curtain - the simplest and most mundane application of a sewing machine. From what other people are saying in this discussion, those are the clues: too simple, too mundane, and the problem is the lack of drive in particular circumstances, not learning the task. I'm just wondering what the limits are to learning and then what those limits might tell us about the disease mechanism. Since ADHD people are capable of learning, might there be processes they could learn which could alter the application of their disregulated reward system so as to facilitate self-drive in more circumstances? If not, why not? Or how not? What is the dysfunctional component of neuroanatomy responsible for the condition?
DarylZero 5y ago
> Other people learn how to get rewards from the doing and the completion of tasks. No, they absolutely don't LEARN HOW.

Ancapistani 5y ago

> […] most people learn eventually, because the rewards for KPI manifestation are the biggest of all. I don’t feel that way at all. My greatest reward, by far, is the moment when the all the pieces “click into place” - the moment of understanding a process or system. I feel absolutely no positive reward at all for getting things done. At best, I feel a bit of relief from the rapidly increasing pressure of a looming deadline.

wombatmobile 5y ago
I was thinking of the concept of getting paid for completing a job! For example, mowing a lawn and getting paid. Serving a table and earning a tip. Have you ever had a job that works like that? A design or engineering job doesn't have such an immediate connection with the completion/reward nexus. I wonder if experience with the earlier mentioned type of work could help to build an expectation circuit that reinforces completion.
- spiralx 5y ago
  A friend of mine has ADHD and is a street performer in Covent Garden in London, and it fits him to a tee - 15 minutes of hyper-focus on doing the show and interacting with the audience then an immediate reward of gratification and money, which he has to do two or three times a day. It wouldn't fit my ADHD but it fits his perfectly.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  What you're missing is the basic fact that the ADD is a disorder of the reward system. That's why you can use a drug that increases dopamine activity (amphetamines) and thereby fix the ADD. Without the exogenous dopamine source, the dopamine synapses in the brain do not fire. Without those synapses firing, the causal emotional chain is broken. The feeling is absent. The very same feeling that would be there in other people JUST IS NOT THERE. Nobody "learns" how to fire their dopamine synapses. They either fire or do not fire. You either have a feeling or not.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    The reward system is functioning in ADHD subjects in some circumstances, just not in others. If that were not the case, ADHD subjects could never learn anything, and that clearly isn't the case. My friend gets excited about conceiving projects and beginning tasks. She has problems with completing them. My friend is perfectly able to learn new procedures, including complex procedures. On occasion, she performs them with hurricane enthusiasm, such as the time she whipped up a dog carrier backpack for my small dog with her sewing machine in 15 minutes flat. She was amazing on that occasion. And then, for 3 weeks, she couldn't bring herself to hem a curtain - the simplest and most mundane application of a sewing machine. From what other people are saying in this discussion, those are the clues: too simple, too mundane, and the problem is the lack of drive in particular circumstances, not learning the task. I'm just wondering what the limits are to learning and then what those limits might tell us about the disease mechanism. Since ADHD people are capable of learning, might there be processes they could learn which could alter the application of their disregulated reward system so as to facilitate self-drive in more circumstances? If not, why not? Or how not? What is the dysfunctional component of neuroanatomy responsible for the condition?

DarylZero 5y ago

> Other people learn how to get rewards from the doing and the completion of tasks. No, they absolutely don't LEARN HOW.