r/skeptic • u/Budget_Shallan • 25d ago

💩 Misinformation Neuroscientist podcaster with 20+ hours of ADHD content discovers it MIGHT be genetic "but there are too many variables to separate"!!!

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u/[deleted] 25d ago edited 2d ago

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u/MrDownhillRacer 25d ago

I can't speak for everyone with ADHD, but for me, "time blindness" has always felt like a misnomer for my experience of being bad with time.

I rarely "lose track of the time." I usually know what time it is. I usually know I'm running out of time to start my task, or to leave without being late. I can feel each minute passing.

And yet that knowledge is not enough to translate into doing anything about it.

And it's not because I don't care, either. If I just didn't care, I wouldn't be feeling anxiety about it or telling myself "come on, move it."

The way Russell Barkley describes ADHD clicks for me. He says it's not so much a deficit of attention as it is a deficit of intention. For normal people, the desire to do A + the knowledge of how to do A (in the absence of overriding reasons not to do A) just kind of naturally leads to carrying out the intention to do A. For us, though, it doesn't. Like the link between the intentional state part and the action part is just broken.

I actually have wondered what the implications for this characterization of ADHD would be for other fields, though. Like, the field of economics makes use of the concept of "revealed preferences," but does behaviour under different conditions reveal the preferences of people who have a disconnect between their intentional states and their behaviour? Hell, a lot of philosophical accounts of "desire" in general tie it to behaviours and beliefs in such a way that seems to be complicated by such a disconnect.

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u/ChanceryTheRapper 25d ago

See, that sounds like it's not time blindness you're experiencing, it's executive dysfunction. Like you're trapped in your brain, aware you need to do something, fully conscious of the way you absolutely have to start, but you're trapped in a body that's just like "haha yeah" and doesn't move. Different aspects of ADHD.

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u/MrDownhillRacer 25d ago

Ah, I see. Might be a different symptom all together.

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u/ChanceryTheRapper 24d ago

Yeah, figuring out if I have ADHD has been a whole adventure of "wait, that's not normal? Other people don't struggle with this bullshit? It has a fucking name??"

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u/MrDownhillRacer 24d ago

Yeah, it's hard teasing out what's just "laziness" and what is a genuine disorder. And working out how that ties into things that culpability is also tricky.

Another layer for me is that, while I've been told I have ADHD, I've been doing some reading on CPTSD (it's not in the DSM, but it is in the ICD), and it seems a lot of the symptoms overlap. But rather than feeling like "I might have been misdiagnosed," I am wondering if it'll turn out I have both, because some of my procrastination does seem to stem more from emotional dysregulation (normal for CPTSD), while sometimes, my inability to focus seems to have nothing to do with my emotional state (which I would think would be the case for ADHD).