Most people don’t believe in ADHD.1 Then they meet me.2
“Elinor saw nothing to censure in him but a propensity of saying too much what he thought on every occasion, without attention to persons or circumstances. In hastily forming and giving his opinion of other people, in sacrificing general politeness to the enjoyment of [...]
The old VHS tape clicks into motion—rotational to lineal to magnetic to image.
The air is filled with echoes of deep past—I feel reverberations, but this might as well be my primary source. The camera settles on a fidgety boy of about five years, happiness and innocence bubbling from his grinning face. He begins his joke [...]
Most people don’t believe in ADHD. Then they meet me.
Ohhh, so that’s it…! Yeah. Well, I’ll be…
While it is not clear to me if the motivating power of death metal is generating a vanguard of energetic youth or drawing artistic and creative youngpeople into a trap of naive individualism, I believe that the political significance of musical sound is rooted in the meanings that the participantsconstitute and the consequences of those meanings for the participants’ lives and the larger society.[^motpower] [^motpower]:Harris M Berger, “Death Metal Tonality and the Act of Listening,” Popular Music 18, no.
…>It’s not the music, but the feelings of the people we hear playing that are important to us… it is not the music as a physical stimulus that manipulates our moods, but it is using the music as a communicative offering to influence our feelings in a re-creative process.[^recreat] [^recreat]:Oliver Grewe et al., “Listening to Music as a Re-Creative Process: Physiological, Psychological, and Psychoacoustical Correlates of Chills and Strong Emotions,” Music Perception 24, no.
By 8th grade, I found myself with one real friend, and more than one enemy whose favorite pastime was to remind me of just how many friends I didn’t have.
…I saw in it the intense introspection and honesty that I’d been forced to learn through years of social self-discipline, trying to learn the unwritten rules of society for which my brian found itself less than ideally suited.
In the second paragraph, he writes about his 8 year old son scaling a Colorado rock face (though he qualifies it with “I think” which is a nice touch): We look up and Kevin never looks down…. None of this is really explicitly wrong (of course, I don’t actually know what it’s like for Kevin, but I assume this is a more general take on AD/HD.
Now your average human being watches one channel, then maybe changes to another channel by pressing a button, and then when that program is over they change to a different channel, or wait to see what’s on next, and so on and so forth…. My room is often a reflection of this state (the disorder, not the thriving) and I can see it acting as both a symptom of, and the contributor to my continued disorder, both resulting from and furthering this chaos Distractions, distractible, distracted—in some settings clearly an unproductive behavior, but in others quite the opposite.
There is a look that I have grown to recognize; one that creeps up mid-conversation and fills me with dread. It says “Ok, I hear you. Uh, yeah. Okay. I get it already”. It says “Why is he still talking?”. It shows a polite disinterest, a rising level of conversation-fatigue. My mind floods with questions: [...]
[Dining Hall Conversation piece (forthcoming)]
[study about facial recognition and AD/HD (forthcoming)]
[Sorting piece (forthcoming)]
Attention: What you are focused on — how long you can maintain that focus — Hey, come back here! And how much control you have over it [see this post with more material on Attention (that stuff is not yet in my own [...]
Attention: What you are focused on — how long you can maintain that focus — Hey, come back here! And how much control you have over it [see this post with more material on Attention (that stuff is not yet in my own words however)]
Imagine a television set that represents your mind, the current program [...]
