Types and other techniques as an accessibility tool for the ADHD brain [video]

References he created for the video: https://blog.mavnn.co.uk/2024/05/17/adhd_refs.html

Thanks for sharing. I've been questioning the validity of my own ADHD "diagnosis", but I had only been considering things with regards to dopamine and the "reward-system", and not the executive-function and mental "optimisations" side of things like he explained. This finally gives reason to all my traits/quirks/problems!

I called it my "diagnosis", because even the psychiatrist that prescribed me didn't seem convinced, but he's also a bit old and thus maybe out of date (ie, only considering the traditional "ADD" style symptoms). So I've been on the drugs for a year now, and up to a BIG dose, but besides some very minor concentration and motivation improvements, the only worthwhile improvement was not being tired in the afternoons (I regularly used to nap on the train on the way home from work, which was at only 4pm! Sometimes from 3->4pm I would even struggle to keep my eyes open whilst at my desk!). So when the presenter said he had tiredness problems too, that was further confirmation for me (of a problem being fixed). Because I had been wondering if "the opposite" was happening, in that my improvement was simply the "stimulants" keeping me awake (ie, just being a "tweaker"), which would imply that the tiredness was normal (and to further confuse things - I have reviewed the traits reported by ancestrys dna test, and one of them says that I am very likely to take naps!).

Unfortunately I doubt this revelation will change anything for me, and that's because I've got decades of "optimisations" baked-in. For example, socialising is a big problem. Thinking back, and by 10 years old I was known to be "shy" - but recently I have come to consider this as "learned" behaviour (based upon a few memories). This new explanation about executive-function and "optimisations" is an even better explanation. Long story short - socialising is hard, and failures are bad, so I've optimised away the failures by not talking much! It's exactly like the example the presenter gave of Test Driven Development @ 23:00;

  > ...suddenly there'll be 500 broken tests and you're like where did that
  > come from what's going on and it turns out there's actually nothing wrong with what you've done to the code but you
  > have just broken all of the mock setup of all of the tests and this is something which
  > I find unbearable almost literally unbearable because I'm end
  > up I end up in this situation where I'm put in a position where either I go and
  > fix all of those tests which in my mind are obviously pointless and which is mind-numbingly boring or I have to have
  > the discussion in the pr review of why the code coverage has gone down on the CI
  > server and it drives me nuts and yes I will stop ranting now on that.