ADHD 2.0

As for brooding, this is the special blessing and the bitter curse of ADHD. You have a vision. Maybe you’ve come up with a novel technology for making an unbeatable knife sharpener. Or maybe you think you have the plot to the perfect novel. Whatever your vision, you go at it like you never have before.

But then, what you’ve created…disappoints. It’s

“Ha” breathing technique. It’s simple but takes some focus and concentration. To begin, inhale through your nose to a count of three or four. Next, exhale through your mouth to a count of six or eight making a soft haaaa sound as you do so. The inhale/exhale relationship is always at a 1:2 ratio. Using this kind of forced breath technique as you se

You might say that stimulants stimulate the brain’s brakes, thus giving you more control.

An increase in dopamine helps our nerve cells pass on information more “cleanly” from one to another. It helps to reduce the noise, quiet the chatterbox, and tune your brain to the right channel. If the signals aren’t clear, it’s easy to fall into confusion and

ADHD as a complex set of contradictory or paradoxical tendencies: a lack of focus combined with an ability to superfocus; a lack of direction combined with highly directed entrepreneurialism; a tendency to procrastinate combined with a knack for getting a week’s worth of work done in two hours; impulsive, wrongheaded decision making combined with i

The massive behavioral conditioning we’ve all been undergoing since the advent of ubiquitous electronic communications technology has changed us radically. But this dramatic, if not epochal, change is underappreciated. It’s underappreciated because we’re living in it as it happens, like frogs in cold water that slowly gets heated up without the fro

“If there is one takeaway in distilling down the complexity of the DMN and the TPN, it boils down to the fact that the toggle switches between them are off in those with ADHD.”

In other words, in most people the DMN does not slip so easily into the TPN; the gears mesh well and are not glitchy. But in people who have ADHD, the gears get stripped, so

Rewards work much better for the ADHD mind than do consequences.

To compound the problem, people with ADHD or VAST tendencies usually reject help. Of course, there is an upside to this trait—it’s called nonconformity. Another, less polite way of saying it: People with attention issues tend to have acute bullshit detectors. We hate hypocrisy maybe more than any other human failing, and we can spot it a mile away.

a neurotypical brain, when the TPN is turned on and you’re on task, the DMN is turned off. But in the ADHD brain, the fMRI shows that when the TPN is turned on, the DMN is turned on as well, trying to muscle its way in and pull you into its grasp, thereby distracting you. In ADHD, therefore, the DMN competes with the TPN, which in most people it do