adhd asd gifted

So it’s well established that there is a lot of overlap between ADHD, ASD, HSP (highly sensitive person) and gifted (silly word), but I’ll go a step further and say that in cases like mind there is a causal nature. They are one and the same.

It all comes back to dopamine dysregulation and is easiest explained in terms of planets and computers.

So the planet analogy has your neuronal landscape as the land and the endocrinological system as the weather. When a new planet is born, the weather is tumultuous and the land is bare. Babies are nothing but impulse and reward, and neuronal mush. This stormy weather shapes the land of the neuronal land through repetition - eroding channels and valleys and leaving peaks and plains.

For most people the balance will naturally change after a certain point so that the peaks are sticking above the clouds and the weather has less of a sway. The weather will always be there, but it settles down and the individual is ruled more by learned behaviours than randomosity. Their neuronal side naturally comes to the fore and emotional regulation and such are pre-cognitive because the clouds no longer reach the highest peaks.

For folks with my type of adhd this doesn’t happen to the same degree. The land is formed, but the weather remains tumultuous, and it is more difficult to exert self-control. I am Jupiter, and I built higher peaks through intentional instinctive meditations and sheer force of will. But the weather was still tumultuous and the clouds still high.

This is why alcohol and valproate were so bad for me: these inhibiting chemicals squash everything at once and they hit my neuronal peaks more than the endocrinological impulses.

Anyway on to the actual dysregulation. Let’s say that your life is like a piece of music; a record. It is encoded by dopamine, but for people like me the record skips as it turns. We get big chunks of encoding followed by periods of nothing. This plays out on the intra-second scale and is because of increased phasic dopamine response, not necessarily lower tonic dopamine. 

This disconnect causes a timing gap between thought and impulse, which can result in what is termed inappropriate emotional response, but which I view as evolutionary rng for the meme. The gene needs randomosity and so too does the meme.

So my neuronal landscape only gets short chunks of information. It learns that this is all it needs to build memory for, which results in a short working memory. I need to function so in order to compensate for this, the processing is cranked up and I am overclocked through neuronal changes and an increase in norepinephrine. 

The lower working memory and faster speed mean that I tend to take a single thread and run it to completion rather than balancing multiple threads and seeing the whole picture. Where someone else might run 5 threads for 3 steps, I run 1 thread for 8 and another thread for 7 and then combine the results to arrive at the same conclusion, or thereabouts.

This time/memory limit means fast thought processing and fast speech, but so too does the exaggerated dopamine response. I take stimulating thoughts (both positive and negative) and chase them; the carrot on the stick is large and the fuse on timer on the bomb is ticking and everything is always in high gear. This is partly due to norepinephrine which overclocks the system and partly because I can only hold a few chunks of information in mind at once; my analogy is that of a train which is lifting the track from behind and placing it in front.

The positive of this is that we can achieve flow-state quite easily because our memory is easily filled front-to-back with the task at hand while norepinephrine and dopamine keep our foot on the gas and our eye on the road. This also gives us a propensity to thinking aloud, butting in, jumping ahead in conversations and burning out hard after challenging times. 

The system is overclocked, but it is merely an adaptation so we can function. Thinking aloud is so that we can actually hear what is being said; we can’t hold our answers in memory and listen to what you are saying at the same time. We need to offload this data so that we can empathise and understand.

It all results in skip-thinking and a hyper-connected brain. There is nothing wrong with any of these adaptations; they are merely how the machine compensates for memory limitations and higher levels of selective motivation.

Things are also encoded *hard* because of the increased phasic dopamine. This is the cause of the rigidity of thinking in some regards, yet surprising flexibility in others. Morality is black and white, but the existence of an objective reality is questionable. I cannot see the forest but I know the tree intimately and I populate the forest by extrapolating from there. My approximation of a forest is different to yours, but I’m not sure the forest even exists outside our heads anyway.

Increased phasic dopamine explains autistic sensitivities because we are more susceptible to latching on to a sound or a light or some other undesirable-yet-stimulating input and being unable to focus on anything else. This can be good - in terms of seeing the sheer beauty of the fractal world - or bad - in terms of the fact that I can’t ever get away from low, throbbing industrial noises nobody else seems to hear.

The estimate of adhd/asd overlap is so broad as to be meaningless. 30 to 80% I think I hear people say; that’s just embarrassing.

And that is because they are all the same thing, in my case*. They are all the downstream results of increased phasic dopamine, which means our records tend to skip. The volume is high but the sound drops out. We are watching a movie on a big screen but one minute in every four is missing. We fill in the gaps with flights of fancy and skip-thinking.

The increased sensitivity due to the sporadic-but-strong encoding also means that we feel emotions exquisitely and often struggle to identify what they are. We cannot see the forest intuitively so we feel incredible discomfort when asked to describe it. This is where the meditations I introduced come in - try talking while walking and you will have a much better time of it. The repetitive motion provides a regular tick of dopamine so we can better access and organise our thoughts. This is why we should be allowed to jiggle our legs and pace in school.

We are empathetic, but we are empathetic in a more microscopic manner. I will try to help, but I will try to figure out the real reason why someone is suffering instead of settling for surface-level platitudes. 

It is a complete system and it is who I am.

/jb202508211514

*ASD needs dividing further; at present, neuronal changes caused by brain trauma, sickness, etc, are all included in the same catch-all. I believe that the majority of genetically inherited forms of autism are because of the aforementioned (or similar) changes in processing styles because of endocrinological differences in early life. Audhd should become its own diagnosis. I have no scientific evidence for any of this, but it feels better than our current DSM-led ’30-to-80%’ overlap ridiculousness.