I was diagnosed adhd and then asd in early 2025 after a lifetime of high achievement and burnout. This is what unpacked from my brain in the month after starting treatment with aripiprazole.
The aim of this was to gain understanding of myself and to create an instruction manual for friends and family, but it has grown. I now think that it needs a total rewrite, because asd and adhd are integral to the human condition; evolution for the meme.
For now though, this will do. The information I have is sketchy and unchecked; I work in broad strokes and approximations. I have pulled together parts of neuroscience, Buddhism and artificial intelligence to create an approximation of my mind.
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I have come to think of us as having two emotional landscapes which pass a baton between them: the neuronal one and the hormonal one.
The neurones are where asd is at play and the hormones are where adhd lives. Because of intermittent dopamine signalling I think there is an unconscious dropout or ‘blip’ which keeps us in fight or flight.
Because of the skipped beat, the endocrine system stops juicing for a second; the brain carries on. I think this results in pre-conscious lurches of the stomach. Like a sock on a bicycle wheel
It can also mean that emotions carry over in a strange way; sometimes resonating and amplifying and sometimes dampening and quieting. For example if your electric-emotion is + and juice emotion is + then you can end up too amped up, or if your electric emotion is + and juice emotion is - then you can end up looking at your dream life and wondering why you feel so bad.
This is part of evolution though; it’s what keeps us dancing unpredictably instead of just rubbing sticks together in caves.
It can be unpleasant for the individual in the moment, but we all have random emotions, just adhd cranks them up a little. Drugs crank them down.
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Given memory and data limitations my brain needed to figure out a workaround. Running single threads to completions seems to be it.
I will take a single piece of data and wrangle it like a generative AI.
I will hypothesise all the way to God before reeling it back in to something more realistic and stepping to the next stage. It’s like I run all the way to the z, where someone else would have seen they can stop at d.
This means I’m annoyingly fast for simple tasks but annoyingly slow for complex tasks: conversation about emotion, which has a lot of internal feedback as well as external, for example. It means I’m good in a crisis. It means I overthink.
The low memory also means that I struggle to get things through the logjam and into or out of processing. I need to export data (think aloud, write it down) to effectively bypass this memory limitation and add more threads to the process.
My brain will optimise every process as much as possible. Things are fast and to the point, because they have to be. It’s a system limitation, and if they aren’t fast and to the point then I am unable to function.
Processing is always sequential because of time blindness; everything slots together like lego blocks.
Output also struggles because of memory limitations. I can be thought of as a dot matrix printer attached to a supercomputer. I often don’t see the full picture of what I’m saying unless I’m allowed to infodump to completion,.
Logic is simple and processed before emotion, which is complex and painful. This is also not a choice. When emotion is processed, it’s usually processed solo. Sometimes it’s not processed at all.
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