ADHD time-blindness is spoken about in relation to things like accurately judging the time it takes to shower or drive to an event.

My spouse regularly talks about the 10 years he has known me, and the decade we have been together.

Our son's 14th birthday is coming up.

So the thing I didn't mention in that poll I published yesterday is that the motor initiation piece that is, at the time of this writing, absolutely sweeping the poll as the Worst Thing people struggle with?

It's the specific thing I'm trying to pull together a grant for, perhaps unsurprisingly. But it's also the only one that actually isn't classically conceptualized as executive function. (I know, I know, that feels stupid to me, too.)

See, formally speaking, we describe executive function in terms of higher-order cognitive processes that allow us to complete complex tasks. There is a lot of work on, for example, "set shifting" (which is a particular paradigm for studying the ability to transition between different frames of mind, essentially; it's measuring cognitive flexibility) and on action inhibition / impulse control. (One of my colleagues works on set shifting, in fact, and I might actually take a look at that later.) We also have a lot of work on how individuals make decisions and prioritize conflicting needs.

But the transition between motivation and motion is a lot harder to study, and it doesn't fit so neatly into this top down paradigm, either. Most of the people who study this kind of movement initiation are people who aren't really focused on executive function per se at all. They're mostly people who work on Parkinson's, in fact.

The problem is that the best way to untangle how these systems work is to break specific things and see what impact that has on the overall function, and that means working with animal models. You know what we can't study as easily with animal models? Wanting to move and not being able to initiate self-paced motion—that is, we can't get inside an animal's head to understand what it wants to do in the absence of a moving body to indicate that thing. This is part of why many of our best studied kinds of executive dysfunction involve not doing a thing, rather than doing it: that way you can look at error rates and study a measurable change in behavior.

There are things we can do, though. For example, you can disentangle motivation versus pleasure in a rat that enjoys things but has no motivation to make them happen by asking questions like: I know that rats like water with sugar in it. If I set up a device that squirts a trickle of sugar water into the mouth of the rat, does it close its mouth? What facial expressions does it make? If I put bitrex in the water instead of sugar, does the reaction change? (Yes, emphatically.)

The thing is, motivation is regulated by dopamine... and so is movement. There's good reason to think that neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD and autism are mediated by weird dopamine signaling patterns, and we certainly know that there is a direct relationship between abnormally high dopamine signaling and schizophrenia symptoms... and that abnormally low dopamine will give you Parkinsonian tremors.

Most stimulant meds for ADHD work by upregulating dopamine signaling, too. All of them are associated with increased locomotor activity, among other things. We know that dopaminergic signaling precedes actions in the body, too: you get firing before the actual motion happens.

Somewhere there is a threshold of motion initiation that is getting fuckily disconnected. I have some thoughts about where it is, but I definitely need to run some experiments to check my hypotheses against evidence.

When you both are in a shitty situation and can't even get up and are waiting for someone to arrive (whoever it is, really) and one of you has cigs and other access to fire so you just. Kinda chill for a moment. Like, it's just once, it should be fine, you can forget about it later.

me: okay, brain. we'll sit down and write. we're gonna get through our WIPs. we can do this brain: sure, sure... hear me out, tho. what if... what if New Story? what if i don't let you work on anything that isn't this specific idea? hm? how does that sound? me: ....

having one of those days where i think i can just decide that my period is over and it annoyingly keeps reminding me that that's not how it works. okay. what if it was though. can we just agree to disagree? my period can keep happening if it wants to, but not to me. i didn't consent. i didn't opt in. you can do whatever you want but don't make it my problem.

Come on brain it's good and all that we can think "Käärijä and ULTRAKILL are two things I enjoy that come from Finland" and come up with stuff like "iconic käärijä pics but with ultrakill characters" and "huhhahhei blasting in the background of the boat level" but can we actually do something with this please

The need to get a better job that pays a livable wage

versus

The instant tailspin into cataclysmic despair into which I’m thrown upon merely opening job listing sites

needing to eat several times a day is so fucking stupid . getme out of here .

Kid to friend: No, it's fine to talk now. I am not working on homework. My mom's just reading to me about Louis Pasteur

Me: Yes. Because you need to pick a person for your Biography Assignment. The assignment that is the majority of your grade next semester. The assignment that your teacher specifically went over during your conference. The assignment that you handed me the Parental Sign-off form TODAY.

And it's also like. if you have no internal sense of your own gender, and you're just gnc sometimes because traditionally feminine stuff is simply harder to do. At what point do you just flip to a different gender in the minds of everyone around you and then if you've basically outsourced your gender to everyone else does it just change? if I started acting feminine would it change back? is it different on different days? how is a person supposed to form a coherent identity in this world

.

Been thinking again about making my own plushies of Roxy and DJ and whoever else that don't suck or cost me an arm, a leg and a kidney and I have ideas for it but ffs I can't find the website a friend sent me a while back with the all the free patterns and the specific one I had in mind for these

nothing like cooking for over an hour only for the meal to be subpar

rereading wibar again, i hope patton wasn't too freaked out right after they escaped and virgil instantly passes out the second they're no longer in immediate danger

you know cuz all the adrenaline's gone and he's just been tasered like 5 times

patton: D:

virgil: no i promise im not dying that was just a. rejuvenating nap. nothing to worry about, standard human feature

patton:

Image ID: A photo of an edited meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, featuring a man holding a hand up and saying ‘That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about humans to dispute it.’ End ID.

cleaned all the stickers and dust and roach leavings and rat piss off my mirror.

no longer a dirty kid in a dirty mirror. this feels like character growth.