Perhaps the best description for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder ever, from Amy Alkon: "Having ADHD is like trying to think while being attacked by a flock of crows or having 16 squirrels in your head, all scampering off in different directions." (OC Register)

  • D. Keith Higgs

    You know, I was fully prepared to shoot this down when I read the headline on Twitter but instead I think it requires just a little tweaking. That’s an excellent description of unmanaged ADHD.

    I was one of the earliest kids to take ritalin, after they tried dexadrine for a year. Once through puberty I went untreated for several years as I struggled through high school and college. Finally got rediagnosed as an adult at 26 and went medicated while I worked on self awareness and a lot of focused meditation.

    ADHD is a proper medical use for shamanistic practices.

    I’ve Ben successfully Med free for 12 years now and my kidneys and liver are a lot happier for it.

  • Knuckles, Honorary Consul

    Pretty much. 

  • http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke

    Yeah. That’s pretty good. Squirrels in my brain. 

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TSIAOMEFCV3XGICK2S2NHXHHCY alexs

    it’s like watching a television with bad reception, and every time the show comes back on it’s a different show.

  • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

    yeah but you totally get used to it. Me hunter, you gatherer.

    • hymenopterid

      Isn’t amazing how being in a natural environment seems to focus the mind?  I remember a moment I had on a hike a few years ago when I stopped and just listened.  The whole forest was alive with the sounds of animals.  Not only that, the acoustics of the sounds revealed information about the terrain.  It was like I could perceive the whole forest all at once.  It made me realize just how deficient my everyday environment is of meaningful stimulus.  I think that has a lot to do with it.  I think some peoples brains are not very good at dealing with the sensory deprivation of modern life, and that leads to endless introspection.  Excessive introspection then leads to rambling posts on BoingBoing.

  • Auger

    Sort of.  I think it’s different for different people.  For me, with medication, I think of it more like my conscious mind is a really un-loyal dog straining at a leash.  Every once in a while, I drop the leash.  But, really, the best description of it I’ve ever seen is this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nL21u2fCZk

    • invictus

      The article doesn’t address the fact that there are three distinct types of ADHD; Hyperactive, Inattentive, and (the most common) combined. Nor are the three as cut and dried as all that; it’s all about where on the two spectra you fall. Sounds like you are less on the inattentive (misnamed though it is) end of things and more on the hyperactive. 

      In my case it’s the reverse: My thought process isn’t so much being attacked by a pack of scampering squirrels as it is making its way though an endless maze — of of twisty little passages, all alike.

      • marilove

         In my case it’s the reverse: My thought process isn’t so much being attacked by a pack of scampering squirrels as it is making its way though an endless maze — of of twisty little passages, all alike.

        YESSSS!!  I’ve never been particularly hyperactive, although sometimes my brain can act like that when I’m more manic (yay bi-polarishness (it runs in the family but I’m not so bad)), but man oh man.  Your description is spot-on.

      • http://www.steponitvelma.com/ Vestal Vespa

        My analogy is tabbed browsing.

        I feel like my mind is tabbed- I’ll have several tabs open at once: several tasks or thought processes. I click through them all and try to resolve whatever is going on with each one: do I pay attention to this, or that? Or all of them? I can never fully close out of any of them, because I never finish anything on them. And before I know it, several have logged me out for inaction, right in the middle of what I was doing.

        • CH

          This is a good thread! I’ve never thought really how to describe… but I figured how to describe mine (ADD)!

          Wikipedia… my mind is like reading (or at least how I read… hmm… might have something to do with it) Wikipedia. I start out with what page I intended to read, then I see something interesting there, and go read that… and there I find something interesting… oh, and that one… oh, what does that mean, have to check it out… until I’ve totally forgotten a long time ago what I was actually supposed to do.

          I can keep one thought in my head, and my mind constantly finds something interesting to hop to. Or declares whatever as “done” and goes to the next thing (meaning I end up taking something else from the fridge than what I intended to take).

  • korthmat

    I was thinking I’m going to have to ask my daughter about that, one of these days, once she’s able to articulate it.

  • http://profiles.google.com/jakesulli Jake Sullivan

    For me, instead of “a” train of thought.  IT is a fleet.  For the most part heading in the same general direction but I am constantly hopping from train top to train top.  If I can make it into the station, ie get to the point I’m trying to make, it can be spectacular.  Of course the falls are equally spectacular.

    The great part is when you can connect with someone that has the same rhythm.  I have one friend that I click with and it is amazing.  Conversations transcend and expand space and time. But some how still make sense to us. 

    • invictus

      Do you ever hit the hyperfocus state, where you not only stop hopping from train top to train top, but forget other trains even exist? Even ones that you really should remember about?

      • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TSIAOMEFCV3XGICK2S2NHXHHCY alexs

         yeah, perseveration…. & it’s a mother, life wrecker, etc..

      • stillcantfightthedite

        Ha, yeah.  Only to be disrupted by thoughts like “why does my bladder hurt so much?” or “why am I so hungry?” or “when did it get dark outside?”.

    • marilove

      Yeah, I connect with two people like that.  I talk ridiculously fast, and so far really only one person can *truly* keep up with me .

      • big ryan

        ive never really had that kind of connection with someone else who has ADD / ADHD, but from a young age ive been able to tell when someone was like me, in the 90′s ADHD became trendy thing to diagnose problem kids with and i could always tell when someone was just a brat or if they really had it

  • Toxa

    The worse about an ADD diagnosis is that they try to comfort you by romanticizing the whole thing: creative geniuses like Einstein and Leonardo had it, yada yada. Listen a psychiatrist talking about ADD and you’ll say “hey, I wan’t one of those”…

    These people are full of shit, ADD is a curse and you’ll not accomplish anything remotely exceptional unless you fight hard the very “positive” aspects of this condition. If Einstein had it, he formulated his theories despite (and not because) the ADD…

    Yeah, sure you are the fun guy at the parties, and people may regard you as brilliant, but that comes with a huge toll.

    That was the rant. Now some practical tips: quit meds (assisted by a doctor of course); exercise; Paleo diet; meditation; obsess about planning and organization. Be happy ;-)

    • stillcantfightthedite

      It’s very difficult to obsess about something as boring as planning and organization.  However, finding something that you can get paid to obsess about is the real trick, because after that it’s just about mastering “life skills”.

    • hymenopterid

      Riding a bike helps a lot.  I’ve met bipolar people who have said the same thing.

  • big ryan

    i was diagnosed with ADD back in 86 i think, back then it wasn’t something anyone had really heard of, my 1st grade teacher thought that i was lazy and defiant, when the doc put me on ritalin suddenly all that knowledge i had been accumulating in class was able to manifest as measurable school work

    everyone knows what its like to have a period of time where you just cant focus, maybe its at the end of the day when you are tired, or when you really dont care about something, for me thats what life is like ALL the time.

    it makes it very hard to focus on most things, even when they are things i want to do, sometimes i have to ask my wife for the same piece of information multiple times,  i didn’t do well in school, i stopped taking meds in high school because i hated the way it made me feel, its like going from watching a fractal animation to watching golf on tv (if you dont like golf)

    The silver lining of it all is that when its impossible to focus on most things you get really drawn to things that you can focus on, even a little, ive always been able to focus on art, i started drawing when i was around 2, and now am a full fledged professional graphic designer/ illustrator, in a way i feel like having my mind stuck in constant free association is a big benefit to my career, when im not illustrating im thinking of a million things that i could be illustrating. 

  • KaleoK

    Actually, that description is complete nonsense. May be a more accurate description of an overstimulated autistic brain.

  • http://twitter.com/MattMarrocco Matt Marrocco

    “It’s a MURDER of crows, honey.  A group of crows is called a MURDER.”
    - Homer Simpson

  • Bersl

    ADHD for me is like depth-first search, only with probabilistic loss of previous nodes, and feeling really cheated when having to re-process a lost node.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ASKPE5VLW3RYM6I4UC25MLMFCA Zach

    what really makes this post for me is the targeted ad just before the comments for 

    SYNAPTOL Safe, Natural ADD/ADHD symptom relief

    bullseye

  • zuben

    I’ve also been diagnosed with both ADHD and bipolar disorder. The latter may have been latent but catalyzed by an SSRI shot from the hip of a (former) doctor.

    The main challenge I face with ADHD is when attempting communication.

    For one, my filters are fairly thin-braned, so I’m easily overwhelmed with information flooding my senses. My mind will be multithreading all that (as well as former, potential future, etc.) input, but I’m without an effective output mechanism or the discipline to make the most of what I’ve got.

    So I imagine anyone suffering a syncopated conversation with me would feel as if I were scattered, senile, and possibly insane.

    I’ll inevitably start nesting clauses, subclauses, and so on, until I’ve strayed so far from whatever I was originally trying to express, that I’ve little chance of finding my way back to complete the original thought (or any others that emerged through all the digressions). Basically, I quickly devolve into rambling incoherence.

    Not even sure if this is ADD or ADHD or just another collateral symptom of the smoking crater pharmaceuticals have left of my mind. But coupled with the frequent tight-chested, clenched jaw, and queasy anxiety, I’ve basically withdrawn from almost all contact with the “outside” world.

  • William Hurley

    As much as the OC Reg item and comments here echo my own experiences, I must add that it is the inconsistencies in focus & temporal awareness that grate most on me.

    I’d also like to add that neurological/cognitive dysfunctions that give rise to ADHD also open the door so-to-speak to a laundry list of comorbid disorders.  ADHD alone is bad enough, but when blended with one or more comorbid condition it’s almost unfathomably maddening.

    It is the case that ~25% of adults w/ADHD also suffer from Dysthymia – a major depressive disorder that’s chronic.  Then there’s the defiant, compulsive, addictive and anxious disorders that are found in numbers between 10-30% of ADHDers.  Furthermore, the working memory deficit that is central to the disorder conditions the ADHD individual to be more susceptible to PTSD and acute anxiety episodes.

    The last body of research I’ll mention pertains to longitudinal studies of “quality of life”, life expectancy and life-long outcomes realized by those living w/ADHD.  On average, ADHDers earn less – regardless of degree – than their SES/educated peers by as much as half.  That’s true of so-called “Hi-IQ” ADHDers as well as the rest of us.

    It’s my hope that advances in imaging technologies and improved neurological mapping efforts will reveal means by which the disorder can be addressed and remedied.  I imagine that I’m not the only one exhausted & frustrated (to put it mildly) that meds & treatment leave me to live with what compares to diabetes of the brain & mind – and by extension the personality.