Yes, That Was On My Mind As Well!

Yes, that was on my mind as well!

Ok I made this reference talking about my job in my crash day post, but I wanna tangent on it a bit because this clip, weirdly enough, describes an ADHD thing perfectly 😛 it's a clip from the episode of My Little Pony called Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3.

In it, Dash demonstrates an "ability" that just kind of comes standard with ADHD sometimes, and can actually cause a lot of frustration for us when we don't know how to explain it to others. See, most people have natural floodgates that let in sensory data that matters and disregards the rest. Neurotypical people can just... Focus on only one thing. Because that's the task at hand. They have no problems paying attention to their teacher in school because the sensory data of listening to their words, reading the board and textbook, and physically writing notes are the only data that matter in that moment. For ME though, those floodgates are busted, and have been blown fully open pretty much since I was born. My brain doesn't have the ability to filter things out— the bright colors of the tree leaves out the window and the sound of the kid next to me tapping their pencil are the same level of priority as what the teacher is saying and the words in the book, so I get kind of force fed or water cured every bit of sensory data I can perceive at the same time. This overflow of data is part of what leads to memory based issues like "inattention" and inability to form habits or memorize things. Everything is coming in all at once, and I subconsciously have no way to sort out the important bits fast enough, so my brain just ends up letting it all kind of run through. As a result, when people ask me "how would you describe your learning style? Are you more of a reading, listening, or watching person?" I have to give the very unhelpful, vague answer of "it depends on what I'm learning and doing? I kind of just absorb information without thinking."

There IS a way to game this glitch and turn it into a feature, though, as demonstrated by Rainbow dash. The trick to paying attention and effectively learning things for us is..... To try to not pay attention 😆 by adding a non-invasive, repetitive, automatic task in the foreground and putting the stuff we're trying to absorb in the background, we can kick our brains into that hyperalertness and soak in info by accident. The foreground task has to be something that doesn't require complex thought, a half-task that's too boring to sustain on its own— examples include jigsaw puzzles, coloring books, knitting, listening to instrumental music that fits what we're doing. Personally, it's one of the reasons I've been enjoying learning to cross stitch lately; it's repetitive and can be as abstract as I want it to be, so it forces me to focus on my surroundings in a meditative way. I can listen to the birds and trees on the porch and relax, or I can pay better attention to the security camera feed and patrol schedule at my new job. I become more conscious of having to flick my eyes through 2 screens, the lobby and windows around me, and back to my hoop, and my brain activates better with the added challenge of speed analyzing at a glance. If I tried to only focus on the feed and lobby and not do my little project, I'd eventually space out and not actually NOTICE any of the things I can SEE. Basically, this new job works for me, because I work like Rainbow Dash— while doing the repetitive background task of flying, she's able to speed analyze her surroundings and actually process her environment better. Us ADHD folks ARE actually paying attention to everything, all the time, we just require that hyperaware, high speed anylization to be activated in order to UNDERSTAND it all.