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Comment by heyjamesknight | Hacker News Reader

It's much simpler and more biomechanical than that.

ADHD at its core is a dopamine disorder. Effort without dopamine is extremely difficult in anyone, and ADHD makes it tough for these dopamine mechanisms to get going. Once that dopamine effect does get going, you're off to the races. That's the ADHD Hyperfocus effect you see.

But when you add in the modern quick dopamine fixes we've surrounded ourselves with—media, social media, processed foods, pornography, etc.—you've built a situation where ADHD individuals are prioritizing those activities over productive ones. This leads to a downward spiral: less productive action means fewer opportunities for future productive actions.

Lock into that mode for weeks at a time and you've got both situationally-supported and biochemical depression.

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> ADHD at its core is a dopamine disorder.

This is still merely hypothetical is it not? I have noticed people home in on dopamine, but no one ever mentions serotonin, glutamate, gaba, and all the other neurochemical systems.

I also thought the biochemical basis for depression has been completely thrown out, is that also not true?

Yeah, we don't understand nearly enough about the brain to have a very mechanistic view of ADHD. With so many different types on a spectrum, and sometimes symptoms being caused by things like physical trauma or infection, it is likely there are different possible mechanisms. However, it certainly appears like dopamine is highly involved, but noepinephrine also seems to be involved as well.

Medically, it is defined symptomatically, and not mechanistically.

It’s not that simple. The brain is a very complex system and once you get other components of your brain to a neurotypical baseline or even better ADHD is a gift.

Those regions being sensory motor cortex and prefrontal cortex. But simply its a system of networks and attention regulation.

Those networks can be trained and I have experienced it first hand by reversing engineering my own brain and training it beyond normal baseline. This training is called neurofeedback and it transformed my ADHD into a super power.

During my evaluation my ability to focus(was measured) was worse than the average ADHD person. Afterwards it was above even normal people.

I need don't even consider myself someone with ADHD and everything just seems to come together naturally. ( Deadlines, managing details, time management and planning- all prefrontal cortex) The networks in my brain have been training to switch normally, and hyper focusing is just focusing but on anything I really want.

It was the cure I’d been searching for my whole life and it actually worked.

Can you divulge more details about your neurofeedback training? What was it like, how long did it take, how did they measure the brain, what stimulus and which "punishment" for bad brain behavior was used?

Not necessarily true.

They did studies and it turns out the kind of ADHD abilities would’ve been useful back in our berry finding days. ADHDers would pick all the berries they could see and then go off to find another bush, not bothering to finish picking all the berries. The neurotypicals would follow along, picking the berries the ADHDers didn’t care about.

All this made berry gathering more efficient.

This is wild conjecture based on performance in a berry-picking game.

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