My parents always used to joke about this: “Couldn’t I have done something better with that neuron?”
Kid me interpreted this to mean that memory was finite and that, once allocated, was not reusable. It seems incredibly silly in retrospect, but I starred making a conscious effort not to remember things I didn’t need to, so as to “conserve space” so to speak. I still occasionally have to stop myself from doing that.
All it got me was a complete lack of practice at remembering things. I still have exactly this problem – I’ll occasionally remember perfectly something I saw over a decade ago, but forget where I left my phone, without exaggeration, three seconds after I set it down.
There you go, OP – empirical evidence that that’s not why. It’s not that our brains get full, we’re just eternally cursed to be like this
ADHD is super fun. I remember even the smallest details about the most obscure things, and the most random stuff will remind me of that. I also usually can think about 3-4 things at a time! So cool.
What isn’t cool is that, I don’t get to pick either. Random details? Not sure which ones are going in and not coming out… Thoughts? Plenty, but I have no choice in what I’m thinking about.
It’s a fun little game of whack a mole, trying to get my brain to do what needs to be done.
I’m 44 and I can remember my best friends phone number from 5th grade. Couldn’t remember it when I was in 5th grade and I can’t remember any actually useful numbers today, but I know that one. A guy named Jeff has it now. He’s nice.
Yup. One time I used it for a password. Then forgot that it’s what I used for the password, until I reset the password to something else… But I still remember the key.
I remember the phone number of an older guy i talked online for like a week when I was 13 or so, 20 years ago. Thanks brain. Also thanks for reminding me about all the embarassing/shameful stuff i’ve done over the years. Why not replace those slots with, dunno, SOMETHING USEFUL!
You know I’ve always wondered, since memories can be changed as they are accessed (memory is absolutely fascinating, and very very very flawed), is it possible to knowingly reprogram your own memories to change your own subjective history?
I’ve been trying but I always forget that’s what I’m supposed to be doing… 🫤
Good point. I suppose that goes for most things like old commercials that we saw all the time. What’s weird for me is that I have a near photographic memory for some movies, even if I’ve seen them only once, and then other movies I will completely forget that I’ve even seen them. Like why? What’s the distinction for my brain?
Short for Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris, a made-up game proposed as a follow-up to Doom by people shitting about on Usenet. Carmack thought it was funny and that’s that.
I can remember obscure things from almost any point during my life, but I can’t remember a person’s name even when I’m told less than 2 minutes ago regardles
Curious input, I’m wondering how many people on this community are diagnosed compared to just not sleeping properly.
I notice a lot of these posts that pop up are frequently just normal symptoms of an exhausted brain and there’s only a few that distinct themselves with ADHD only.
Not here to ruffle any feathers, just the posts are popular in Top/Hot feeds and I hope people seeing them are looking at ADHD diagnosis seriously instead of self-diagnosing them. Kind of like people that think they’re OCD because they’re pedantic.
Again, curious input. Not here for feather ruddling. Just a comment thought it may be worth mentioning in case moderation isn’t aware.
My unscientific and uninformed observation is that social media, especially TikTok and Reels seem to mess with peoples’ dopamine reward systems and cause them to become very impulsive and have short attention spans. Either that or literally every single one of my coworkers under 30 also have ADHD.
I think OP was more about the trend of self diagnosed people acting like they were really diagnosed people while we all know that self diagnoses aren't worth anything.
I too do oppose this trend since it fuels the "ADHD is a made up dad that parents make up so they don't have to take responsibility for just not disciplining their child enough" crowd that just will not die out and harms diagnosed ADHD patients like myself.
There has been an uptick in ADHD TikTok videos over the last year or so. There are a few TikTokers that do basically nothing else. Since the core symptoms of ADHD won't provide you with content forever, those channels have continuously moved into symptoms that are more and more loosely connected to ADHD and thus more and more present in people who don't have ADHD.
Now, since medical professionals have been super reluctant to diagnose or treat ADHD for some reason, there is a huge distrust in diagnoses. It's said that ADHD is both the most underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed psychiatric disorder at the same time.
So people who have been convinced on TikTok that they have ADHD because they have trouble prioritizing household chores and walk around objects by swooning their hip out of the way will not trust a psychiatrist when they tell them that what they have is not ADHD.
There are tons of communities all over social media where people who have been "denied their diagnosis" gather and circle jerk about how all their life's problems would be solved if only someone finally wrote "this guy ADHDs" on some piece of paper for them, much to the detriment of real undiagnosed people who go under in this sea of confirmation bias and projection.
What counts as a diagnosis? Technically I've had a medical doctor (no clue what their specialty was) try to prescribe me adhd meds when I was like a toddler (my mom refused). Ironically, the reason my parents brought me at all was mostly sleeping problems IIRC. Even with treatment for sleep apnea and when I'm regularly getting 9 hours of sleep, my adhd symptom's don't seem to change much. If anything, being exhausted might make me more normal.
A diagnosis counts as a diagnosis. ADHD worth any concern is easily identified and diagnosed. If it is hard to determine, it’s very likely one (or some) of the countless other things that cause the same symptoms and are more often fixable, but can cause harm/damage if ignored. It is quite simply a numbers game and of all the things causing symptoms like foggy short-term memory, attention drain, daily fatigue, etc, ADHD as the cause would definitely be a single digit percentile. This makes it a concern that people—ironically as someone else put it—gloss over their problems with alignment to memes/post as conviction over professional diagnosis. It also makes things more difficult for the community and those within that do indeed have ADHD.
Again, I’m not saying this is the case, but the remarkable uptick in ADHD’s trend lately is certainly making me consider that people are neglecting their health or are indirectly encouraging others to. If I see a meme about ADHD being the LOL cause of needing to sneeze, I’m calling it.
A lot of ADHD symptoms are variants on normal burn out. The difference is the trigger level and severity.
By analogy, it’s like going for a run. Everyone gets tired etc. ADHD is like going for a run with an invisible parachute deployed behind you. You can still run, but it’s exhausting. You are also a lot more prone to being knocked about by cross winds etc. Unfortunately, without a sense of scale, the problems all sound like the same issues a normal person has running.
When I was a kid there was a song that I guess was popular around here that mocked bald people with several “pet names”, one of them was “Moskito Airport”.
Over a decade later I started taking the train to go to work and it took me literal years to stop getting that song pop up in my head every time the train announced the airport station. Nobody around me even remembers that song exists. I don’t even remember who sang it or where it would play, but still - listen to the word airport and the song starts playing in my head. Same thing is true for pretty much every word that is not often found in song lyrics.
I watched a horror movie (that i hated). But, a substantial part of the film had this song that was driving me crazy, tickling the back of my brain. Finally the movie showed the tv that the music came from, a 50s cartoon that was part of a classic cartoon compilation VHS i watched 40 fucking years ago.
But i can’t remember the name of that guy who’s come in to the shop every day for a year.
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