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When you're a kid, you get some low level parameters set that define your basic relationships to different types of things (see: object relations therapy), one of which is your attitude to ambiguity. What happens if too large a fraction of ambiguous situations resolve badly? 2/
The basic attitude towards ambiguity becomes negative. The attentional schema becomes one of seeking out information about how things might go badly. Notice the similarity to what in adhd diagnosis is called heightened rejection sensitivity. 3/
When skills and tasks are learned and deployed the attentional schema is busy paying attention to negative examples and generalizing across them. But now your attention is taken up by a bunch of things to avoid, which generalizes to 'avoid' and ultimately to dissociation. 4/
The suggests that when therapy works for adhd, the mechanism by which it works is to cause an update to start *throwing out* more of the negative examples and instead gather enough positive examples to generalize from those, which builds up abstractions that are actionable. 5/
This should be testable by trying out therapy that goes directly for this intervention of replacing negative-dominant navigation schema with positive ones and seeing if seemingly unrelated adhd symptoms subside. 6/
Lastly, this may only be a part of the picture, as adhd might be a big tent catch-all for several related and unrelated things that currently share poor explanations. Curious for feedback if this does/doesn't resonate with people's experience. 7/7
@RomeoStevens76 oh this is interesting. i think this should reflect itself among other things in a preference for video games, esp. games in which it's generally extremely unambiguous what's going on and what to do. eg RPGs over strategy games maybe 🤔
@Malcolm_Ocean @RomeoStevens76 @LordChisholm @hormeze This pretty accurately describes my own self-discovered process, ie focus on what you want to see more of https://t.co/o8hYqE5QDd
The suggests that when therapy works for adhd, the mechanism by which it works is to cause an update to start *throwing out* more of the negative examples and instead gather enough positive examples to generalize from those, which builds up abstractions that are actionable. 5/
@RomeoStevens76 I somewhat resonate with the ADHD cluster and I'm pretty towardsness oriented and I know some people who are way less ADHD and more avoidy so they don't seem to obviously map to me, though I like the overall structure of the model