The youtube channel of ADHD science researcher Russell Barkley gave me the push to get diagnosis in my last year of undergrad and It was like lightning to see all my symptoms laid out since childhood in context of the underlying brain science. He does a lot of debunking of bad research too. Great channel.
In addition to confirming and quantifying my more obvious and problematic symptoms, the reaction time tests clearly showed my very mild impulsivity. Nobody I know would call me impulsive, and in the questionnaires I’d have said I wasn’t impulsive, even though I had a sense I was subconsciously resisting that tendency. The tests were too quick for my usual masking reflex, and while I was still ultimately diagnosed with the inattentive variant, the tests revealed a textbook symptom I wasn’t even aware of. Quite illuminating.
I think especially as adults (esp. people that managed to get to adulthood without being diagnosed), a lot of people think they don't have certain symptoms, when really they just have developed elaborate systems for managing those symptoms.
I never related to "time blindness" because I was always consistently early for things, but really I was just deeply anxious about being on time for things. I would set like 10 alarms set, I wouldn't be able to do anything for an hour or two beforehand because I was worried about being late, and I'd usually show up way too early because I couldn't actually estimate when I needed to start getting ready to be on time. That doesn't exactly sound like the behavior of someone with a functional inner clock.
Yeah time blindness is my arch nemesis… but it has led to some pretty serious grit and persistence for difficult things under pressure. You need me to start on an arduous, long, difficult task right this second? No problem. You need me to do something on February 23rd 2027 at 4:30am in Anchorage Alaska? Should be fine as long as I’m still using the same calendaring system then. You need me to chip away at a background task steadily for two weeks? I hope you really mean you need me to work on other neat cool things for 13 days, panic, and stay up all night getting it done. (Apparently adrenaline is great for focus, too)
I'm not familiar with the reaction time test. Based on some reading I've done, ADHD is associated with higher variance in reaction time. Despite my ADHD symptoms, I've never thought reaction time was one of them. Quite the opposite really. The hours and hours honing my "skills" in first person shooters puts my reaction time and precision well above human average. But basically the only time I'm testing my reaction speeds is when headed towards those ADHD hits. The few times I've had opportunity to test it, it's felt very "game like" in science centers and places like that and I still have consistently fast reaction times.
The "clumsy" aspect is similar. I'm not clumsy. My balance and coordination are a little above average based on observations like rock hopping to cross streams while hiking.
It’s not a simple quantitative reaction time test— they use it to look at various qualitative things based on what you’re reacting to. For example, how often and in what ways you improperly gave anticipatory reactions based ostensible patterns that change without warning. I have no expertise in the matter but I imagine someone with very slow reaction time or particularly bad pattern recognition would make it much more difficult to get reliable results from that test.
Out of interest, how are you with fighting games (Steeet Fighter, Mortal Kombat etc.) and Souls-like games where you have to predict and parry at the correct moment?
I never got into fighting games outside of Bushido Blade which I think translated quite well in my domination of Souls-like games. Domination is an exaggeration. I don't feel like I'm particularly good at those games, but I don't think they are nearly as difficult as the reputation conveys. It took me fewer than a dozen tries to kill Malenia in Elden Ring and most of the bosses I was able to kill in the first or second run.
On the other hand I had a hell of a time getting used to the parry sequences in Expedition 33. It felt at times like they were intentionally trying to fool me into parrying at the wrong times based on visual cues. Which... they were. The auditory cues were more reliable and once I got used to that I breezed through the rest of the game.
I ask because FPS gameplay contains a whole host of different skills, including the precision of your movements, the ability to accurately predict and track the enemy’s position on screen, as well as your reaction times, sequencing movements and so on. Potentially you could be exceptionally good at some of these and unusually bad at others and still emerge as a good FPS player.
Fighting games are a bit more pure, leaning more heavily on reaction times, timing and sequencing of moves.
Recent understanding of dyslexia is that it’s actually a kind of sequencing problem in the brain. I wonder if this is more descriptive of the issues faced by ADHDers?
I wonder now if I tended to avoid those more frenetic fighting games because to your point it becomes reaction, rection, rection. It's almost constant throughout a fight to the point where it looks like button mashing to the uninitiated. If my reaction times are a more limited pool, I could see them getting exhausted in a fast fighting game where as something like Bushido Blade just needs those great reflexes for a couple exchanges. Similar in FPS where you can balance reactions and game sense. Even Elden Ring boss fights aren't as crazy as a Tekken match against a skilled opponent.
I'd like to see some research, but anecdotally the reaction time tests are overperformed on by people who are serious gamers.
I am absolutelywildly impulsive (and was even more so when I was younger), but when I took the reaction time test in college, I was playing counterstrike multiple hours a day. I tested in whatever the "in between" area was on that for impulsivity. None of the people I knew that played twitch games a lot got a positive result on that test.
Just looking now at his channel now. I’m happy to see a critique of Gabor Mate’s ADHD theory in his playlists.
I’ll watch that for sure as I’ve always felt very uneasy, and a little indignant, listening to Mate talk about ADHD; but I’ve never been able to put my finger on why exactly!
He has excellent lectures on the science and history (hundreds of years which was surprising to me that it had been studied formally for so long yet is still a weird and new “American disease” in Australia—-even considering how backwards and slow we are down here).
