• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Neuroscience answer: Dopamine is responsible for (among other things) motivation and the feeling of reward when you do something. People with ADHD have chronically low dopamine levels because they have more dopamine transporters than most people do in their brains, so their brains burn through it quickly.

    In practice, people who are unmedicated tend to do whatever they can to try and get a little more dopamine to get them through the day. It’s why smoking, risk taking, illicit drug use, gambling addiction, etc are also correlated with ADHD: all those things give you a dopamine boost.

    So when someone is sitting there scrolling through memes on the phone, they’re hunting for the dopamine. The dopamine is almost never at The Task. It’s incredibly frustrating to understand all that and still not really be able to do anything about it until it escalates into an emergency, at which point you don’t really need dopamine to deal with it anymore, now that you have adrenaline. But that’s obviously an unsustainable way to do things on a regular basis.






  • Sound, definitely at times. More commonly when outside sounds (traffic, construction, etc) get incorporated into my dream. I feel like sometimes I experience knowledge of sound in my dreams (responding to things that would require hearing it in IRL, like speaking) but don’t actually remember hearing anything, because dream logic.

    Smell is more rare in my dreams, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced any very lovely smells in my dreams. But I have smelled a horrible rotting smell in my dreams before.