Alright, you made it through that. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get back to the conversation. We're talking a lot about things going on around us. Sensory information, right? And your theory is that we encode sensory information differently from the neurotypical brain, correct? Yeah. So part

of that is that 80-subins have what we call a filterless processing style. I like to think of this as neurotypical brains kind of being like a VIP dance club. And... I'm just excited

because we got a dance club now. We've got a new metaphor and it's a dance. So first of all, I haven't been to a dance club in a long time, but I know that there's VIP areas where like they have red velvet and there's a body guard there. And then the rest of the bar, you got to wait with everybody else to get like a Stella. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Gotcha. I have not been to one of these clubs in years together. Okay. So...

Yes. It's our Gen X version of a dance club. I'm excited about that. I think exactly. Very good. Who knows? Maybe millennial dance clubs are different. That's right.

So a VIP dance club, there's a bouncer at the door. He is saying like, you're important. You can come in. You're not important. You can't. So that bouncer is filtering the stuff that isn't supposed to be hitting the nervous system. Whether that's kind of hitting the attention and awareness and thinking things through or whether that's sensory information hitting. A ADHD brain, on the other hand, is more like an open air party. Right? And open air parties are awesome, in my opinion. But they are vulnerable. They're vulnerable to the rain, to the wind, to a car driving by, blasting music, a dog running through. Right? And anything that comes through hits it. There's a lot more fun. There's a lot more energy that happens in that outdoor party. But it's a lot more unpredictable. So we kind of always had to be mindful of that fact. It's getting bombarded by extra stimuli all the time. A lot of folks with ADHD have a lot of anxiety and often can get overstimulated as well.

There's also those perfect moments at an open air party where the weather's great and everything worked out and everyone's having an awesome time. Exactly. What a great metaphor. Yeah. And meanwhile, honestly, I prefer the open air party to the VIP party. And I think, you know, maybe that's because I'm ADHD. I mean,

I prefer the open air party too. But I love ADHD brains. All right. Why

do we hate being bored? Why? Is it? I mean, is it all the stuff going on around us? Is it because our, what do we call it? Our default mode network has never turned off? Why do we hate being bored?

There's something that I call the optimal zone of stimulation. And if you imagine a normal curve, which just kind of looks like the hump of a camel. Right. And that middle section, which we call is kind of two standard deviations from the mean, which said there's a center line and they're kind of two bands on either side. That is the optimal zone of stimulation for somebody with a neurotypical brain. They will get bored and be uncomfortable if there's too little stimulation going on and they will be overstimulated if there's too much. For an ADHD brain, same shape, but it's much more narrow and it tends to happen a little bit higher up on that graph. So they need more stimulation to kind of be optimally engaged, but then they can kind of tip over into overstimulated pretty quickly. Tell me about

overstimulation over stimulation. I know that's, you know, we're going to get into regulation and emotions here. I want people to hear about this because as an adult, I think we, by nature, learn to regulate by the time we're 50 in most cases. But I do remember having a lot of trouble regulating and getting overstimulated as a child.

And the truth is that even as adults is hard, while adults kind of learn to mask a lot of the difficulty with the regulation and, you know, learn to often kind of avoid situations that are overstimulating and so forth. It's a real issue for adults as well. What happens is if you imagine that outdoor dance club, all the extra stuff is coming in. Do your really hearing and your nervous system is really getting hit with the impact of every sound and every thought and every sensory, like every tag on your shirt and every look that somebody gives you, right? All of that stuff is coming in. It's hitting the nervous system in a very true and real way. And that nervous system then starts to kind of get defended, right? It starts to feel under attack because, guess what it kind of is. So it gets defended and it starts to kind of activate as if it's being attacked. And as it activates, our sympathetic nervous system gets activated and we get into this fight or flight mode. It floods our systems very quickly. And so that's part of why ADHD brands kind of tend to go from cool, calm and collected to very much not cool, collected very, very quickly, right? Because this is all happening kind of under the surface of awareness. And then suddenly that final little drop is added to the pool and it's just like, oh, oh my God, I can't handle it anymore. And that's a full flood.

I've had moments like that in my life and I've remembered that no matter how hard I try, I lose control. That's the scariest part about ADHD to me. It helps me with those emotional situations when I remember that I'm wired differently from other people. But there are advantages to our wiring, right? While we're going down that road, while we're talking about the science of it, how is the way our brain is wired advantageous to us? Yeah,

so if we think about that, if we go back to that outdoor party, here we have a system that is taking in all the things. And taking in all the things does a bunch of cool things. Yes, it overloads. But it also means that extra information is coming in, which means that extra information can be processed as we're trying to look for novel solutions, right? So a brain that goes A, B, C, D, neurotypical linear brain, great, that's linear, that's wonderful. But a brain that goes A, X, P, Q, R might be a little harder to follow for somebody else, but also it's going to cover different ground. And so this is part of where the creativity and the novel problem solving comes in. We see it as being very linked to the fact that it's not filtering out all this extra information. Another thing that comes from that is this kind of intuitive processing. Intuitive processing is happening more at kind of the quote unquote gut level, right? More at this kind of non-verbal level where we're kind of filtering through all this different information. A lot of it is non-verbal. That kind of verbal centers of our brain has a hard time saying, well, I made this decision because of X, Y, and Z. But it's still a very felt and informed decision, but it's happening at a different kind of more non-verbal level. And again, coming from the fact that all the little pieces of information are getting processed as opposed to neurotypical brain that's kind of saying, well, A, B, and C are important. And therefore, we're going to only pay attention to these and we're only going to use our rational brain on these three things. And ADHD brain gets to use a lot more in its informational process.

You just described, in my opinion, the most important aspect of problem solving, which is the most important thing in getting a job. I know that people struggle in school with ADHD. I did too. I know that sometimes finding the right job or keeping a job that's not super stimulating to you can be difficult, and I get that too. But the way you just described it, finding creative solutions, I feel like everyone who I talk to who works for a software company or anything who's a consultant, I'm like, so what do you do? And they're like, oh, you're creative solutions. It's a pretty good skill for the workforce that we have out there right now.

It's a great skill. And it's one of the many reasons why it's important to have neurodiversity within a workplace. It's also important to go A, B, and C, right? It's also important to get things linear and be able to communicate things in this kind of very linear sort of way. But it's also really important to get some creative problem solving. And our organizations run better when we have full breadth of neurodiversity and we get to be able to capitalize on the strengths of different types of brains and what they can bring.

I want to play a voicemail that we got. This is Heather, and she has the same problem I do.

Hi, this is Heather from Southern California. We've never diagnosed as ADHD as a child, but I've always had it. And with diagnosed later in life, I'm just curious. One of the things that's very hard for me is to actually concentrate on what someone's saying if there's a lot of noise happening or other conversations like a party in a room. I'm just curious of the tips or tricks to help with that issue because I've been told that it's because of my ADHD. Okay, before you answer the question, Heather, I have an entire video on how to fake your way through listening to something. That's

not a good answer, okay? But basically, if, like for me, this is my tip and trick. If you're like midway through a conversation, you realize that you don't know what's going on. If you say, wow, that's crazy, that can mean a lot of things. That can mean, wow, I'm so happy for you. That can be, wow, I'm so sad for you. Wow, I can't believe that. Usually it works. I'm sorry. That's, I'm a horrible person, but that's my tip. Please help me, Marcy, with a better tip than, wow, that's crazy. So this

is a very normal phenomenon. And whenever there is a normal phenomenon for an ADHD brain and a situation that's going to kind of work against that normal phenomenon, then I always look to see are there ways to augment that situation because I'm much more about changing the environment than we're not going to change the brain, right? And again, I don't want to change the brain. Usually brains are beautiful and we need them. How can we change the environment? And so one is, you know, there's the easy of like, do you need to be at that, you know, the huge party with all the noise? Sure. Sometimes we need to be at that party. So are there ways to kind of, if you really want to talk to someone, can you draw them into the kitchen that's quieter? Or, you know, are you, can you draw them into a spot that is quieter? Can you face a corner so that the person that you're talking to is standing in the corner and you're facing the corner and they're the only person that you see, right? We want to think about how can we filter out the stimuli? The primary stimuli are going to be noise and, and visual at a party. And so how can we get the person kind of more isolated so that we're only seeing them? How can we get it so we're only hearing them? There are earplugs too that are designed to filter out some of that extraneous noise. That would also be another way of kind of filtering some of that. I'm just realizing

something crazy. I was at South by Southwest a couple of weeks ago and everywhere we went, there were people talking and they were at these tiny little trendy places that were really allowed. I already don't have great hearing because I was in a band, but even if my hearing was perfect, I had the toughest time at these places and it was, I mean, I could hear the person in front of me, but there was so much competition. I never really thought of it that way. Maybe my hearing is not that bad. Maybe I just need to tell someone like, look, if you want to talk to me, we have to go somewhere else. I don't know how, but I didn't make that connection to my ADHD

brain. Yeah, I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do to kind of say to someone like, I'm really interested in this conversation. I'm having a hard time hearing because of all the extra noise. Can we

step outside for a moment? I feel like they almost like

that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, what warmer way of kind of saying I'm interested in you and what you have to say than that? Dr. Caldwell, tell us where people can find you and your fantastic metaphors. Thank you. You can find me at adeptadept.org. That is my blog and digital resource. Or my practice is the center for ADHD.com.

Thank you so much for helping us better understand the brain. And we will talk to you what? Tomorrow? We've been like, sorry, it's an inside joke

because Dr. Caldwell has been helping us so much with our book. I'm happy to talk to you any day and every day.

Well, that was fun. Let me ask the listener really quickly. Do you feel like you have a better sense of what ADHD looks like? I also want to ask a friend, Amory Tapkey. She is one of the producers of this podcast. She is my Midwest neighbor. If you've ever seen any of our videos where she pops up, she's very, very funny. And she also has a co-worker with ADHD, which is me. So I wanted to ask Amory. Did this help you understand what ADHD looks like when

working with me? Hi, Amory.

Hi, thanks for having me. Well, thanks for being here. Okay, one thing that I really liked about what Marcy had said, and she has such a beautiful way of illustrating things so that you can imagine them. I'm kind of a visual person as well, so I really appreciate where she comes from with that. I liked the open-air party concept. And the reason why I liked it is because I imagine an open-air party has live music. Maybe there's food trucks. Maybe there's yard games. And I feel like working with someone who has ADHD in a creative sense. Sometimes you have to be okay with bouncing around to those different activities. There's times you need to focus on one thing, but for the most part, you should explore the space with them, and you need to balance the times when you need to focus, and the times when you just need to go on the journey. Sometimes that's where the creative inspiration comes. Yes.