Here's a question regarding attention and its role in ADD. When I have not taken the Adderall, here is how I feel:
My attention is spread too thin, pulled in too many directions at once, as if my brain is not alert enough to switch focus from one stimulus to another. This increases my stress level, and seems to increase the symptoms--a vicious cycle. Anybody else ever experience ADD this way?


Thanks in advance.

DBR

Yes, my attention can be quite promiscious, and go with any old stimuli.

I'm starting to buy the notion that my attention swings wildly (with any partner) due to an underlying executive function deficit. That higher brain function that promotes perseverance is lacking, so my attention hips and it hops.

Sure, more interesting stimuli will capture my attention. Its as if I'm an infant or a dog-- loud noises, bright colors, a new webpage, etc. My higher brain functions are not successful at maintaining my attention on objects that will benefit me in the long run or that are part of a longer term plan.

Yes. I have a difficult time focusing on what I'm trying to read, so that I usually have to take a ruler and hold it under each line,

One of the old helpful hints from "Brain Gym" is to put an x inside a circle at the middle of the top of the page. It's supposed to help you stay centered.

I have no expertise in Brain Gym but I have been to a couple of workshops and it reminded me a great deal of some of the excercises I did when I was in Occupational Therapy for Sensory Integration.

Yes,I do too.Its a vicious circle but it all leads back to one place.First confusion,frustration,anxiety,anger which bring me to panic attacks and then depression.Without meds,Im lost.I think that its a part of ADD for some.

I have terrible problems with attention, focus, whatever you want to call it. And it seems to be getting worse. The oddest things distract me (I mean that literally- I am distracted by the odd and unusual). It is most noticible at the worst times- checking out old ironwork while driving down a residential street, gawking at a tool sale while on a busy road, stopping in an aislway to study a preying mantis while shopping in Home Depot (I have no idea how it got there, but it was cool!)

At home I do it constantly, I'll be doing something, notice something else that needs to be done, start on that, then notice another thing and so on until I get back to what I was doing before. Sometimes anyway. Since I never seem to be able to actually finish anything, I always have dozens, if not hundreds of partially completed projects. Argh. If not for my wife I would be a complete basket case I think.

I'm new to this, so w're still 'experimenting' with what medicine works for me. Wellbutrin helped, but didn't do much for my focus. I'm trying Concerta now, 18mg didn't do a thing (that I could discern anyway) except upset my stomach and 36mg seems to help, but it's only been 3 days so the jury is still out.

Working with a dozen people, paired into 6 teams on a large project with me as the overall leader I can actually feel my brain spin it's gears as I try to teach or guide all of them. I have a terrible time multi tasking, but I'm a champion bouncer from one task to another.

Hmmm, probably outside the scope of this thread, sorry!

Craig

My attention is spread too thin, pulled in too many directions at once, as if my brain is not alert enough to switch focus from one stimulus to another. This increases my stress level, and seems to increase the symptoms--a vicious cycle. Anybody else ever experience ADD this way?
DBR
I do. I have a terrible time trying to read a map in the car. I get frustrated and before long not only can I not only read the map, but I can only hear about half of what is being said to me.

Same thing in the driver's license bureau trying to fill out a simple form with people waiting, got so distracted and upset I couldn't read the words (actually I could read them but not understand them).

My therapist said stress is a major attention killer for anybody. ADHD folks just start behind in that to begin with.

Here's a question regarding attention and its role in ADD. When I have not taken the Adderall, here is how I feel:
My attention is spread too thin, pulled in too many directions at once, as if my brain is not alert enough to switch focus from one stimulus to another. This increases my stress level, and seems to increase the symptoms--a vicious cycle. Anybody else ever experience ADD this way?


Thanks in advance.

DBR
Switching my attention from one thing to another is often very difficult, and from my reading and talking to others with ADD it's all too common. Something I've done thousands of times in my life - signing my name on the bottom of a check or credit card slip - if the cashier or my grandchildren ask me a question I stop writing and it takes a major effort to remember how to write my own name. But if I ignore them and keep writing they get ****y with me. Arrgh, no way to win in this situation?

Here's a question regarding attention and its role in ADD. When I have not taken the Adderall, here is how I feel:
My attention is spread too thin, pulled in too many directions at once, as if my brain is not alert enough to switch focus from one stimulus to another. This increases my stress level, and seems to increase the symptoms--a vicious cycle. Anybody else ever experience ADD this way?


Thanks in advance.

DBR
That’s an interesting way to express it, because in the classical sense it isn’t possible to experience ‘attention’ the way you describe it.

So perhaps an even more interesting question is what makes you different, that you can experience the process of “paying attention” to something in this unusual way.

In the standard classical model of cognition, you have only one thread of conscious awareness. We ADDers sometimes talk about ‘multithreading’ or ‘multitasking’, and you will also hear talk about ‘hyperfocus’ from time to time.

The idea behind hyperfocus is as radically different from the classical model as your description; if conscious awareness has only one focus, how can it become ‘hyper’? Expressing it in this common way de facto generates a continuous model of attention, one in which we can have more or less or even lose some through some mysterious process.

But note that it is the tyranny of language that generates the model. It wasn’t (for example) the product of careful consideration by a bunch of smart, concerned researchers, or even the result of a conscious consensus of previous generations.

It just is, without particular justification, and as such is as likely as not to incorrectly represent what’s happening in our heads when we say we’re “paying attention”.

Our AD/HD experience is much closer to the way actual neural structures work. On the level of the logical structures in our brains (the things that support stuff like conscious awareness) ‘attention’ is a mechanism that allows us to determine which of the firing patterns presented at any given instant are significant, and suppress the rest.

We all have many attention mechanisms at work, although historically only one has been devoted to the process that supports conscious awareness. ADDers have more than one conscious attention mechanism, perhaps in some of us as few as two; that’s all takes to make us significantly different in many subtle ways.

There is some evidence that we can use them at will, in effect choosing to narrow the focus of our conscious processes so that it appears we have only one mechanism in play.

This is probably the mechanism of hyperfocus, although it is likely we are actually using all of the available mechanisms to attack the same problem, partitioned on a slightly lower level into independent related subtasks.

The way that this mechanism arises is a bit difficult to grasp at first; like most neural mechanisms, it doesn’t work anything like the cause-and-effect deterministic machines familiar to most of us. The mechanism is real, but it arises as a consequence of the organization of neural structures into a successful meta-structure.

It’s implied by the fact that the structure works at all, and that we function. There is no particular separate organizing center needed, and if we were to construct one it wouldn’t work. This is where one important aspect of what is commonly called ‘the executive’ arises, and it is integrated entirely into the structure.

It’s not separable from the basic structure or it’s ordinary operating principles. The appearance that this aspect of ‘the executive’ exists in isolation is another accident of expression, its apparent independent existence a consequence of the way language works.

If we function at all this aspect of ‘the executive’ must be working just fine; there can‘t be any flaw in our ability to perform ‘executive’ functions associated with attention. Since the function is integrated into the neural structures themselves, those bits and pieces that are assumed to support executive functions must be doing something else. Presumably, it’s something that looks like it affects these integrated functions directly.

Real world understanding of the organization of the brain is in its infancy, if that. In our opinion you shouldn’t put too much faith in the models out there that seek to identify specific areas of the brain that are assumed to be malfunctioning.

The behavioral artifacts studied are usually real, but the various ideas about neural function of specific areas of the brain are at best just a kind of mental model, useful for thinking about the problem but not actually related to the real brains connected to the behavior.

Attention mechanisms are discrete, so there can be some confusion when we talk about the amount of attention we can devote to a thing, or our attention wandering or fading. The truth is that we switch tasks, and when we are overwhelmed we can lose track of what task we should be focused on.

Normals (with a single attention mechanism) also switch tasks, but the effect is different. Once a particular task is in play, it’s all there is for that person. If you were normal there wouldn’t be any problem with, say, forgetting that you are in the middle of signing a check when someone interrupts you.

You either continue with the signing, forcing the interruption to wait, or you interrupt the signing and continue it when you are finished.

No problem. Doesn’t that sound too simple? It is, in a way, because our version is complicated by the enormous number of potential subjects vying for our quota of attention processes.

Some of them are pure distractors, things like maintaining a constant ongoing evaluation of how we’re doing compared to others. (If you didn’t recognize that right off, it’s the lesson we learn in elementary school at about the time AD/HD can begin to be a problem.)

Everybody’s mix of tasks and internal private priorities is different, and how they affect us is also different. But the mechanism is the same in all of us, and it isn’t too hard to begin to get a feel for what’s happening under your own hood when you experience these little crashes.

It’s also easier to be nice to yourself when you understand a little of what’s going on. Of course, there’s still the question of why we can see this stuff at all. It’s not something for which there’s a traditional sense we could apply, sight, smell, touch and so on.

The answer to that is related to the difference that having even one extra conscious thread of attention makes, in how we think and how we store and analyze information, patterns we recognize in ourselves and others.

But that’s a different piece of the puzzle. Let us know if you’re curious.

--T&K

Yes, I am interested. How can I learn more?


DBR

You could drag yourself through some of our old posts, by searching on Stabile or looking at our member page and clicking the ‘find all posts by’ button. Be sure to read through the whole thread, though, because our theories aren’t the whole meat of most of the threads to which we’ve contributed.

(Unfortunately, some of our best stuff is too old to appear anymore, but we have it all saved, if you should ever run into a reference you can’t resolve.)

That self-aggrandizing suggestion aside, you could also peruse the same material central to our work, in particular the papers published by Dr. James Albus describing his neural network model, CMAC. I should warn you, though, that it took us more than seven years of part time effort before we began to feel comfortable with it.

Perhaps the simplest thing would be for us to describe a little more about the differences we mentioned right here, in as few pages as possible. (grins…)

Neurons can be organized into networks, and the fundamental property of their function might be described as pattern recognition: present a particular pattern on the inputs of the network, and if it matches the pattern stored, the network will signal that fact with a particular output pattern, also part of the stored information.

Networks can feed other networks, in a hierarchical organization that is inherently economical of both logical structure and neural mass.

If we feed a particular network a pattern representing an abstraction such as a particular arrangement of edges in the visual field, we might generate an output that could signal recognition of an object such as a couch or table.

Thus, the information stored in that particular network that allows it to ‘recognize’ a couch can be thought of as a model of the couch, expressed in the logic of the neural connections and the stored weights of those connections.

Our memory is a large collection of such models, which can represent anything that logic can model: objects, feelings, abstract concepts, non-existent objects, pure abstractions like a mother’s love, and so on. It’s all just a particular representative pattern of logic, expressed in neural structures.

Another way of thinking about how neurons interconnect to form these networks is that they associate individual firing patterns (which may represent recognition of a more complex firing pattern) with other logical elements, knitting everything together into a logical whole, a single abstraction.

That abstraction is in the same way associated with other abstractions, accounting for similarities and differences until we have one big lump of logic, all related to the same general thing. Neurons form interconnected systems of models by associating similar models, or models with similar elements, or any other organizing principle that can be represented (again) by a particular firing pattern.

We’ll skip the exercise of deriving consciousness from these basic low-level beginnings (more grins…) and jump straight to what the experience of this process is like on the highest level of ordinary conscious awareness.

We observe our context (our surroundings and the pattern of events going on around us) and notice particular elements that happen to catch our attention. We form a memory of that element, be it an object or action or even an abstract quality like beauty.

When we forge a new element in our store of memories, we take maximum advantage of association at the highest logical level, by relating the characteristics of that element to other elements with similar characteristics, or characteristics of the same class, and so on.

The element exists in a sea of relationships, and there are some obvious attributes to this state. The first is that we can utilize the associations to traverse this sea of stored elements, effectively using the stored relationships to navigate from one element to the next, and ultimately to the one we want to access.

We might also note when traversing the chain of associative relationships that much of the character of the stored model may be referenced by the relationships themselves. This is directly analogous to realizing that you can remember the relative heights of the various members of your family without actually memorizing their numeric heights.

Less obvious is the fact that much information about the absolute numeric value of each family member’s height may be reconstructed from the stored relative associative relationships, given any one numeric height as a starting point.

Information is implicit in the relationships between any two stored logical models, interchangeable with the information implicit in the model itself, and in most cases identical to the model itself. If we could find a way to do it, we could store only the relationships and not lose a thing.

But how is our memory of these relationships formed? In the case of the relative height of family members, we observe two family members and store a memory of the differential in their heights. Although we’re observing two objects, that differential is a single abstract conceptual object. We only need to a single attention mechanism to be able to observe it and form a memory of the experience.

That single differential observation suffices to recognize almost all possible properties of any object, abstract or not. But there is a logical property that requires observing the differential of two differential observations: the metalevel.

The metalevel is an abstract property that indicates relative logical scope of an abstract object. It would be convenient (especially for mathematicians) if metalevels were an illusion of some sort, but that turns out not to be the case. Metalevel is a property that relates generality (or specificity) of one abstraction as compared to another.

If we list the names of several logical abstract objects it’s usually obvious whether they all occupy the same metalevel. For example, in the list {carpenter, craft, electrician, mason, and roofer} craft should immediately leap out as belonging to a different class than the rest.

But the relationship is deeper than that, because the rest of the logical objects listed are each an example of a craft. The logical model craft serves as a prototype of specific examples such as carpentry or electrician.

It occupies a higher level, in a sense, because it defines one complex aspect all of the logical models on the level below, examples of a particular craft. Since both craft and examples of specific crafts are models, we need an additional term to indicate the sense that there is a level involved, in which craft serves as a general prototype for each specific model.

And meta is a good a term as any, meaning literally transcending, or higher. Thus, we call craft a metamodel, to acknowledge its role as a prototype of any particular instance such as carpentry, and we acknowledge the property of transcendence by saying it exists on a higher logical level, or metalevel.

It should be obvious that carpenter is itself a general term, describing in a particular general way any number of individual carpenters. A such, carpenter also serves as a metamodel, and it should be obvious that the chain of metalevels is potentially endless.

Looked at this way metalevels don’t seem like such a big deal, and they’re not. They’re just an abstract logical property, and like the other more familiar fundamental elements of pure logic, the metalevel must also be considered a gift of the universe, implicit in the nature of nature itself.

But we have cheated in the example by laying out the names of the logical objects we want to consider. In this circumstance we can walk from one object to another and make note of the similarities and differences, and also make note of our sense that they’re not all of the same class.

We’ve effectively frozen a picture that we can peruse at leisure, and even then the recognition of the logical property metalevel was already in place. This isn’t a particularly esoteric example of metalevels, which is why we use it: it’s already implicit in our common understanding of reality, and particularly the idea of craft.

What we need to do to observe relative metalevel on the fly and store it as a part of our memory of the experience of observation is look at two relationships simultaneously, so the implied relationship of the two relationships may be stored.

It’s not good enough to look at first one and then the other, because metalevel is relative; this is the commonly recognized view of anything, and the metalevels fade into the background. Every logical object occupies a metalevel, and in that sense they’re all the same.

But if we happen to have two independent attention mechanisms to devote to the process of observation we can meet the requirement of simultaneity, looking at two different relationships and implicitly storing a memory of the comparison. If the logical relationships occupy different metalevels, that property will become a part of the stored model of the observation.

We’ll wrap this up presently, but first lets talk about what effects this seemingly trivial difference could have on our experience of being. Obviously, we’re talking about the AD/HD ability to multithread, or multitask, here, and you can understand why we said that there might be as few as one extra conscious attention mechanism at work to make us different from normals.

(Why we would have this difference is another interesting question, for which we don’t have any firm answer.)

The first and most important difference is in the quality of logical models themselves. If we model different elements of a model by including information about the relative metalevel of each element, there is obviously a lot more room to spread out the different logical elements.

In effect, a model may be almost arbitrarily dense and precise. By comparison, models that do not differentiate different elements by their relative metalevel may become limited by ambiguity. Two or more otherwise identical elements that occupy different metalevels seem like completely different objects to us, but look confusingly similar to someone that doesn’t notice the metalevels.

The potential ambiguity inherent in models without metalevels places a kind of limit on what we can model successfully, and that limits what we are able to notice in our environment through our experience in that environment. It isn’t possible to have a memory of an experience unless a logical model can be formed to represent it, regardless of how many times we might live through it.

What can we do with these more sophisticated models? We can (for example) develop an improved awareness of many ordinary things, with which we are all familiar. In particular ADDers seem to be developing an awareness of internal processes that are classically thought of as existing on a sub- or unconscious level of our brain’s normal function.

We have a model of this, including a theoretical context for such ideas as subconscious or unconscious, which we won’t get into here. Suffice it to say that we are potentially faced with the complete dissolution of the barriers that created the need for such terms.

Consequential to that, we are busy learning to interfere with these formerly invisible processes, with varying results. There is no model for control of some of these internal mechanisms, and some of them are structured to afford a kind of inherent stability to the way that our minds work.

We can step around those stabilizing structures with ease, but when we do, we set the mechanism in motion, and that can be somewhat confusing or annoying. Worse yet, our meddling activates these processes in others, and they respond with unconscious attempts to correct the ‘defect’ in our behavior that triggered them to act.

None of this is going to prove very important in the long run; think of it as growing pains. The important differences are in how the logical structures in our minds are organized, and here we return to the idea that information can be stored in objects (i.e., models) or implied in the relationships between models.

If we store information in one big chunk, without making note of metalevels, we are limited to how large the chunk can grow. Consequently, normals classically develop many different relatively isolated ‘superchunks’, and switch between them as necessary.

(This is why a perfectly nice guy like Ken Lay could go do things he would never think correct at home.)

But if we make note of metalevels when we store models, we can knit all of the information in our heads into one giant metamodel that takes on a multi-dimensional web-like structure, with the information stored mainly in the relationships, rather than as hard models.

This logical structure, which is called a metamodel web, has some significant properties. It’s holographic, in the sense that the structure at any point implies the structure at a remote point, since the relationships that connect the two regions must maintain a certain degree of logical consistency.

This allows us to correctly imagine stuff we’ve never seen, but perhaps more importantly, it allows us to instantly verify whether a model is valid. With all models connected, we have to enforce a kind of consistency in all areas of our lives.

(This is why the behavior of guys like Ken Lay seems completely bogus to us. Once we develop a significant metamodel web, it’s impossible to have two inconsistent models of behavior in different areas of our lives.)

Using a metamodel web enables us to think differently, accessing and analyzing information by sliding along the interconnections of the web itself. Since we don’t actually have hard models for some of the stored information, we are forced to recreate the substance of the model by running around and noting the relationships whenever we actually need a hard model.

Principally that occurs when we need to interact with others, and to some people it looks like we make everything up. It may even feel like that to us, too, and so we may endure a certain sense that we’re faking it, a very common AD/HD attribute.

There’s much more, of course; we can generate most of the commonly reported experiences associated with having/being AD/HD by running through this model and looking at how the inclusion of information relating to metalevels creates a different experience in a particular situation (as compared to a normal), and in turn how that experience can result in a significantly different self-model.

A different self-model feeds back into the process, of course, and so there is a bewildering array of different AD/HD stories. There is also the consideration of the time it takes to form these web-like structures, which are more dense and efficient than the classical structure, but still require time to build.

Typically, we don’t feel as if we understand something until our web is substantially complete; since it’s often more complex, it can take us a lot longer to learn something, and if we’re expected to learn within a certain time, it looks like we have somehow failed.

That sense, that we aren’t able to learn as others do, feeds back into how we experience being, too, and the whole picture revolves like this in ever larger circles for many ADDers. It’s hard to explain why we feel we need to understand something differently than other people, and most of us don’t bother to try.

That’s six pages, and more than enough for now. We’ve written a lot about this in these forums over the last year or so, and you can probably still find some of it. Or you can toss it aside and begin to put together your own picture, not a bad way to go either.

However it goes, good luck. If you have any specific questions, you might want to PM us. If it seems relevant, we can always repost it to the thread.

--T&K

Here's a question regarding attention and its role in ADD. When I have not taken the Adderall, here is how I feel:
My attention is spread too thin, pulled in too many directions at once, as if my brain is not alert enough to switch focus from one stimulus to another. This increases my stress level, and seems to increase the symptoms--a vicious cycle. Anybody else ever experience ADD this way?


Well considering I needed to copy and paste original question here so I could remember it long enough to answer may be a sign of difficulty in short term memory!!!!!!!! Getting lost in Stables well defined answer could also contribute as well!!!

I experience my ADHD a bit differently than what you describe. I feel like all the outter stumli is mixing with the inner srumli and there is one one at the helm directing traffic...so I end up basically confused and frustarted...it takes a while to untangle mental mess. By the time I get the knot in my brain untangled the world has like moved on without me.

On adderall I can "direct traffic" so to speak it does not decrease what I hear, see, or feel, but internal can be matched with extrenal and I can decide what I need to react to first. The medications acts kind of like a traffic controller it keeps my menatl traffic from resembling a mutli-plane crash!!!!!!!

Stabile, what you are missing is that the experience of attention is not an acute monitoring, rather, it is aquired retrospectively through reflection. I don't think anyone can both monitor attention and actually pay attention at the same time. Part of paying attention is monitoring your thoughts and actions and modifying them to fit the situational requirements. As this monitoring occurs it may happen while a task is being focused upon, only if attention is free (such as when a task is automated to lower levels of the brain). This back and forth balance is part of attention. But going one level up and monitoring real-time how you're monitoring (or not) is not possible, unless it is aquired through memory. Which brings up another point: If you're experience of reality is chaotic and not integrated well, your memories are going to be difficult to characterize "accurately". People with ADHD are notoriously poor self-observers, and tend not to guage the impact they have properly.

For me personally, my ability to construct an accurate view of things has been to identify many sides through other observers, and form a concept of how things might fit together, integrating my perceptions in the process. Everyone has varying levels of natural awareness, but it's pretty amazing the simple things that I have had to look at conceptually rather than intuitively, in order to see things clearly.

I try not to spend too much time breaking attention down into components, when I am speaking to laymen. To them the many peices of executive function and attention are thought of in simple terms: "I can't read a book", or "I can't pay attention to a conversation". Identifying the components may seem crucial for tailoring treatments to the individual. The problem is that people who might seem to fit a certain cognitive profile, may respond to medication that is historically thought to be specific to a very different cognitive profile. Therefore, unless the traits are very neatly and distinctly in another realm, it is generally not possible at this stage in time to draw conclusions that apply to treating individuals.

Look at the disorders out there and the amazing heterogeneity involved in each and every one of them. They have different courses and respond to different treatments, and yet they are considered the same disorder. That means we don't know enough yet.

Dbr2, it sounds to me like you are describing a very common difficulty! :o My brain is an absolute mess without medication. I really identify with what brandilyn described. As my meds wear off I loose my focus. If I experience a day without meds I am in a sort of drunken haze, mixed with stupid happiness, stress, aggrivation, antagonistic tendancies, etc. It can be fun, but I'm glad to go back on the meds. If I go more than 3 days without meds, I begin to spiral away into la la land. I get scared and panicked and I don't know what I'm doing or where I am. I get very annoyed. The reason I think it takes me 3-4 days is that before that time I have some residual process in my mind that knows the chaos will end soon. But as time goes on, I become more and more disoriented and the immediate situation begins to overshadow my thoughts of myself on meds.

Yikes! I'm hooked ;)

BTW, I didn't read a single post in this thread other than the original poster's, and a few lines of stabiles. Sorry if I'm way off here lol:D

Hey, relvinnian:

I think it only matters if you don’t believe you got what you needed to understand some aspect of the thread. (grins…)

Our posts are sometimes way too long, admittedly, and we try to limit the situations in which we blast like that to when we have specific theoretical material to explain which is significant but not generally known.

Thirty-five years of work usually produces a pretty deep mound of background.

Our descriptions of attention are what actually happens in neural structures, and there are many elements of the common experience that reflect that. We’ve come to recognize it in that way, and it seems much simpler to us as a result.

But like all experience, it’s relative in the sense we need to interpret it in terms of our internal experiential model of reality. The only requirement for such models is consistency between the two, and each is perfectly valid (if they’re sufficient) in their own context.

So (for example) meadd823’s model is entirely useful to her, and although we would feel limited by it, we suspect she gets exactly what she needs from it. If it begins to fail, then she’ll be motivated to modify or even abandon it.

When a model becomes embedded in a common body of scientific inquiry, it isn’t usually that easy to transcend.

Your understanding of attention is inconsistent with the actual neural function that supports conscious awareness, and also with many common experiences of the machine in action. Despite that, it’s a conceptual scheme that’s been around for a while, and serves well as a framework for some serious discussion.

But because it doesn’t accurately reflect the underlying mechanisms, it’s going to be impossible to extend theory based on it into other areas successfully. Unless, of course, a consensus can be arrived at to modify or replace it.

* * * * *

We won’t get into the extent to which conscious thought is entirely a retrospective function, but the effect is usually absorbed by the mechanisms by which it arises. So it’s perfectly OK to consider conscious awareness as a real-time process.

All experiences are a result of ‘acute monitoring’, by definition. If you find a memory of an experience, you were ‘paying attention’ when the memory was formed, that is, an attention mechanism was assigned to a conscious process. No attention, no memory.

It is possible to ‘miss’ (in a sense) the fact that a particular event has been noticed and noted, but that is a different mechanism at work, a kind of ‘meta-attention’ that reflects your own internal model of your conscious awareness. If that model doesn’t include a sense that an awareness of such events is possible, it will automatically filter them from your interpretation of your ordinary experience of being.

That’s not attention, though, and has little to do with it. It’s also not what the original post was describing, and isn’t involved in the effect our drugs have on how we experience attention.

(The effect of our model of experience on what we experience can be changed at will, in no time at all. Some fun. This is the filter Aldous Huxley talked about in The Doors of Perception, BTW.)

This is the way neural structures work, and we don’t see much point in holding on to old models that don’t reflect that.

The particular class of model of conscious function you describe generally requires the introduction of abstractions like ‘subconscious’ and ‘unconscious’. Once you begin to understand the underlying logical structure of human awareness such ideas lose their utility.

--T&K

BTW, I didn't read a single post in this thread other than the original poster's, and a few lines of stabiles. Sorry if I'm way off here lol

Hmmm could this your answer to the question about attention.

I will have to say that your wrote a detailed response to Stables post for some one who only read a few lines!!!!!!

I will have to say that your wrote a detailed response to Stables post for some one who only read a few lines!!!!!!
Good point; it’s an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?

Which is certainly theoretically possible, according to our understanding of how neural structures work in the AD/HD brain.

Kay and I do this all the time – we let our web give us answers that vary from what may seem like a simple flash of insight, to the mysteriously appropriate but unexpected thoughts that Kay calls ‘whispers’. It’s an artifact of how we structure the storage and analysis of information, and it’s virtually free – it doesn’t require a conscious attention mechanism, because it’s implicit in how the structures are formed, and what they represent.

We can’t find fault with it; it seems both valid and validating of our claims. Of course, this is the point in the discussion at which we might revisit the thread and look a little closer at what had been written, perhaps printing the whole thing out to look at in those odd free moments.

We do this sort of thing all the time, with anything you could imagine. It’s how we wound up looking at Albus’ papers for more than seven years, until we began to understand their implications to out work. (grin…)