Found a mention about this in a book by the German coach Martin Wehrle (titled: “Bin ich hier der Depp?”), who describe how many aspect of modern work environments can literally make people ill - and often are like designed for that.
ADT, or “Attention Deficit Trait”, is similar to ADHD, but is caused purely by environment - constant interruptions, unrealistic schedules, high pressure, lack of empathic interaction, impossible multi-tasking (a thing that computers can do well, but not humans), neverending stream of notifications by electronic media, addictive-by-design apps, and nagging software and operating systems are what causes it, resulting in an inability to “switch off”.
If one has difficulties correlated with job changes, this might be worth consideration. Myself, a year ago I left a job in a renowned research organization that piled up about 40 parallel urgent projects in the course of five years. The difference has been night and day.
Woah, that is interesting. Always felt that.
I also work in research and the number of tasks running in parallel is honestly too much for me. I am nearly always waiting for responses of other to finish urgent paperwork or proposals, while doing research and some teaching stuff. It is almost impossible to really dive into one of these topics when everything is just done this way.
I’ve been wondering for a while if one of the root causes of Autism / ADHD is systemic overstimulation (beyond the individuals capacity to integrate), especially at the early brain development stages, leading to a permanent form of this ADT.
It has some explanatory power for the rise of these issues as the world had gotten ‘louder’ (i.e. more stimulating) over the past century or so, 4 or 5 human generations is unlikely to have led to such a rise on the genetic level, but perhaps a fairly common phenotype with higher than average sensitivity to stimuli (“hunters’ brain” perhaps) could be more prone to these effects.
Perhaps they’re just the canaries in the coal mine too, as society tends ever ‘louder’.
Maybe, but in my memories my childhood wasn’t super full of overstimulation. We didn’t have a TV at home and my mom was fairly good at seeing me rested, because if I wasn’t I’d be super annoying to her.
If anything, I was responsible for my overstimulation at home once I had a pc and access to the internet. It probably could be a factor though, because, my then undiagnosed ADHD, usually was only a problem at school. And school was very overstimulating at times.
But I feel I wouldn’t have turned out super different if school and the rest of the world had been less stimulating. Alot of the problems I had could be attributed to ADHD and they started pretty early in school. I can’t remember a lot about my live before school but from what I’m told it was relatively stress free, at least for me. But parents being constantly stressed can also affect their children, so who knows really…
so who knows really…
Yeah, it’s mostly a musing I thought I’d get some feedback on, so, thanks :)
