Keith Carman–Chief Administrative Coordinator
Podcasts are amazing. I’m addicted to about a dozen different ones, ranging from sagas about surviving natural disasters to historical pieces on everything from World War II to the stories behind random household objects, infamous dictators and music. I can’t get enough.
While that alone is a handy connection to ADHD (the whole obsessive, everything, all at once mentality, what’s next, what’s next impatience and so on), I was recently awed by something I heard on a music podcast called A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey.
Amazing in its own right—Hickey is thorough, insightful and engaging as an author and narrator–A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs did something I’d never have expected from a music podcast: provide a simple, relatable explanation for ADHD.
In the interest of sharing such valuable information with the hope that it helps anyone—recently diagnosed, those who’ve had it for years but struggle to explain it, parents, partners or family members not fully comprehending what’s going on with their neurodivergent loved one—I’ve taken the liberty of paraphrasing him here.
Full disclosure: I did try to contact Mr. Hickey directly for permission, but I’ve been unable to do so. I would be forever grateful if anyone could put us in touch.
Anyway, what’s going on with ADHD and this whole, “I have a pile of things to do, I’m late for work, my bills are overdue, and I can’t seem to get anything done, but REALLY want to go sort my rock collection and eat a bag of candy” executive functioning baloney?
Believe it or not, it’s predominantly physical. Chemical at that, thanks to our own biological reward system called dopamine, which I presume almost all of you have heard of. As our Director Tara Carman-French notes:
“Specifically, there are three neurotransmitters that ADHD brains are deficient in: dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). Everything we do to accommodate for ADHD is aimed at increasing these neurotransmitters. Move your body, take your meds, prime your pump, eat your frog, etc.”
Anyway, back to the basics, here’s Mr. Hickey explaining things in Layman’s terms:
“Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. More precisely, it’s associated with what’s called motivational salience and the brain’s reward mechanisms. When you do something associated with an increase in evolutionary fitness, like eating a high-calorie food or having a drink when you’re thirsty, cells called dopaminergic cells release a little bit of dopamine in your bloodstream, which then hit dopamine receptors in your brain.
That motivates you to keep doing that thing repeatedly if you can. Essentially, dopamine tells your brain, ‘Keep doing that. It feels good.’
Many of these dopamine receptors are in the limbic system, a part of the brain that deals with the way emotion and memory are linked. So, if you get a lot of dopamine from something, your brain also creates an association in your memory that tells you, ‘That felt good. You should do that again.’
Having the WRONG levels of dopamine in your brain can be bad. Too much can lead to schizophrenia, while not enough can lead to other problems like Parkinson’s disease or depression.”
“So, where is this going,” you’re asking me, the blog author. Read on:
“People with ADHD also don’t produce as much dopamine as other people, which causes problems. It makes it hard to say, ‘Ok, I’ve had enough,’ because the dopamine receptors haven’t had any dopamine. So, you keep eating more and more and more of the chocolate, trying to produce enough dopamine for those greedy receptors.
Conversely, you could try to do something really important, like writing a script for a podcast (or a blog post—ed), but find that you’re physically unable to make yourself do it. Your brain doesn’t get the same rewards for it as other brains, so it just refuses to do its thing.
So, in order to prevent you from, on the one hand, feeling compelled to do completely random things because you get an enormous buzz from them, or on the other hand, sitting staring blankly at a computer screen, knowing that you should be doing your work but are just completely unable to do it, the dopaminergic cells have a sort of monitoring system which checks how much dopamine is floating around in your brain. Not enough, and they give you a little extra hit—just the right amount—and they’ll stop producing it. If there’s too much, there’s a process called dopamine reuptake, where the dopaminergic cells suck the domain back inside themselves, lowering the level.”
Factor in that people with ADHD have at least one defective gene, making it difficult for neurons to respond to dopamine—the “monitoring” Mr. Hickey references—to begin with, and there you have it: putting things off, focusing on what’s probably the LAST thing you/they should be doing and a seeming inability to start or stop depending on if you’re looking for the dopamine boost to sate you or kickstart you accordingly.
Thanks, Mr. Hickey.
