Thinking Beyond Science

Imagine your brain as a dopamine rollercoaster—wild highs and crashing lows that make focusing feel impossible. In children with ADHD, too much dopamine gets sucked up from the spaces between neurons, leaving little behind, while events trigger massive releases. This hypersensitivity to stimuli explains the classic signs: distractibility, poor impulse control, trouble focusing, and disorganization. These kids swing wildly between extreme arousal and total disinterest, like being stuck on a spectrum’s two poles.

Amphetamines and cocaine tweak this by blocking dopamine reuptake and boosting release. For ADHD folks, small doses of amphetamine derivatives calm the storm, raising steady dopamine levels (tonic dopamine) and dialing down those intense bursts (phasic dopamine), finally allowing focus. Cocaine amps it up further for a pleasure rush, but the brain adapts, quitting its own dopamine production over time—leaving life dull and unrewarding without it. We don’t yet know long-term effects of ADHD meds on young brains; adaptation might cut natural dopamine, risking depression later.

Stats paint a stark picture: 2-10% of schoolkids have ADHD, but up to 40% of prison inmates do. Untreated, it hikes addiction risks in adulthood—many self-medicate with street drugs that hijack the brain, slipping through gaps in education and mental health systems.

Brain scans reveal more: ADHD kids show weaker default mode network (DMN) integrity, especially in the precuneus node. Their resting-state DMN fluctuations oscillate faster—a different wavelength entirely from “normal” brains.

Yet this wiring fuels exceptional creativity. What tanks performance in classrooms, boardrooms, or cubicles shines in music studios, art labs, or lively chats. Success at society’s top demands near-psychotic focus, blinding you to novel connections between ideas. Those “irrelevant” thoughts? They’re your unconscious whispering, “This is lame—try something better.” Bad for time management, gold for art. But to execute, you must pause the idea flood. Noise, oddly, might keep anyone—ADHD or not—in that sweet creative-concentration zone.

Our brains crave variation. Each experience rewires us irreversibly, deepening with rest in between for consolidation via the DMN. A resting brain integrates lessons into your sense of self, making meaning uniquely for you. Attention rhythms ebb and flow daily, with DMN oscillating against task-positive networks. Force constant focus, and trouble brews.

Take epilepsy: 50 million worldwide, 30% uncontrolled by max meds. Causes vary—genetic, disease, trauma—but seizures stem from hypersynchrony, where neuron groups fire too uniformly. EEGs show it as ictal spikes: starting as fast, low-amplitude waves, exploding into slow, massive ones. One overfiring zone spreads, causing blackouts or convulsions.

This all ties to a bigger rebellion. As David Graeber notes: “The ultimate measure of humanity’s success as a species is its ability to increase the overall global output of goods and services by at least five percent per year. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that if we continue along these lines much longer, we’re likely to destroy everything.” Ancient Greeks saw wage-workers as slaves. Today, debt traps nearly everyone in the grind, starving the brain’s need for rest, variation, and those “irrelevant” sparks. ADHD brains—hypersensitive, creative, rhythmic—might be canaries in the coal mine, signaling a system that demands hypersynchrony at the cost of humanity.

What if embracing brain diversity, rest, and wild ideas is our real path forward?

Source : Autopilot: The Art & Science of Doing Nothing by Andrew Smart

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18053732-autopilot