earlyrisera day ago
I read champignons and it kind of fit even better. Adderall (Brave New World) and mushrooms (Island).
Transcript: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/realizing-human-...
It's also not really an antidepressant any more than it is an amphetamine (it's neither). Attempting to self-medicate in either direction is not beneficial, longer term.
If your marijuana usage carries you through such wide-ranging symptomology, that's on you homey [holds-back next pass to you]. It's okay to ask for help.
(Antidepressant was about "Soma", the Huxley fantasy drug)
Depends on mind, use, dose. I've had THC trips that were almost as strong as concentrated mushrooms can deliver on an empty stomach, seeing shit that wasn't, patterns, my mind was light years away, reality twisted. Almost as strong.
Didn't dance as a mist of atoms to shamanic music without any connection to my real 5 senses, but then again I hardly met mushroom user who did achieve that themselves.
Marijuana often seems to promote thinking "outside the box" which is probably not what the Brave New World people would want for their population
That's also more-or-less consistent with the implied literary reference to the Lotus Eaters, who I think are usually imagined as opium users. Opioids are different but are also downers that reduce anxiety.
Benzos later featured significantly in one of Adam Curtis' film-essays -- maybe Century of the Self, maybe another one. I'd view those films as being in a similar spirit to Brave New World.
(By contrast, turns out 1984 -- which is always paired with BNW -- came out later than I thought, in '49. Yet BNW seemed more forward-looking. I always imagined it was written partially in response. It wasn't.)
There goes my benzo theory.
Though they remain what I imagine when I read about soma.
Hard disagree. Cannabis induces a sensation of profundity. It makes ordinary mundane thoughts feel insightful and novel. The ideas you have when on cannabis seem like insightful out of the box ideas, but that's a perceptual illusion created by the drug. The best it can do is provide you the encouragement to see ideas through to the end, but of course this is tempered by the way it generally has a negative effect on motivation, so most often users are left thinking of ideas they think are wonderful, but not actually executing on those ideas. End result is usually a couch potato lost in unproductive thoughts.
If someone has a problem with idea development because they decide early that the idea isn’t worth exploring, perhaps due to low self confidence in ideation etc, then simply producing the feeling of it being a good idea could help them go further than they would otherwise with it. Of course it also makes dumb ideas feel like good ideas too, so for someone who doesn’t have the capacity to have good creative ideas or who doesn’t have this problem in the first place, it probably won’t help.
And with nightmares I’m not referring to bad dreams in general, but to horrific nightmares where a person is re-experiencing their trauma in various ways, not necessarily remembering their dreams afterwards.
Imagine sleeping eight hours but waking up more tired than when you went to sleep and in full panic mode without even knowing why. After months and years, it gets pretty tiring.
Being able to not be afraid of going to sleep is a lifesaver and can keep those people functional in their lives.
my major state was one of deep relaxation ... MDMA does not work like Dexedrine ... I feel totally peaceful.
- Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL
https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal109.shtml
I really prefer the term ‘ecstacy’ for mdma paired with a stimulant, even if it’s just caffeine - because that is a distinct experience.
What Adderall is about is:
- helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it.
- allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired.
- increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1].
- making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]).
Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title.
No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall.
To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD:
https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication
If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD.
Thank you in advance.
[2] https://add.org/adhd-and-depression/
[3] https://crownviewpsych.com/blog/adhd-increased-risk-suicide-mental-illness/
Adderall has no positive relationship to my mental efficiency. It can in fact be a negative once your passed the 8 hour windows where its still in your system.
At the end of the day, it makes it easier to not bounce between different things. It doesn't help me be smarter. It helps me drive to work without needing to listen to music and be on my phone.
Modafinil... maybe.
A big thing I struggled with prior to medical treatment that I don’t often hear discussed about ADHd was rejection sensitivity.
For those unfamiliar: imagine a time someone said something that hurt your feelings or caused a strong emotional reaction.
Now imagine that as a routine emotional response to day to day interactions. Feeling intensely sad, irritated, insulted, etc. to extents completely o it of proportion to whatever was said or even implied.
It’s brutal. It contributes to a lot of depression and social anxiety for folks with ADHD. It doesn’t matter if you’re aware of the response being disproportionate—you get to go on that emotional roller coaster whenever somebody says they don’t care for your favorite food, accidentally cut you off in a conversation, or the day just turns out differently than you were expecting.
Medical treatment makes a huge difference—in my particular case the difference between feeling like I had the emotional regulation of a toddler and not needing to constantly question every emotion I felt prior to responding to things I was reacting to.
Stimulant medications didn’t work for me, but they do this for most people with ADHD (more effectively, too!) and like alterom it saddens me whenever FUD like this crops up.
Rejection sensitivity is neurodivergent trait that's not exclusive to ADHD, but the way it manifests with ADHD can be truly life-derailing.
Learning about it helped me a lot to deal with it (in particular, externalizing that emotion as a trait and not what me is).
I wrote about it too in that wiki. Here's my experience with rejection sensitivity in the ADHD context:
It's like realizing that the reason you've been getting stuck in the mud is not that you're a bad driver.
It's just that people who don't are driving 4x4 trucks, and you've had a Nissan Z series sports car.
Turns out, farms and off-road are simply not the right environment for your vehicle, and when that environment has some accomodations, like the paved surface of a highway or a race track, you're literally running circles around people in the most common vehicles.
One profound effect of taking Adderall was feeling the clarity to understand that difference, and seeing the road instead of the endless mud fields in front of me.
It does help to get things done, but around 30% of ADHD'ers aren't responsive to it.
Understanding that you're getting stuck because your brain wasn't meant for that kind of driving, however, is universally useful.
That's why I made that ADHD wiki [1], and keep posting links to it.
It's an compilation of information that has helped me tremendously to understand the above; and I know this resource was helpful to others too in their journeys.
My perspective is that of a late-diagnosed adult who's been completely unaware of what ADHD is, and thought that they can't possibly have an attention deficit because to get anything done, they have to hyperfocus on it.
Again, learning that hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD and understanding how it works)l had a profound impact. And medication helped with that too: it's easier to not get stuck hyperfocused on the wrong thing with Adderall.
Getting Adderall was like spraying WD-40 into rusty steering components. The immediate effect is that I can go where I want to go to, not the random direction my vehicle happens to face.
The long-term effect though was understanding what makes it difficult to steer, and how to maintain it better.
And even if I don't have power steering all the time like everyone else, I'm still better off with that experience.
My point here that it's never about medication VERSUS therapy and knowledge.
Medication is not an alternative, it's a BOOSTER.
When it works, it's just dropping the difficulty from Nightmare to Medium/Hard. It doesn't play the game for you.
The said, I'm very much happy the Nightmare mode days are behind me, and I'm very sad that the only reason I've been living my life that way is stigma and lack of information.
When I took Adderall, I unexpectedly had to grieve the future I'll never get to have after being held back by all the pain I've been needlessly subjected to over the preceding three decades.
That grief, too, is a common experience in ADHD late-diagnosed adults.
Thank you for sharing that link, and contributing to the discussion and awareness <3
The only things I’ve foung that actually works, is a daily combo of Vyvanse and dexis
But talk therapy can help some folks come to accept the differences that their ADHD means in terms of how to relate to other people or to better understand why how ADHD impacts their own behavior and self-perception.
I myself have found it’s much easier and happier to shape my life around my particular ADHD than trying to change my behavior (something that’s destined to fail and only compound the negative emotions associated with ADHD).
The therapist that worked for me practiced ACT, and was more close to coaching when it came to ADHD.
Therapists are living databases of solutions to certain kinds of problems that people have.
Problems caused by ADHD certainly belong to that category, and if your therapist is specializing in that area, they can save you a lot of time and effort by suggesting approaches that you'd otherwise have to figure out on your own.
Finding such a therapist is, unfortunately, a bit like winning a lottery that most people in the US wouldn't have the resources to play.
The stigma also seems to accidentally admit that things like executive function and food noise aren't equally distributed, thus some people could benefit from intervention.
For example, if you've never been fat or you never binge eat or you've never procrastinated 15min of homework until 2am despite, then you're missing the irony when your solution for people who deal with these things is to try harder and to jump through hoops that you don't need to.
> For children with ADHD younger than 6 years of age, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends parent training in behavior management as the first line of treatment, before medication is tried.
> For children 6 years of age and older, the recommendations include medication and behavior therapy together—parent training in behavior management for children up to age 12 and other types of behavior therapy and training for adolescents. Schools can be part of the treatment as well. AAP recommendations also include adding behavioral classroom intervention and school supports. [1]
CBT works pretty well for adhd, studies are clear on this.
But medication seems even better, as does a combination of therapy and medication.
ADHD isn't unusual as far as the effectiveness of therapy, it's unusual in how well the medication is proven to work.
No, it doesn't. It _barely_ works and mostly consists of teaching people some coping mechanisms. Medication works _much_ better, especially when using in addition to the CBT.
I want to share my counter example -- no amount of therapy could help me not almost loose it every time I drove my daughter in heavy traffic or deal with her just being a toddler.
But after 2 weeks being on concerta made lasting changes even months off the drug.
It was the best type o therapy -- you just do the thing that triggers you minus the bad part and learn it's not so bad and you can do it, it has profound implications.
It is not effective, and I would argue actively worsens, situations where you're feeling bad about your accurate view of things, such as when you're depressed because you're unable to ever get any of the things you need to do done despite knowing they need to be done. CBT is unable to help in that situation because most people can't simply go "oh, well its ok, its a mental health condition" - employer, while sometimes supportive, aren't going to continue employing someone who doesn't do the work they're being paid for, and reframing that would eventually result in losing their job.
> Using a random effects model, we found that CBTs had medium-to-large effects from pre- to posttreatment (self-reported ADHD symptoms: g = 1.00; 95% confidence interval [CI: 0.84, 1.16]; self-reported functioning g = .73; 95% CI [0.46, 1.00]) and small-to-medium effects versus control (g = .65; 95% CI [0.44, 0.86] for symptoms, .51; 95% CI [0.23, 0.79] for functioning). Effect sizes were heterogeneous for most outcome measures. Studies with active control groups showed smaller effect sizes. Neither participant medication status nor treatment format moderated pre-to-post treatment effects, and longer treatments were not associated with better outcomes. Conclusions: Current CBTs for adult ADHD show comparable effect sizes to behavioral treatments for children with ADHD, which are considered well-established treatments. Future treatment development could focus on identifying empirically supported principles of treatment-related change for adults with ADHD. We encourage researchers to report future findings in a way that is amenable to meta-analytic review.
Yeah, it's better at making people feel better. Not great but certainly OK at improving behaviour.
As I said, the evidence seems to suggest medication is extremely effective which is I guess is why people are quoting the first thing I wrote and acting like they disagree with me (they get mad for suggesting that CBT works a bit because they feel judged for using the arguably superior treatment?).
You are welcome to either actually read my piece or, better, listen to his talk. There is no judgment against the substance but a call for additional approaches to enhance a person.
What specifically are you talking about here? It appears to me that your comment is an expression of vibe with zero information content.
There's no dichotomy between treating symptoms and cause even when the cause is treatable (which isn't the case with ADHD; it's a neurotype, with differences showing on brain scan levels) — and that's setting aside the discussion of whether it's something we need to "treat" in the first place.
We still have painkillers for people who need them while they are getting treatment.
We still have meds for runny noses, we still have Tylenol for fever, even though these are merely symptoms.
We still have pills for allergies.
And on that note: the symptoms (such as fever and allergic reactions) can and do kill people.
Please reconsider your comment.
If you encounter a bit of bitterness from the ADHD community online, let me provide some perspective: I have been called lazy my entire life, I have wondered why everybody could just do stuff and apply themselves. Why couldn't I just clean my house, do my homework, keep on top of chores, or even find the energy to play games after a day of work? I only found out as an adult I have a disability which makes all of that an uphill battle for me, INCLUDING finding the motivation for the fun stuff. There is an easy fix for this, some meds that take care of SOME of the problem. They don't fix it in much the same way that a wheelchair doesn't fix the legs of a crippled person, but it sure is like playing life on easy mode if you're used to dragging yourself around by your arms. And now I'm stuck explaining this to people who have done the barest minimum of research and who say 'oh it only is treating symptoms'. They have the audacity of calling me lazy (again!) for not training my arms more to overcome my disability that way. And my response is simple: You can take my metaphorical wheelchair over my dead body, and if you were in my position you would feel exactly the same way.
The alternative is that you prevent millions of people in managing their disability while asking them to bet on your view of the world AND on our collective ability to change it. In the best case scenario where we manage that shift, that's what, 10 years of my life gone while society adjusts? Will you write my kids a nice letter explaining them their dad is going to be a deadbeat the next 10 years while we fix society, because somebody on the internet thinks daddy shouldn't be on stimulant medication?
You're just not presenting an attractive deal to anyone, whilst very politely telling disabled people making the best of their shit situation that their crutches should not exist. Hell, maybe they shouldn't need to exist, but how is that my fault? And while I can't tell if you stand on the side of 'using meds to manage ADHD is a failure of self discipline and morality', but if you do: I promise you most people with ADHD have more self discipline in their little toe than others do in their entire body. But self discipline doesn't make a cripple walk, as much as it doesn't make my brain make the chemicals I need to put my body into action. I've spent enough time of my life flogging myself into action, believing I was a fundamentally lazy human, I'll take the meds.
Thanks for writing this succinct counterpoint!
The argument of the commenter you're responding to reminds me of the "ADHD is a superpower!” vibe, which I perceive as toxic positivity, but couldn't rebuke quite as clearly [1].
"There's nothing wrong with you, it's literally the entire human society that's broken" has the same implication ("don't take meds, you're nOt bRoKeN”).
Of course it's the environment that causes our symptoms. Just like cold weather makes one feel cold.
It'd be rather silly to argue that winter clothes should be abandoned, that they exist only to make money for clothing manufacturers.
Some of us live in cold places. We need winter clothes. And we don't make the weather.
It also helped do wonders for my anxiety, which I previously treated with sertaline.
I'm not the hyperactive sort of individual who has ADHD so I didn't get diagnosed until late in life, around a year or so ago, I'm just the "Inattentive" type.
But finally I can take my meds, and do things that other people do without feeling like it's mental torture. And I can also remember to do important things, like my taxes, on time!
It's so weird comparing my days on it to off it, when I happen to run out. I start getting a backlog of little things that my brain decided it couldn't take one minute to knock out.
Just wanted to reiterate it for anyone who's reading this thread.
That's exactly my point: it is NOT.
Not for the people Adderall is prescribed to and was developed for.
See: https://romankogan.net/adhd#Medication
>I don't believe this is specifically about ADHD.
There's nothing to believe in here.
Adderall is a drug that's specifically about ADHD. It's a stimulant that helps people with ADHD overcome executive dysfunction:
https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Executive%20Dysfunction
You can't talk about Adderall without talking about ADHD just like you can't talk about allergy pills without talking about allergies, or talk about eyeglasses without talking about myopia.
> It also happens to treat ADHD
NO. Please reconsider sharing this sentiment.
Adderall is a drug for treating ADHD that also happens to be abused by people thinking it'll have the "effects Huxley predicted" (enhancing thinking efficiency).
It does not; that's the reason why it's a controlled substance. When abused, it will wreck your brain.
As an analogy: glasses make people with myopia see better, but wearing glasses without prescription is a very bad idea.
>I believe it's being used here in the former capacity.
I understand this, and it's a misconception I'm trying to dispel.
With evidence and scientific understanding, mind you, and not just with vibes about thinking what Adderall is.
Speaking of which, I forgot to take it, which means I'm about to have my breakfast at 5PM because I couldn't bring myself to do the eating task earlier.
This is what Adderall is for.
>The title is perhaps a bit unfortunate.
The title is repeated verbatim in the article, whose author has kindly replied in this thread and re-stated it twice (as did you), as if I weren't directly addressing the fallacious point that the author employed to attract attention to Huxley's lecture (which doesn't need such advertising in the first place).
It's not the title that's a bit unfortunate.
It's the mention of Adderall, and the myth that it's a "brain-enhancing" drug.
If it were, it'd be given to everyone already, and perhaps there'd be fewer people spreading vibe-based falsities in post titles, but I digress.
The point is:
==============
Adderall does NOT enhance mental efficiency, as Huxley's fantasized drug would.
Adderall HELPS people with ADHD overcome EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION.
That's what it's for. That's what it DOES.
If you take it for ANYTHING ELSE, you will NOT get the intended result, and you will likely FUCK YOURSELF UP.
Spreading the MISCONCEPTION that Adderall is a "brain-enhancing” drug (as the author opined in the comments here) drives the ABUSE of this medication, which HARMS people and makes ADHD harder to obtain for people who NEED it to function.
========
I hope I've succeeded in bringing your attention to this issue.
If this hasn't changed your point of view, please let me know what else I can elaborate on.
Thank you <3
Huxley never mentions Adderall, and neither Huxley nor the article mention ADHD.
I'm not trying to argue with your points about how Adderall relates to ADHD. I agree! I empathize!
I'm arguing that this is not about how Adderall relates to ADHD. I don't think our experience is the intended context.
The talk is mostly about tailoring learning to the individual. I think you'd find it's points quite agreeable!
> you will likely FUCK YOURSELF UP.
To be fair, there's evidence it does the same to us.
Then whose experience is the "intended" context?
> To be fair, there's evidence it does the same to us.
Same for every prescription medication out there.
This is why they require a prescription.
This is why spreading the idea that Adderall is a pill that will boost your "mental efficiency" WITHOUT ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES, as Huxley said in his talk, is harmful and dangerous.
Adderall is very much known to not be that kind of stimulant.
Of course, same applies for e.g. nicotine. But we also know the outcome of nicotine being touted as a consequence-free stimulant.
The fact that one is widely available to anyone over 18 no questions asked, while the other requires a thousand hoops and a costly diagnosis is, of course, a bizarre travesty...
...which is only exacerbated by people promoting the abuse of this medication, as the author of the piece does (by saying that it is anywhere close to Huxley's utopian drug at population scale).
For… weight loss? Adderall was developed as a diet pill. It was never modified in any way to better suit ADHD treatment.
A rather costly part, at that.
There's a heckton of it that needs to be done before doctors can prescribe drug X for condition Y.
Adderall was developed for helping ADHD folks, not for helping everyone else get a boost of "mental efficiency" (and particularly, without adverse consequences).
Not in the least because it doesn't do that.
Yes, there’s certainly research involved in getting an existing drug approved for a new condition. That’s not development.
> not for helping everyone else get a boost of "mental efficiency" (and particularly, without adverse consequences).
While that’s not what Adderall was recently approved for, that and dieting were the primary purposes driving stimulant development (and also the development of Adderall/Obetrol specifically).
The suggestion that Adderall would only benefit folks with ADHD diagnoses is also fundamentally weird, given that ADHD is not a specific identifiable condition. We can’t scan a brain and identify whether or not that brain belongs to an individual with ADHD, so an ADHD diagnosis is necessarily subjective and not objective.
OK, I concede that point then. That's the information I intended to communicate.
>The suggestion that Adderall would only benefit folks with ADHD diagnoses is also fundamentally weird
Sure, let me rephrase.
There is, as we both agree, research performed to establish that Adderall is something that can help with ADHD symptoms (...and obesity).
There's plentiful data that demonstrates its effectiveness for some people with ADHD in that regard. And appetite loss is a well-known effect.
But there's no research done to establish that Adderall would work the way Huxley describes the hypothetical drug: giving anyone a boost in "mental efficiency", without adverse consequences to health otherwise.
To the contrary, we have extensive data and research that demonstrates Adderall doesn't work that way.
Particularly, for folks without ADHD, mental efficiency is likely to decrease when they take Adderall [1].
It gives them the feeling of being productive, though...
...which only exacerbates the problem.
Quote [2]:
What Adderall clearly does extremely well is make people think they are doing better — and to feel good while they’re doing it. “Adderall might not be a cognitive enhancement drug, but a ‘drive’ drug,” says Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Farah explains, “[Stimulants] make boring work seem more interesting, so they increase your motivation to work, energy for work, and that’s not nothing — that’s really helpful . . . Unfortunately, it also gets into the realm of feel-good drugs, and that means the risk of dependence is quite high.” Yet when I ask Farah exactly how addictive Adderall and other stimulant medications are, she tells me that there is currently no good answer. “Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers and what the dependence risk there is,” she said.
"Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers" is what I intended to communicate when I said that "this is not what Adderall was developed for".
When somebody did look (the study [1] came out years later), they found that a drug that wasn't for improving mental efficiency does not, in fact, improve mental efficiency.
The mistaken belief that Adderall is akin to Huxley's fantasy pill, which the author of the article perpetuates, is harming everyone.
As I said before, Adderall is for treating executive dysfunction: not being able to do things which you can do, should do, want to do, have the time and resources to do, but can't start doing because Brain Says No.
Adderall won't make anyone smarter. It'll make stupid people be stupid faster and with more enthusiasm.
That's not what Huxley talked about.
The headline, put simply, is a dangerous lie.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adderall-ritalin-adhd-decreases-productivity-study/
I would hazard to suggest that it can make many people much more productive though. This topic has been studied extensively since before anyone cared about ADHD, and the answer is broadly “yes, for some tasks”.
> Nobody has really looked at these drugs used as work enhancers
I would strongly disagree with this bit, this was one of the primary purposes people have studied stimulants for. They’ve been successfully used for this in the past and continue to be used anriun the world, especially by various militaries.
Anyway, unfortunately I can’t comment here on personal experience given that I have been twice diagnosed and once undiagnosed with ADHD. Adderall makes me more productive and more prone to tunnel vision, but certainly not smarter.
The historical and continued use by various militaries of stimulants seems to suggest that at least many very highly motivated big spenders seem to expect the same to apply to the general population.
That suggestion is disproved by the research I linked, particularly when it comes to mental tasks.
>the answer is broadly “yes, for some tasks
For mindless tasks, like long-haul driving, where staying awake is pretty much all that's required ? Sure.
Anything else, citation needed.
>The historical and continued use by various militaries of stimulants seems to suggest that at least many very highly motivated big spenders seem to expect the same to apply to the general population.
Military use is more commonly to increase stamina (e.g. for pilots on 48 hour bombing missions), not efficiency.
And military scenarios simply don't transfer to civilian life.
Staying awake without sleep when you're a bomber pilot is a matter of life and death, so adverse health consequences and even decrease in mental capacity can be tolerated, because being dumb and awake is better than being smart and asleep in that context.
...to an extent. Until you end up shooting some Canadians dead [1].
Which is why the "historical" use by militaries is not continuous. It's been abandoned by militaries that tried it; particularly by the USAF after that incident.
As for use by the military in general, note that the average lifespan of a Russian soldier on the front line in the Ukraine war is measured in hours[2].
That's a very different context than anyone talking here is facing. And one where the ability to stay alert matters more than anything else.
That doesn't translate to efficient or productive in any normal sense. A solider is waiting most of the time. Then something happens, fast. Any delay in reaction, and you're dead.
We can discuss the effectiveness of amphetamines in such scenarios, but that has nothing to do with Huxley's description (or productivity, efficiency, etc).
As I said in my top comment: Adderall is for helping people act without delay. This translates well to military use.
Sometimes.
A delay would've saved those Canadians.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/04/afghanistan.richardnortontaylor
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/average-life-expectancy-front-line-184101568.html
The whole idea here is that current evidence suggests that we are almost certainly currently filing a variety of disparate conditions under “ADHD” because we have no good way to determine what “ADHD” actually is.
In which way specifically?
I.e., what do you think is wrong in what I said, and how does Paul Erdos demonstrate it's wrong.
Anyway, here's what Huxley's had to say:
> ... I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter, and a number of them say that it’s probably quite possible that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means, which will do no harm to the organism as a whole, to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and the various other things which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency.
No high mentioned. Remarkably accurate to my experience.
"Upping the dose" of Adderall makes me sleepy. In fact, I take a little before going to bed if I'm feeling restless. Midnight coffee is a thing for me.
I don't have a problem with attention span (ADHD isn't about short attention spans, after all), and stimulants do nothing for that.
Power of concentration? That's where ADHD people excel when that hyperfocus locks in. That's the default, unmedicated. The problem is the lack of control over where that concentration goes.
As you can see, I've been concentrating well enough on writing long enough comments in this thread to exceed the attention span of some of the commentors who respond to them (including, sadly, the author of the article we're discussing, who, while being kind enough to join this discussion, has nevertheless glossed over the points I've made that others haven't missed).
What I should have been concentrating on is sorting out the stuff in the garage from our recent camping trip.
This is what Adderall helps with. It's starting to kick in, so I'll go and do the adulting things it makes far less painful to start doing .
Wouldn't call it an increase in mental efficiency by any measure, but insofar as my spouse is concerned, it gets me off the couch; and insofar as the to-do list is concerned, I'm more productive in ticking off the boxes.
But the items on that list are far from requiring leaps in mental effort. It's things like folding the laundry, or unpacking suitcases, paying bills, making calls to insurance, mopping the floor, doing the oil change, and so on.
In short, Adderall doesn't work like Mentats from Fallout 1/2¹.
But it greatly increases the number of action points I have for Doing Things, while I feel... normal.
That is the much more common experience, and the reason it's prescribed for ADHD.
____
The main effect for me is a decrease in inexplicable mental barriers. Things that were hard suddenly aren't. Same brain, different output. I dunno man, I call that an increase in mental efficiency.
I love the action point metaphor. Much better than the spoons I've heard before.
How do you differentiate attention span and concentration?
One is supposed to feel good doing "normal" things. Completing tasks should feel good.
There can be many variables at play: maybe your dosage could be lowered, maybe Adderall isn't ideal for you, or maybe you're simply adjusting to the medication the first few times you take it, and it won't feel the way afterwards.
But most importantly: yes, you're absolutely going to feel like you've got a superpower the first time you take it. The euphoria you feel from being able to simply do things the way neurotypical people can just get up and do them is very much a part of the ADHD experience.
Also, neurotypical people don't do mundane things on Adderall. That's not what makes them feel particularly good. Because for them, doing things without friction and climbing the mental wall first is the normal experience.
They don't feel happiness experiencing it for the first time in their lives when they take Adderall. They've had that ability all along.
TL; DR: you feel that dopamine release from doing mundane things on Adderall because you have ADHD.
>It's downright insulting when people think pharmaceuticals are some kind of shortcut to avoid some more disciplined approach.
That's the exact problem I have with the article and the title.
Nobody is talking about "championing alternatives" to antihistamines, the way this author (not Huxley! The title is misleading) talks about Adderall.
One thing I noticed is that while I hate being told what to do, and my partner hates being told what to do, and we understand deeply how we feel when someone tells us what to do, we still tell each other what to do (which goes especially badly after a long day).
Edit: I am glad you wrote this, so I didn't have to. It feels like reading my own autobiography. But the problem with reading about this stuff is that, if you forget for a minute that it's literally just how life is for you, it reads like some fantastical fiction comedy. I avoid telling anyone I deal with that I have ADHD because I feel like if I tell them they'll lump me in with some crappy mental model, and I avoid telling anyone I deal with about these problems because they sound completely absurd.
> I am glad you wrote this, so I didn't have to.
My hope was that this website would fulfill this goal, and I'm very glad you think so <3
I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.
> ... I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter, and a number of them say that it’s probably quite possible that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means, which will do no harm to the organism as a whole, to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and the various other things which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency.
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/realizing-human-potential
It turns out to refer to a drug in fiction which is named after the Vedic ritual drink.
Original Vedic "soma" is indeed more like a drink of inspiration and ecstasy, with myths similar to the norse "Mead of poetry".
"somasya tA mada indraS cakAra" - "In the exhilaration of soma, Indra has done these great deeds" - is a rig-vedic refrain.
TL;DR
Please ignore this nonsense, it's garbage.
Is that your question?
He predicted. Absent an Ouija board, he isn't predicting any more.
"In his 2006 paper, Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis"
Journalists love to do things like this - cut out the context - as it makes the headlines seem more vivid, immediate and often alarming.
"Roubini sees an upcoming global financial crisis"
Germany invades Poland on trumped-up pretext.
Shock murder in Roman forum. Details to follow.
Literary criticism and philosophy cast actions in and from recorded media in the "eternal present" (a term of art that should yield search results).
So, if Huxley (contemporary tense) wrote about a drug that resembles Adderall then a sentence cast in the eternal present would express "Huxley _writes_ about Soma in Brave New World which…".
I am more used to historians with horn rimmed glasses and badly fitting tweed jackets talking in the past tense about past times so when they reflect on it's impact in the present time they can use present tense about past acts correctly.
"German Troops conduct a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issue a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" is really not better than "The German troops conducted a false flag against Poland as a result of which the British issued a final demand, the echoes of which continue to the present day" when it comes down to it.
And it leads to awkward sentences like "At the time, FDR believes that he can keep the war away from America, but Japan attacks pearl harbour and he has no choice but to declare war" when the use of "Believed" and "could" and "attacked" and "had" make it clear we, the owners of backwards looking syntax and historical documents, realise this all happened a very long time ago and can keep a hold of the sequencing.
I must say matches on "the eternal present" are a giant bag of mystical wank, no disrespect to yourself intended. Perhaps you get better responses than I do but my top returns were flooded with mindfulness and cod philosophy and christianity.
AFAIK some neurodivergent brains deal with amphetamines differently and the baseline levels of chemical affected by amphetamines is different.
Wear and tear might be a thing, i don't know, but the analogy of putting NO2 in their car feels a bit off.
It'd be more like finally putting premium unleaded in your car after years of "back of the lorry" pseudo-unleaded.
You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.
I have ADHD and take metylphenidate(I've tried many kinds of stimulants as well) -- and the NO2 analogy is an imperfect but better analogy than saying stimulants simply adjusts the baseline of people with ADHD to function like "normal" persons.
I feel there is a narrow window of dosage and time where it might feel that way -- i.e. stimulants at the onset might calm you down, reduce anxiety, but all stimulants are very broad hammers.
For me it feels like it's impossible to re-create chemically exactly the neurotypical focus that I've seen in other colleagues.
Like spending 5-6 hours of continous work where you drill down just enough, get back on track, don't get distracted, don't get too anxious, don't get hyperfocused AND do that consistently, day after day after day.
My non-chemical modes are either hyper focus for 2 weeks on a problem, immerse myself but then completely lose interest, most of the time without showing much for it OR procastinate it a long way, get extremely anxious and work really hard on the problem.
With stimulants it's a bit like: - dosed just right:it evaporates anxiety, stressful situations feel easy to deal with, BUT there's always increased heart rate, grinding teeth and some tension at the end of the day - some stimulants make mundane things wildly interesting (on isopropylphenidate I spent a few hours playing with a PLSQL debugger because I thought it was really cool), but no sense of "GO, GO, GO, do it". - some make things seem urgent enough and help stay on track -- like the metylphenidate I'm prescribed. - some make going into a flow-like state easy and fun (like methamphetamine and phenmetrazine). - some are pure energy and urgency -- like modafinil.
All of the stimulants have the potential to give me euphoria, all of them temporarily increase libido I still have to be mindful of not focusing on the wrong thing, the "normal" feeling is very fleeting, it's very easy to get hyper on stimulants, all of them feel like wear & tear at the end of the day, some more than others.
I wonder if you tried lisdexamfetamine? I can't get it prescribed easily here since it's not covered the way the alternatives are but someone i know had amazing success with it. Seemingly because it's a prodrug. I can't help but be hopefull that I'll get to try it one day and that it ends up being what I always needed.
It's not legal where I live also, I did try 2-FMA and it felt better in certain scenarios -- like following a hard course, but I also felt the tolerance ramps up much faster in releasers than re-uptake inhibitors so methylphenidate still is a wonderful tool.
Once I got prescribed lisdexamphetamine, my life turned around almost instantaneously. While it doesn‘t really get rid of my ADHD, it does help tremendously. The everlasting brainfog isn‘t as debilitating anymore. When I get excited about something I actually tend to follow through. I still battle with my obsessive tendencies — like getting stuck at setting up the perfect project tooling stack or spending way too much time on planning and research instead of just getting to work — but these are not so much related to ADHD.
On lisdexamphetamine, I am more social, my appetite is better, when I actually commit to something, I tend to stick to it for much longer, and I have also picked up a bunch of healthy habits. For example I exercise almost every day now.
If you someday get a chance to switch to lisdex, do it. It’s much smoother, longer-lasting, with fewer side effects. But honestly, anything is better than ritalin in my book.
That said, it completely destroyed my appetite. I picked up ciggies, too. It made me crave nicotine and caffeine. I started pulling all-nighters because I was so productive (or, so into whatever game I was playing.) I got cold sweats often and had some weird uh sexual health side effects. Develeoped a tolerance to 5-10mg very quickly, so went up to 15-20mg, which also felt weakened after a month or so.
So, wasn't lolng before I could tell this was not healthy. Felt like I was in overdrive mode - super mentally active, and productive, but running my body into the ground. I would never do it long-term.
Definitely DO use this medication if you need it - it's the first medication your doctor will likely ask you to try precisely because an extensive body of research says it's the most effective way for treating ADHD.
1. People take it as a study drug, without prescription.
2. There may be over medication. Doctors will sometimes feel pushed to prescribe (as is known to happen with antibiotics)
3. At an individual level that is true, but you may need it because of your society and environment. Both ADHD rates and treatment varies between countries (even between regions and states within countries) and has varied a lot over time, which implies some external factor affects it.
1 out of every 5 Ivy League students is prescribed stimulants.
I think it’s time we stop pretending like prescriptions magically mean the substance isn’t abused or is truly needed.
I think untreated attention issues (if not the rather narrowly defined condition labeled "ADHD") are rather widespread. And society doesn't help, just look at the checklist of things you need to do on an ongoing basis to just keep a vehicle running for transport in the US, which pretty much everybody outside a city needs, and even many city dwellers elect to procure as well.
If you're getting Adderall from "a guy I know" instead of with a prescription, that's the problem. you keep taking more until you're satisfied.
Less likely to be addictive, definitely not non-addictive.
This has the same energy as the common incorrect statement “marijuana isn’t addictive”. I assume made by frequent users who want to downplay negatives.
An office worker on meth-lite (or whatever you want to call it) is still accumulating less wear and tear than a laborer, something the human body is clearly capable of being for a lifetime if you're somewhat smart about it.
Adderall, caffeine, heck cocaine based stimulants, are probably all fine if you're not over-using the living crap out of them and stacking large amounts of them on top of other things that'll beat the body up over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_amphetamine
The most famous in that family seems to be meth(amphetamine)
It's a huuuuuge family of substances though, particularly if you go one step more generic and start with Phenylethylamine as the backbone (amphetamine is a shortening of alpha-methyl-phenethylamine), the family includes hallucinogens like mescaline, empathogens like MDMA and its close cousins, the whole 2C family, the cathinones and their derivatives ('mephedrone' had a cultural moment 10-15 years back). And some real nasties like PMA, PMMA and bromo-Dragonfly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_phenethylamine
> Chronic Meth users have deficits in memory and executive functioning as well as higher rates of anxiety, depression, and most notably psychosis. [0]
In more recent times of horror:
> After the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, large stockpiles of the illicit drug captagon have reportedly been uncovered.
> The stockpiles, found by Syrian rebels, are believed to be linked to al-Assad military headquarters, implicating the fallen regime in the drug’s manufacture and distribution. [1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3764482/
[1] https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-drug-captagon-and-how-is-it-linked-to-syrias-fallen-assad-regime-245935
That being said if anyone uses drugs to avoid sleeping for many days straight I would imagine it's quite horrible for your mental health
https://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/friendlyfire/gopills.html
But I'm not a doctor either so who knows really.
I wouldn't recommend them in general, but mostly because they last too long to really work with a normal 16/8 sleep cycle and the other stimmy effects can detract from things other than focus work.
Which is to say, they seem better to me, but maybe long-term use is different.
I tried googling for more info but I haven't been able to find much in English and my Japanese isn't good enough to read at that level. I've only heard about it from my wife and a few other people in Japan. I've seen a few old posters for it at old bars.
As I understand it, the aspartate and saccharate still dissociate in solution. If so, there isn't much of a plausible reason to consider them different drugs. If not, they might act more slowly or not at all.
None of this puts Adderall in the class of substituted amphetamines like MDMA or Desoxyn or exotics like ALEPH: https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal003.shtml