this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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I'm no brainologist but I wonder if things like this might be more related to autistic cognition. There seems to be something similar in the space of not attaching the same significance to events others find emotionally charged.
eh, kind of hit or miss with autistic people, afaik.
hyperfocus is a big thing for autists, which is a problem with attention, since it keeps you from choosing what you want to focus on.
so if you've got an assignment due, and your brain decides we're gonna focus on [different thing] right now, possibly for days on end, that can be a serious problem.
it can also look basically identical to ADHD for outside observers, since the result is often the same "they didn't to [the thing]!"...
and that then gets mistaken for a lack of motivation, which it isn't really:
it's a lack of ability to choose what to be motivated about.
it's one of the reasons that there's so much overlap in diagnosis of ADHD and ASD: symptoms can present very similarly to outside observers
I've also got both, kinda; no hyperactivity just the attention deficit...
and yeah, i agree: that's why I said it can look the same to an outside observer, not that it feels or works the same.
the term I've heard for the task switching problem you describe is "autistic inertia"; basically just means that it's more difficult to start a task, and end a task (or switching to a new task), but once a task is underway there isn't an issue. it's just the starting/stopping part that's hard...
That's a nice explanation, I'm ASD and wife is ADHD and it makes sense in our case. I just used my son as an excuse for underperforming at work because instead of programming whatever I was programming a different thing.
ADHD and ASD go hand in hand. Not all ASD people have ADHD, but if someone’s on the spectrum, ADHD might want to be looked at if they’re having issues that are similar.