11 Comments
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Peter Clayborne's avatar

This is fucking brilliant, just finished the video on my home from work, and I'm a fully-converted disciple, I need to spread this everywhere — univocity of attention!

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Joan Antigone's avatar

Being in the more autism end of the neurotypical pool I also believe in this stacking with monotropism! Let’s LEGO the shit out of this.

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Liz Farmer's avatar

Can’t stop thinking about this. For me, I often feel like I’m being pulled into different dimensions, like from univocity into monotropism and back — from brain dump into rabbit hole.

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Liz Farmer's avatar

Also it’s wild to think I have a grasp on something, like ADHD, and then realize how it’s still so steeped in power dynamics — speaking of Barkley in this case — who has really informed my understanding of ADHD since suspecting my eventual late diagnosis. But damn, this made me realize how pathologizing and negative his view is. It’s very sad, honestly, so I very much appreciate you and Andrew and other neurodiverse thinkers collaboratively teasing out our internal experiences and framing them in a supportive way, rather than moralizing us as being burdens who should work *even harder* to appear neurotypical.

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Berdgerhl's avatar

Thank you for this it’s so good; it all makes so much sense to me. I’ve always been solely motivated by finding the ‘glue’ between ideas or concepts rather than single ideas themselves. As we all know with ADHD, this level of ‘distraction’ is exhausting and oftentimes disabling, but is so exciting when it all comes together in those magic moments. As you say, then why is it that if we operate so much more efficiently when thinking in this way, why can’t we be allowed to do so (serious question)? Capitalism? Colonialism? I think we need a new word. Or world!

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Kate Robinson Beckwith's avatar

Omg GLUE. I am so overjoyed to see someone else, especially in this context, talking about conceptual glue, it’s also a large part of how I engage with/perceive the world. I wrote a paper about it in grad school!

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Erica Reyes's avatar

Oo share your paper here??

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Kate Robinson Beckwith's avatar

I’ll see if I can dig it up!

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Cpl's avatar
Jan 1Edited

This is interesting—havent watched the video but recently was thinking that the advantage, and disadvantage, of ADHD is we naturally break everything down into bite sized pieces. Someone without ADHD is like “gonna clean my kitchen now” and the person with ADHD is like “omg I just washed all the forks, gotta take a break.”

But this also allows us to see the inefficiencies in processes because we see each component separately.

BUT ALSO. Sometimes we do the opposite of this and see entire aspects of our lives (for me, finances) as a giant KidPix blur that is very difficult to understand. It’s like our telescope can see distant galaxies but fails to identify a bird.

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Dave Meesters's avatar

Thanks for speaking to the apparent contradiction between univocity and monotropism. I highly relate to univocity but was myself wondering how, and if, that speaks to my habit of letting the rice pot boil over every time I wander off and start looking at my phone, lol.

What you propose makes sense. Full univocity might not be best thought of as a literal lived accomplishment of every moment of our lives.

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Jason Stalides's avatar

Super interesting and well researched! Haven't gotten through it all yet. I may have some follow up thoughts.

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