My Misguided Brain: Advances in Neuroscience
I'm glad to be able to say that it has been a very long time since I last heard somebody call psychology "basically a mumbo jumbo field."
I'm also very glad to report that there have been considerable advances in psychology since I was a kid. We understand, among other things, a lot more about how the brain works and how it sometimes malfunctions.
When I was a kid (in grade school), there was really no such thing as ADHD. There were "disruptive kids" and while the school counselors did understand that there was a difference between somebody who was having difficulties with abuse at home and somebody who was having learning difficulties, it was still a pretty primitive time with respect to effective help.
The people around me essentially called me a daydreamer.
By the time I graduated high school, ADHD was a more widely accepted concept, although I would not have been diagnosed because I never suffered from the "hyperactivity" part of the equation. I was quiet and I would just zone out and fall asleep.
Now, I'm not particularly keen on latching onto labels and wearing them like some kind of "badge of pride" but I do find that scientific explanations for human behavior can be very useful if you're struggling with something.
So when I talk about "progress,"× we have now reached a point where we understand a lot more about neurotransmitters, including the fact that there are quite a few of them, and that some of them occasionally are not working properly and that can cause you considerable problems.
In more or less scientific terms, I wrestle a lot with dopamine dysregulation. That is to say I lack that neurotransmitter at times when I need it; times when people normally are able to produce it to generate motivation and to aspire to get up and achieve something.
Well, perhaps "lack" is the wrong term here... but physiologically my brain is not able to call up dopamine simply by the potential for needing to do something... and so, I sit there with a strange state in which my brain is definitely telling me that I "need to get up and work on my taxes" while the rest of me just isn't following through, almost like a state of suspended animation.
Okay, so that's just an example but it applies to pretty much any task I really need to take on. Which, of course, can make life pretty challenging!
But I am grateful that the field of psychology now has this better understanding and so my predicament is no longer phrased in the context of I'm "just lazy" and "need to apply myself more," instead there is an actual measurable cause with medical underpinnings.
Understanding how these neurotransmitters work also enables me to employ various forms of "trickery" in order to get my body working and responding the same way bodies tend to work in neurotypical people. People often think I'm weird and autistic because I use a number of timers to get myself to do things.
Most often, I depend on the "5-minute challenge trick" to get myself going. I set a timer for 5 minutes and force myself to complete a certain task within those 5 minutes. That's a bit like I did things back in my running days where I was trying to beat my last best time.
Absent this sort of "personal gameification" applied to virtually every situation in life, chances are that I wouldn't get anything done at all and I would end up pulling my head out of a daze at 5:00 in the afternoon... realizing I had done nothing but watch cat videos all day.
It's not laziness, it's not a lack of determination or focus, it's neurochemistry!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2026.03.24 01:40 PST
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Hola. Me parece muy interesante lo que explicas sobre la dopamina y como el cerebro a veces no arranca para hacer las tareas. Es bueno saber que no es flojera sino un tema de quimica cerebral. Gracias por compartir tu metodo de los cinco minutos.
Hello. I find what you explained about dopamine and how the brain sometimes fails to start tasks very interesting. It is good to know it is not laziness but a matter of brain chemistry. Thank you for sharing your five minute method.