Playbook for learning things deeply despite having ADHD
I’ve struggled to read deeply for my whole life. Whenever I read anything even mildly interesting or complex, I’m hit with a combinatorial explosion of connections or ideas. It feels like the whole world is crashing down onto me. It’s taxing and emotionally overwhelming. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to execute forward progress on any tangible goal.
I’ve had some space in the last few months to better understand and experiment with my ADHD. Philosophy and Cognitive Science have given me a language to effectively articulate my subjective experience. They’ve given me frameworks to better understand what protocols are likely to help me, and what might be happening under the hood.
In short, handwriting with the appropriate scaffolding has been the best mechanism for me to effectively integrate complex information.
I’ve described my process below. Disclaimer - This is based on my own personal experience. For many reasons, it might not work for you. I’ve decided to share it in the spirit of “open-source philosophy/cogsci”. Hopefully, other people will be able to easily “fork” it. Similarly, the rationalisation in the following section is my own attempt to understand what’s going on. I’m not really qualified w.r.t credentials to opine on this stuff. YMMV.
Create an intention of how long you’re going to sit ahead of time. Don’t create an intention based on outcome. Do create an intention based on something inherently controllable like time. Wherever possible, control the intention and the environment so that the probability of you actually meeting the intention is very high. In that sense, don’t be afraid to “aim low”. Some examples below are highly contextual.
“Good” examples
Sit and read for 30 minutes.
Spend an hour writing something creative, with no editorial standards whatsoever.
Try fixing this bug for an hour without a break.
“Bad” examples
Finish reading this paper in the next two hours.
Finish making notes on this chapter of this book in 45 minutes.
Fix these three bugs by the end of the day.
Read a few paragraphs or a page at a time.
Handwrite salient notes from those pages. Do so in your own words as much as possible. No matter how complex the source material is, attempt to use language that a bright high-schooler might understand. Generally, the more complex the source material, the simpler this “translation” needs to be. For example, I found it most helpful to use primary school English to describe how field-effect transistors work.
Make your notes as visual as you possibly can. Don’t describe in words when a picture might suffice. Attempt to anthropomorphize as necessary.
Read things out loud whenever anything catches your eye.
Wherever possible, attempt to existentially imagine what you’ve read as clearly as you can. If you’re reading some philosophy, what would it be like to actually participate in the world as a person that perfectly instantiates that philosophy, within the limits of your imagination?
If you’ve reached the end of the paper/book, write a few paragraphs or maybe even an essay in response. Attempt to write about what really caught your embodied imagination, or seemed especially relevant as you were reading it. Attempt to generate this as imaginally as you can.
At the end of the timebox (or whatever your intention was in step 1), celebrate that you hit that milestone. For example, spend a minute or two really hyping yourself up mentally. Prioritise congratulating yourself on the effort, rather than the outcome.
So why might this process have been so effective for me? For that, we need to dig into a little bit of philosophy and cognitive science.
Philosophers have spent thousands of years debating various ontologies that capture different forms of knowledge that humans can possess. My preferred ontology is the work of Prof John Vervaeke at the University of Toronto. Most of the insights in this essay have been derived from what I’ve learned in his lectures. Specifically, the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series. His presentation is by no means the “final” ontology. But I like how workable it is. He often talks about how knowledge can be broadly categorised into propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory. That is, the knowledge of beliefs, skills, experiential perspective-taking and co-identification into an agent-arena relationship.
Philosophers have also spent hundreds of years making a case that reality is infinitely intelligible. That is, there seems to be a groundlessness to things, where the more of them you find in your awareness, the more aspects of those things seem to get disclosed to you. And there seems to be no bottom to this. I’ve definitely had direct experiences of this. Given that reality is infinitely intelligible in this way, we seem to engage in a process called Relevance Realisation (RR). This is the process by which we reduce this infiniteness into a spectrum of things that we deem relevant and irrelevant. Almost all of this happens unconsciously.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the authoritative guide used by clinicians in the US to diagnose mental health disorders. You can see that the DSM criteria for ADHD actually encompasses a very wide range of behaviours. And likely an even wider set of subjective internal states. Neurodivergence/neurotypicality aren’t actually discrete categories, but rather a rich continuous spectrum that all people fall along on. Relevance Realisation provides a useful lens to model the specific difficulties that an ADHD person experiences when reading something complex.
I suspect that Relevance Realisation in people with ADHD is spatially and temporally less stable as compared to their neurotypical peers. The complexity of a textbook likely makes relevant a combinatorial explosion of ideas and connections. This results in a feeling of being overwhelmed. Participating in a gamified activity likely acts as an organizing force for their RR machinery. This makes it easier for them to make plans.
Humans find convergent information more plausible than divergent information. For example, you might have a certain level of belief if someone trustworthy tells you something. But in addition, if you can see it, touch it, experience it, etc. then it becomes that much more plausible. Additionally, coming into deeper contact with reality seems inherently meaningful for most humans.
Putting all of this together, we can rationalise the recipe that I’ve found most effective for the recipe I’ve described above.
Creating an intention allows you to more clearly delineate this activity from others, which makes it easier to reinforce it with positive reward. Specifically, the last step where you congratulate yourself and really hype yourself up. It creates a reliable “game” that you can participate in with yourself. Framing the intention in terms of something you control (e.g. spend X minutes on reading), makes it easier to internalise a positive prediction of success.
I’ve found it helpful to notice my negative predictions as a litmus test for anxiety. For example, “My family will hate me if I say $BLAH” or “My girlfriend will break up with me if I’m honest about how I feel about these bed sheets, which will imply that I’m unloveable.”. Or more specifically, “I don’t even want to read this book because I’ll do a bad job”. These are all anxious thoughts. The intention at the start acts as a conscious prediction for what you will achieve. By making it “easy” and hyping yourself up at the end, you practise creating and actually realising positive predictions. As this muscle gets strengthened, your RR machinery automatically starts to get attuned to these intentions and your body acts accordingly.
Reading a few paragraphs at a time forces the RR machinery to constrain itself across space and time. It constrains the aspects of the text that disclose themselves to you, even if they are unstable in space and time. This makes everything feel less overwhelming. Actually handwriting out notes further constrains the flow of information. It helps to organise what is relevant and irrelevant, and produces deep connections to specific passages of the text.
Creating visual representations of what you’re reading likely does a number of different things. It also starts tapping into more unconscious forms of knowledge, like procedural memory. Reading things out loud and becoming really imaginal also starts engaging your perspectival and participatory knowledge. By introducing more convergent stimuli that attempt to transform various forms of knowledge simultaneously, you’re more likely to find the information more plausible. This is more likely to make it “stick”.
Similarly, anthropomorphizing phenomena has its trade-offs. But I’ve found it to be extraordinarily effective. For example, this electron “wants” to cross this junction. Or that this server “wants” to respond in a specific way when it gets a specific request. And it rage-quits and shuts everything down when it gets a malformed input. This form of anthropomorphizing taps into our rich evolutionary heritage of taking on the perspective of other humans.
Once you’re done reading the whole book/paper, the act of generating something creative in response acts as an integrating force. Attempting to generate this response as imaginally as you can taps into deeper and more unconscious forms of knowledge. It forces you to bring into consciousness a throughline for everything you’ve learned, which makes it easier to remember. Depending on how convergent this throughline is, the material will start to come “alive” for you, and help you participate in the world in a totally novel way. Propositions that might have otherwise required substantial repetition for recall will instead seem increasingly effortless because they’ll seem “obvious”.