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Alfred MacDonald's avatar

Some of this you (Katherine) know about me already, but for the purpose of this comment: I've been diagnosed ADHD for sixteen years, know quite a lot about the pharmacology of Adderall and recently stopped prescription stimulants five months ago. I'm sure someone will think I'm still taking it because of the length of what I'm writing but I need to cement that my brain is just this way, and if I was on medication this comment would probably be double in length.

Most of what I could say about prescription stimulants has been said, so I'll keep to what's novel: the biggest difference I'm noticing is in memory formation. I could go into detail about this if you'd like and going into detail would probably require an article of its own, but my theory which I have no evidence for is that Adderall increases fluid cognitive ability at the expense of long term memory formation, or output at the expense of input. (For transparency, my dose was 15mg/day of IR and I averaged ~215lb bodyweight during my prescription.)

To use an analogy to AI, the Adderall tradeoff is like the difference between ChatGPT4o - which stores memory for induction - and ChatGPT o1-mini, which is a more powerful reasoning engine but tunnelvisioned and contextless.

The biggest on/off prescription-stimulant difference is how you negotiate memory to yourself; I can put off thinking about something because I know the thought will come back to me. The universal Adderall Experience is a burst of thoughts on a topic that drive you to expel them from your brain **right now**, and they'll be lost if you don't. This is beneficial in some ways and detrimental in others, because when misused it's the impulse that drives you to clean your room for three hours and fixate on a stain that won't go away.

In essence, the Adderalled brain limits intrusive thoughts for higher performance in-the-moment. This sound good on paper, but intrusive thoughts are also what allow our memory to help us remember details by osmosis and enable our creative thought processes like divergent association.

What I don't want is for someone to take away that prescription medication is bad and needs to be limited, because there's always someone who immediately infers a prohibitionist action item the moment a drug is deemed problematic in any respect. I need to reiterate the point that what I've described is a tradeoff, because tunnelvision can be beneficial also. This is why stimulant medication has a purpose and should be taken at low doses and cycled when tunnelvision is more useful than divergent intrusive thought. But I think the fact that there **is** a tradeoff is important on a basic level, because the discourse over the last few years has been "is it a Nootropic? y/n".

I hope that this kind of discussion creates more nuance. I am reluctant to even talk about this because I don't want someone to jump to an irrational conclusion. But if you view the Adderall trend through the phenomenology of Adderall, you'll see these aspects everywhere: people who are able to focus and pay attention but whose front-of-mind thoughts drown their listening.

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Kirk Gordon's avatar

It’s small, but the all lowercase writing, an exceptionally Gen-Z thing, feels like such an absurd performance of hurried nonchalance and “authentic” stream of consciousness. You literally have to actively stylize it that way on most keyboards, which makes it feel exceptionally tedious. I won’t even read an all lowercase piece because of it.

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