As for the Jung Society events I was looking forward to tonight and tomorrow… they are next weekend. I even looked at the site this afternoon to make sure of the time, and totally missed the date. Well, at least I left work at a decent time and had a nice—if quick—dinner of several grain/veggie/fruit salads before heading to the location only to find square dancers and a conspicuous lack of Jungians.

So. OMG. An unexpected expanse of alone time. I’m actually quite relieved. I am exhausted. And this means I don’t have to wait until Sunday to install the new bird bath. I also have made it a vague goal to make it to the farmers’ market tomorrow morning to get ingredients for making kimchi. I see reports that there are cabbages, bok choy, carrots, and garlic at the the market.

It takes 11-13 minutes to walk up the hill to downtown.

When I checked this morning, I saw that the next buses would be arriving up the hill downtown in 4 and 14 minutes. “Aha!,” I thought. “It takes three minutes to walk down the hill to the ‘at trailer park’ stop. I can just go there and it will be just perfect timing.”

If the bus stopped at the trailer park after it stopped downtown, it would have been perfect timing. But it is the other way around. It’s not as if this is news to me—the whole reason I like to walk up the hill to downtown is so that I spend less time in the over-heated, motion-sickness (not-helped-by-drunks-reeking-of-cigarettes-booze-filtered-out-the-skin-and-and-sometimes-also-urine)-inducing bus.

I arrived at the trailer park stop feeling quite satisfied with myself. And then I thought I’d check when the next bus was going to come so that I could inwardly gloat over my great timing. Then I received the text telling me the next bus was in 36 minutes. I went blank and confused for a couple of minutes as I tried to process this. It slowly dawned on me that the bus that would be downtown in 14 minutes stopped at the trailer park while I was traipsing down my driveway on the way to the trailer park stop.

Sigh.

I go through periods of obsessively tracking how much time everything takes. This is how I know it is 3 minutes to the trailer park stop from home, 11-13 minutes to the downtown stop from home, 9-10 minutes from the frat house stop to my desk at work, 12 minutes from the cheap parking deck to my desk, and so on. I always think that if I just know how long everything takes, my problems with time will be solved. I am always wrong.

Times just do not stay in my head in a meaningful way long enough for me to line them all up properly. This is why I have spreadsheets to calculate when to leave for the airport and what time to start baking bread if I want toast at 4.30pm.

Now, this morning I was super-fixated on getting to work at 9:30am because a) that’s what time I am supposed to be there; and b) I had a meeting at 10am and I needed to refresh my memory on the matters at hand. At least, I was pretty sure the meeting was at 10am, but I realized I needed to check just as I shut down my computer before leaving home for the day, and I hadn’t written it in my calendar—because for some reason I always think I will remember the time. Or that I will remember to check the time before I shut down or leave my computer.

Finally it sunk in that I was totally going to be late to my meeting if I took the bus, walked, or biked. I clambered back up the hill and jumped in my car, hoping I’d be able to get back up the hill after work (winter storm alert!).

When I hit my desk at work at 9.20am, I felt slightly heroic for being 10 minutes early. This gave me plenty of time to prepare for my meeting, because it didn’t start until 11.

Every time I have a time-fail like this, I resolve to get my act together and do better. I try, but it never works for long.

Perhaps this is what used to make my parents say “She’s book-smart but she has no common sense.” Which is not true. I have plenty of common sense. It’s just that, between the ADHD and the depersonalization, I happen to nearly lack the normally-functioning time-sense module of the common sense package.

At least I’ve long since given up beating up and berating myself for being an idiot and feeling ashamed when these things happen. Now I can usually laugh at myself and accept that I’m far from an idiot, but certain tangles of my brain just aren’t hooked up right. I do what I can. What I can’t be is perfect, and I’ve got no time for feeling bad about my humanity (except for when I’d rather be a cat).

Oh look, suddenly it’s an hour later than I thought it was and there’s a 9am all-staff meeting that is still on despite the weather being bad enough that the university canceled classes until 11am tomorrow.

Another study on sense of time
Vrabel, Christopher J. (2009) Sense of Time, Inhibition and Working Memory in College-Aged Students. PhD dissertation. Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Inhibition was not related to time reproduction or time discrimination. In addition, time reproduction was not related to working memory, ADHD or trait anxiety. However, time discrimination was related to working memory, self-report symptoms of ADHD and trait anxiety. Subsequent analyses showed that visuospatial working memory predicted above and beyond verbal working memory. When tested in a stepwise fashion, self-report measures of ADHD and trait anxiety both predicted significant variance in time discrimination ability above and beyond working memory. Further analyses showed that, although participants were able to solve medium level time discrimination items using working memory, as the level of difficulty increased and exceeded the capacity of working memory, participants were forced to rely more on their sense of time. The results of this study provide evidence that symptoms of ADHD and anxiety are related to “purer” deficits in sense of time as related to an internal clock.

I could have told you that
Caci, Hervé; Bouchez, Jacques & Bayté, Franck J. (22 April 2009) “Inattentive Symptoms of ADHD Are Related to Evening Orientation.” Journal of Attention Disorders : early view.

Rings true for me, though I seem to have even better results with pink noise + binaural beats in the gamma frequency range.

Dissertation from Stockholm University: Noise improves cognitive performance in children with dysfunctional neurotransmission

Research on children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has shown that they are extremely sensitive to distraction from external stimuli that lead to poor cognitive performance. This thesis shows that cognitive performance can be improved if this external stimulus is smooth and continuous (e.g. auditory white noise). Control children attenuate their performance under such conditions. The first Study proposes the moderate brain arousal model (MBA). This neurocomputational model predicts selective improvement from noise in ADHD children. Noise through a phenomenon called stochastic resonance (SR), can be beneficial in dopamine deprived neural systems. The statistical phenomenon of SR explains how the signal-to-noise ratio can be improved by noise in neural systems where the passing a threshold is required. The second Study provides experimental support for the MBA-model by showing that ADHD children improve performance in a free recall task while exposed to auditive noise. Control children declines in the same condition. The third Study generalizes this finding among low achieving children, which it is argued have low dopamine levels. Noise exposure improves performance in low achievers, but inhibits performance in high achievers. The conclusion is that external auditory noise can restore low dopamine levels and thus improve cognitive performance. It is also proposed that dopamine levels modulate the SR effect; this means that low dopamine persons require more noise to obtain an SR effect. Both excessive and insufficient dopamine is detrimental for cognitive performance. The MBA model can be used to explain several shortcomings where changes in the dopamine system have been identified. The MBA model can also help create appropriate and adaptive environments, especially in schools, for persons with a deficient dopamine function, such as ADHD children.

Booze

Jessica Weafer; Mark T. Fillmore & Richard Milich. (2009) “Increased sensitivity to the disinhibiting effects of alcohol in adults with ADHD.” Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology 17(2): 113-121.

In conclusion, the present findings demonstrate that adults with ADHD exhibited a deficit in inhibitory control compared with healthy controls as measured by the cued go/no-go task, and that this deficit was exacerbated in response to alcohol. The group differences in impairment of inhibitory control were evident in the valid cue condition when overall levels of disinhibition were low. The current study suggests that adults with ADHD exhibit an increased sensitivity to alcohol impairment of basic acts of inhibitory control, and this may contribute to the high incidence of impulsive behaviors observed in individuals with this disorder, especially in response to alcohol. Additional work is needed to examine the potential behavioral consequences of an increased sensitivity to the acute disinhibiting effects of alcohol in adults with ADHD, including increased alcohol consumption and risky behavior while intoxicated.

Time

Gilden, David L. & Marusich, Laura R.. (2009) “Contraction of time in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.” Neuropsychology 23(2): 265 – 269.

The notion that time perception might be altered by ADHD is supported by neuroimaging evidence of volumetric reductions (Castellanos et al., 2002; Valera, Faraone, Murray, & Seidman, 2007) in areas known to control and regulate timing: prefrontal cortex (Mangels, Ivry, & Shimizu, 1998; Smith, Taylor, Lidzba, & Rubia, 2003) and cerebellum (Ivry & Spencer, 2004; Mangels et al., 1998).

They did a pilot study where ADHD and normal people did a rhythm-keeping task at 60 bpm, 40 bpm (the slowest most metronomes will count), and 30 bpm. At each tempo:

participants slapped the drum with their dominant hand in time with a synchronizing signal for 16 beats and then continued without the signal for another 3 minutes. To prevent counting, participants drummed while reading aloud from a non-technical book review printed in large clear type.

Ok, so I doubt I could read and beat a drum at the same time, period. Anyway, what they found was that at the fastest tempo, ADHD people were actually more consistent and accurate than the normal people. At 40 bpm, the ADHD people totally lost touch with the beat, while normal people performed the same as they did at 60 bpm. At 30 bpm, everyone sucked, but the ADHD people had slightly better sense of timing. This is why metronomes don’t go that slow. Which doesn’t really say anything at this point, but I’m certainly interested in this line of research, given my absolute lack of sense of time most of the time (but uncanny ability in some situations to know exactly when the timer is about to go off…)

dopamine, or why I like bupropion

Swen Hesse; Olaf Ballaschke; Henryk Barthel & Osama Sabri. (2009) “Dopamine transporter imaging in adult patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 171(2): 120-128.

The aim of this study was to provide in vivo evidence for the hypothesis that dopaminergic neurotransmission is altered in adult patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We used high-resolution brain-dedicated single-photon emission computed tomography and the dopamine transporter (DAT) marker [123I]FP-CIT in 17 adult treatment-naïve ADHD patients and 14 age-matched controls. Magnetic resonance imaging-based region of interest analysis was performed to quantify the DAT availability (expressed as a ratio of specific to non-displaceable binding, V3″) in the striatum. Additionally, the specific radiotracer binding was assessed in the thalamus and the midbrain/brainstem regions (reflecting also the availability of the serotonin transporter to which [123I]FP-CIT binds with moderate affinity). In the striatal areas of the ADHD patients, a significantly reduced specific tracer binding was found (V3″: 5.18 ± 0.98; controls 6.36 ± 1.34). In contrast, the specific [123I]FP-CIT binding did not differ from controls in the thalamus and midbrain/brainstem areas. These data indicate a reduced dopaminergic but not serotonergic transmitter reuptake function in adult ADHD. Further studies will have to deal with the question of whether these findings have the potential to influence treatment decisions in this complex disorder.

coaching: apparently effective

Joyce A Kubik. (2009) “Efficacy of ADHD Coaching for Adults With ADHD.” Journal of Attention Disorders (early view)

sleep, or i should be in bed right now

Yuri E. Rybak; Heather E. McNeely; Bronwyn E. Mackenzie; Umesh R. Jain & Robert D. Levitan. (2007) “Seasonality and circadian preference in adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: clinical and neuropsychological correlates.” Comprehensive Psychiatry 48(6): 562-571.

Based on the morningness-eveningness questionnaire, which assesses circadian preference 11 (40.7\%, N = 27) subjects were designated as evening types and only 5 (18.5\%) as morning types, a distribution highly discrepant with general population studies. Later circadian preference, independent of seasonality, was strongly correlated with both self-reported symptoms of {ADHD} and neuropsychological deficits, including impulsive responding and poor target discrimination.

S. Kooij. (2009) “S01-01 On rhythms and seasons: Associations between ADHD, eveningtypes, seasonal mood changes, and health.” European Psychiatry 24(Supplement 1): S10.

The majority of the adults with ADHD have chronic difficulty to go to bed on time. This leads to a shorter sleep duration and daytime sleepiness that may aggravate the inattention problems of ADHD. This sleep pattern is also known as a delayed sleepphase, and the patients as ‘eveningtypes’.