5 Comments
User's avatar
Jody Gates's avatar

This was a great read that brings back so many old thoughts, theories and general behaviors. I'd say it gave me chills, but that'd be a bit too much on the nose.

As of yet, I haven't dug into thinking too much about time blindness, but have been considering that it works both ways. To see your break-down, and how you liken it to glaciers. is curious. I re-stacked with a comment, but will re-state that I used to feel a sense of weightlessness and vertigo when I would get too enmeshed/hyperfocused in a task. It's neat to remember that time while considering your comment about weightlessness.

I look forward to picking through your posts and notes, so far they seem to poke my curious centers in my brain. Thanks Elizabeth!

Expand full comment
Rebecca Todd's avatar

I love this! I love the poetic style of writing and the way you weave the experience of ADHD time blindness -- which I very much relate to - to the time scales of glaciers multiple scales and forms of human memory. As a cognitive scientist with ADHD (and a history as a dance artist) who studies memory and attention, this resonated for me in so many ways. I've been looking around substack trying to find my people, and I think I just found one of them.

Expand full comment
Elizabeth Case's avatar

Thanks Rebecca. I feel similarly reading your posts - I especially loved the one linking your dad's work and aging/creativity (thinking a lot about "This study provided a direct link between porousness to distracting information and creative performance" - do you have a link to this study?). Really curious about the relationship between dance and cognitive science for you and relieved to find other academics with AD(H)D on here

Expand full comment
Rebecca Todd's avatar

Thank you! Here's a link to the study I referenced. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32744848/

I will have to write a post on dance as cognitive science I think. I was a choreographer/ improviser for years before retraining as an academic, and back then I very much thought of the practice of dance as a practice of first-person cognitive science. Understanding the mind in motion from within. Now I'm back to thinking about that again - thinking that dance improvisation is the best way to understand the dynamics of two minds and bodies interacting in relation to cognitive processes such as attention and memory. I'm thinking that will be an important research program moving forward. I find a lot of work in cognitive neuroscience is focused on studying dancers' brains - dancers as subjects. But I'm more interested in dancers as scientists - the doers of the research.

Expand full comment
Rebecca Todd's avatar

Also you may know it already, but there is some literature on ADHD and creativity. For example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886905003764

and

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25460384/

Expand full comment