Making robots with ADHD
Me, not my robots… just saying.
Wait? you have ADHD?
Yes! I was diagnosed in late 2021. Before that I spent a few decades walking through life with the horrible feeling that I was totally out of place. I felt like the people around me were seeing a different world with different eyes, they were fighting different challenges for different outcomes.
One day a friend was talking about having ADHD and being diagnosed, he was explaining some of his experiences and saying know what I mean while looking right at me — he did this a lot. So with my weirdo hat on and a keen interest in not having an acronym stamped on my forehead, I googled for a whole weekend; descending from doubt to dismay and then climbing to optimism with an appointment with Graeme the Psychologist.
Graeme was a lovely fellow, great to talk to and able to walk the “kind and honest” knife-edge effortlessly without making me feel bad. After the tests, Graeme told me that on a scale of one to ten I got a score of 9.5!
Yes! 95%! That’s a high score! I shouted —Graeme laughed.
9.5/10... But what does a high score mean?
The scale consists of several questions about 10 different hypothetical situations - you are graded on your behaviour in those situations and how those situations affect you — this is also supplemented by interviews with people around you — in my case, my partner (about my adult life) and my mum (about my younger years).
How a person reacts to those situations means either a tick or a cross. Getting a tick or a cross on one or two of these situations is quite normal, but if you get 5 or more ticks — you’re on the ADHD side of the curve.
An example of a behaviour is:
How well do you deal with being in a queue for a coffee? A small queue? A long queue? A queue on a hot day? A queue when you’re late?
To which I said:
Yeah, queues? they’re fine... They don’t worry me at all.
As Graeme, slightly confused leaned in to mark that one a cross, I continued;
I was once in a queue and it took so long… I think it was for a pie… I really wanted that pie! That was so stressful, I was in the queue for hours (well, maybe 10 minutes?) but the last pie was taken just as I got to the counter. So now I just don’t engage with queues, I’d rather walk around the block 4 times than wait that time in a queue and hey, we could all do with a few extra steps on the tally for the day amiright? Man, I feel like a pie now. I wonder if the bakery is still open?
Yes... After talking about a few other queue mishaps, that was a tick.
Adam, I hate to tell you but that means you’re terrible at dealing with queues.
“Ok,” I said “but we should probably go back to question number one now that I know how this works.”
Together we would figure out, my ADHD was extensively masked by my own behavioural reprogramming and adaptations. I don’t like feeling stressed, so in stressful situations I find ways to be not stressed.
What is ADHD?
Truthfully, I’m only just getting this clear in my own mind, but it’s simpler to see it in 2 ways; Hyperactivity Disorder and ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder.
HD — Hyperactivity Disorder
Hyperactivity disorder is initially obvious, an HD person has more available energy than most people and — whether I want it or not — it’s there, at all times. This isn’t just a physical trait, it’s also the way my mind moves, it’s fast, multi-faceted and it never stops, especially when I want it to stop.
The darker and less obvious side is that a hyperactive person can feel both the discomfort of being utterly exhausted and the inescapable need to always be doing something, always be moving, always be alwaysing. Unless both my physical energy and mental energy is exhausted — which is rare — I keep on alwaysing… always alwaysing.
ADD — Attention Deficit Disorder
This is actually a terrible name, because it implies that someone doesn’t pay attention — which is absolutely not true. Many sufferers and practitioners alike prefer to call it Executive Function Disorder.
Executive Function Disorder is really well explained on the how-to-adhd channel here — I wont butcher it by trying too much but in short, Executive Function Disorder effects the way our brains process the motivation to do things and reward we get for doing things. The motivation and reward process is what makes up the building blocks of how we learn to behave and how to function in the world over the course of our life. Executive Function Disorder makes the positive or negative feeling we get from our actions chaotic and this effects how a person behaves at a fundamental level.
So you have ADHD —what does that really mean?
In short, it means that I move through and process the world in a different way. Some things that most people find really easy are quite challenging for me for example:
- Remembering names, dates, times, what day/month/year it is… what did I do yesterday, was I wearing shoes?
- Did I lock the door 1 minute ago? Was the door locked the last 8 times I checked just now? Yes, I can clearly remember locking the door but was that today or 3 weeks ago when I was wearing the same belt?
- Impulse control — I had a thought, everyone heard the thought long before I realised I was talking about the thought, sometimes before I concluded the thought. Never mind, I worked it out.
- It’s next to impossible for me to focus on something that I’m not intrinsically motivated to do — intrinsic motivation means “the doing of an activity for how it makes you feel rather than because you should” For example; making robots makes me feel good, making the bed is something I should do.
- Even with my own internal voice shouting stop! — sometimes I can’t stop doing something that I shouldn’t be doing. There can be no tiktok in my world, that one click lasted about 4 hours… never again.
There are also things that are easy for me to do that others find hard:
- Remembering the last conversation I had with someone, no matter how many decades ago, even if they don’t remember me at all.
- Remembering every person I’ve seen wearing that shirt, in my life.
- Multi-tasking and context shifting for hours at a time without getting tired.
- Hyper-focusing on a single thing for hours at a time without getting bored.
- Shortening complex decision-making process to the core contexts — also called first principle thought.
Hyper-focus?
ADHD people have an incredible ability to focus on something for extended periods of time, sometimes many hours at a time. This is called hyper focus — it’s not unique to ADHD, it also presents in people with ASD.
The problem is that an ADHD (and/or ASD) person isn’t in charge of what they are hyper-focusing on, it could be work, it could be robots, it could be the swinging of the bendy trees across the road out the window. Hyper-focus is so strong that we can go for so long that we forget to eat, drink, sleep or even go to the bathroom.
For example: I once sat down to play CounterStrike and 36 hours later I stood up and fainted — because I’d not moved, eaten or drank water for 36 hours.
ADHD is kinda flavour of the month
ADHD seems to be everywhere these days, this is because the science behind ADHD has improved and it turns out that it is both more common than specialists thought, and not at all what the general public thought it was.
ADHD or ADD has a pretty negative stigma, a lot of people believe that it’s a synonym or a justification for children behaving badly. This is in part because the traits that an ADHD person can exhibit are indeed normal behaviours, what’s not normal is consistently exhibiting many of these traits. It’s a complex condition to diagnose and short cutting ADHD to bad behaviour doesn’t suit.
I also suspect that the isolation of the pandemic softened people’s defences and coming out of isolation amplified the symptoms for a lot of people.
So you’re weird, how does this help with robotics?
As a hyperactive person with a mind like a beehive, I need a constant stream of unfamiliar and interesting challenges to maintain my focus and use up this seemingly inexhaustible energy. Robotics is very difficult because it encompasses so many different skills, skills that I did not possess.
When I first started, I had a hot glue gun, some bits of brass, a servo motor and massive dreams.
Everything was really difficult. Every small thing required days and weeks to understand, learn and overcome. The little successes along the way were very small but my obsession was unending. As time moved on, all of those little successes snowballed. The constant context shifting and side-quests were fun and interesting — like the time I realised I should get a 3d printer, learn 3d modelling to make my robots — that side-quest ended up with me teaching 20 kids how to 3d model monsters at a conference, then we 3d printed them (the monsters, not the kids).
The long way around
After making massive and costly mistakes, I started taking the long way around to avoid those mistakes. At work, the goal is to find the shortest path to success. At home in my apartment, buried under mountains of electronics, fuelled by caffeine and enriched by mayhem, I discovered that in taking the long way to get somewhere I gained more skills, knowledge and appreciation for the task and more gratification when I succeeded.
I say when I succeeded because it never occurred to me that failure was an option. Without restrictive time lines, without the requirement of turning a profit, the only way I can fail is to stop. Of course, stopping is not something a hyper-active person does well.
Somewhere on the long way around, I realised that I had totally succeeded in my dream of making a robotic spider, I won! But I hadn’t stopped there. I was 6 years on from success and I am still busy on a tangent³ of a tangent³, my vision and my goals are ever-evolving and I’m designing and building things I never could have imagined with skills that I had no knowledge of or capacity for when I started.
What’s it worth?
The first question I am asked (after why spiders?) is how are you going to sell this? People are often very confused when they find out that my overly expensive robotics projects aren’t worth the cost of the parts and that they’re not a product to sell.
After a suitable pause — for dramatic effect — I point out that my intense hobbies have allowed me to demonstrate enough skill, determination and passion to get into good roles. My robots have had me speaking at conferences, they’ve put me on a collision course with my heroes and they’ve put me in a position to mentor some of the most amazing people and see them grow to pass me… So yes, it was worth it.
