The Student Room Group

Extreme lazyness = executive dysfunction?

It's an interesting read. It's about how certain aspects of one's creativity can be hindered by a not very well known brain disorder (or whatever category is that). It caugh me because it's strongly related to being unable to finish projects or meet deadlines.

Scientific American Article

About who wrote it: Dr. Brian Levine is a neuropsychologist interested in the function and dysfunction of large-scale neural systems as expressed in complex human behaviors, including episodic and autobiographical memory, self-regulation, and goal management.

Who is the person of interest in that article: Brian Wilson, founder of Beach Boys.

TL;DR - Executive function can be seen as the CEO of one's brain, it directs one's brain. The article doesn't try to explain creativity as a product of mentall illness, it rather focuses on what happens when the brain's CEO is damaged or malfunctioning.

They mention an example of failing to properly analyise a situation in the article. Imagine that you are going to buy food and plan to make a dinner for a group of friends or family. Due to bad executive functions in one's brain, the person decides to buy food in a far away shop, far away enough that it's going to take too much time to travel there just to buy food (maybe because the person though about price and forgot about time or vice-versa). Or, suppose that the dinner has dishes that are going to take a lot of time to cook and that there won't be enough time to cook it, yet one won't change his/her mind.

Incidentally, I saw this video (below) and made a connection between the article and "The game that the time forgot"



I've had some experience with these in the past. I once wanted to build a city in UT, but it was just too ambitious, beyond the engine limits. For many years I refused to go back to the planning stage. I'd just open the map, do something for some time, then a long break, then open again to do something, then another long break, untill I finally decided to delete it once and for all. Much like the mention to ADHD that the boy made, I too had that surge of ideas that I couldn't control. Make a map with theme A, then stop in the middle to start another with theme B, then stop to do 3D model, then stop to do sound recording, and so on.

Just now I'm beginning to understand why I failed so many times in the admission exam (over 5 tries). And for the same reason, failed in so many exams of calculus and physics. Because I always delay the time to study, it's always "later, later, not now, ...". It's a bottomless pit of delay.

Curious effect: the second time I took introduction to computing and calculus I studied at least two weeks before the exams, everyday, without a pre determined timetable. It did work as I didn't fail a second time. In introduction to computing case I even managed to write comprehensive lecture notes for me, which I later made public in google sites.

However, calculus II (syllabus is from definite's integral applications to partial differentiation) and introduction to physics (from physics units of measure to the basics to energy and work theorem), I've already failed more than twice because I didn't study at all before exams were due the next morning.

One of the main issues is that I get stuck at one subject at a time, that is to study calculus for many days without thinking about the rest.
(edited 9 years ago)
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Rearranged the text and deleted some parts to make the point clearer.

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