How about  ASO, for Attention Surfeit  Order?

Royal SocietyAttention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging. To which Thom Hartman adds, The Science Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease.

Which I've always believed.  But that didn't make me normal. Far from it.

In my forties and at my wife’s urging (because my ability to listen well and follow directions was sub-optimal), I spent whole days being tested for all kinds of what we now call neurodivergent conditions. The labels I came away with were highly qualified variants of ADHD and APD. Specifics:

I was easily distracted and had trouble listening to and sorting out instructions for anything. (I still have trouble listening to the end of a long joke.)On puzzle-solving questions, I was very good.My smarts with spatial and sequence puzzles were tops, as was my ability to see and draw patterns, even when asked to remember and rotate them 90° or 180°.My memory was good.I had “synchronization issues,” such as an inability to sing and play drums at the same time. This also involved deficiencies around “cognitive overload,” “context switching,” multitasking, coping with interruptions, and “bottlenecks” in response selection. They also said I had become skilled at masking all those problems, to myself and others. (While I thought I was good at multitasking, they told me, "You're in the bottom 1%.")I could easily grasp math concepts, but I made many mistakes with ordinary four-function calculations.I did much better at hearing and reading long words than short ones, and I did better reading wide columns of text than narrow ones.When asked to read out loud a simple story composed of short and widely spaced words in a narrow column, I stumbled through it and remembered little of the content afterward. They told me that if I had been given this test alone, they would have said I had trouble reading at a first-grade level, and I would have been called (as they said in those days) mentally retarded.My performance on many tests suggested dyslexia, but my spelling was perfect, and I wasn’t fooled by misplaced or switched letters in words. They also said that I had probably self-corrected for some of my innate deficiencies, such as dyslexia. (I remember working very hard to become a good speller in the fourth grade, just as a challenge to myself. Not that the school gave a shit.) They said I did lots of “gestalt substitution,” when reading out loud, for example, replacing “feature” with “function,” assuming I had read the latter when in fact I’d read the former.Unlike other ADHD cases, I was not more impulsive, poorly socialized, or easily addicted to stuff than normal people. I was also not hyperactive, meaning I was more ADD than ADHD.Like some ADHD types, I could hyperfocus at times.My ability to self-regulate wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t bad. Just a bit below average. (So perhaps today they’d call me ADHD-PI, a label I just found in Wikipedia).The APD (auditory processing disorder) diagnosis came mostly from hearing tests. But, as with ADHD, I only hit some of the checkboxes. (Specifically, about half of the ten symptoms listed here.)My ability to understand what people say in noisy settings was in the bottom 2%. And that was when my hearing was still good.

So there's no good label for me, but…

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Published on July 22, 2025 19:54
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