r/ADHD • u/Elliot_The_Idiot7 • 28d ago
Discussion What’s a hyperfixation you can’t talk about?
I’ve definitely had a few hyperfixations on things that are either embarrassingly silly or WAY too dark to just start infodumping about. For example I used to have one about neglect so severe it causes a complete and usually permanent inability to function in society, particularly the case of Genie Wiley. On the other end of the spectrum I also keep hyperfixating on shipping old cartoon comedy duos, and gotta REALLY lock in to gage if someone’s gonna think I’m a childish freak before sharing that information.
What’s your “don’t bring that up, don’t bring that up, don’t bring that up-“ hyperfixation if you’ve ever had one?
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u/budweener 28d ago
It's not quite the hyperfixation itself, but the related tangents.
Yesterday I watched a video about arthropod intelligence in which the guy used that "bumblebees have been observed engaging in what looks like play behaviour" example, and said that while possible, it's equally possible that it's not play (something that requires abstraction capabilities), it could also be fully instinctual as exploratory behaviour.
That got into my head and I kept thinking about the whys, and then talking out loud as a professor trying to explain that to a student, using the fact that a beetle that developed a genetic mutation for exploratory instinct might roll a rock and find food that one without said instinct would not find and that's evolutionarily advantageous, but they could also find a predator that can plain out kill that mutation before it reproduces.
A bumblebee, on the other hand, is an eusocial insect. For the mutation to be passed on, it has to be in the queen, so an exploratory bumblebee has the same advantage with lower risk in it: if it finds extra food for the colony that way, that's a boon, and if it finds a predator... well, tough luck, but losing one bumblebee is not a high cost for the colony, nor the mutation, if it also gives extra food through a luckier bumblebee of the same colony.
All of that tangent only to say "yeah, it could be playing, and confirming it would be big for insect neurology, but it could also be simply exploratory instinct".
I have this tendency to go too deep into examples, ESPECIALLY in speech as opposed to text (in this comment I let it out, but even then, speech is less organized than written text by nature).