'Super memory': Why Emily Nash is sharing her brain with science

look up bullet journal, might help offloading the memory and focus to a simple journal

Well I wanted to say "solve warp drive" but didn't want to sound eccentric.

I'll lump the comment by ghufran_syed in with this. I'm fond of SpaceX and deeply admire what they're doing. But honestly my heart is in helping people, rather than taking humanity to new heights. I originally wanted to be a genetic engineer back in the '80s during the AIDS crisis, and because progress on cancer was glacial then. Prejudice was a lot higher than it is today. So the powers that be didn't want to do a moonshot for genetics like they did with the X Prize in the '90s, and I went into tech instead. Today if I could do it all over again, I'd like to see a moonshot to cure all genetic disorders by 2030 with tools like CRISPR and mRNA vaccines.

Loosely that just means that from the context of a show like For All Mankind, I identify more with NASA than I do with Helios. Although Dev Ayesa's non-hierarchical work structure resonates with me more than what Elon Musk is doing. Ayesa's was the original vision of the '90s tech scene that we've lost today under wealth inequality.

On that note, I'm concerned about Musk's embrace of center-right politics and the cognitive dissonance we're seeing around free-speech-for-some. Humanity is moving the opposite direction towards egalitarianism. I hope that he comes around, but until then, I can't really endorse any of his companies anymore. And that makes me sad on a profound level. I'm sick of losing my heroes.

Anyway, the gatekeeping around medicine is so high that maybe I let myself give up on the dream of genetics. Which is sad too, because AI is what will solve it. We don't have large epidemiological studies or a simulation where we can rapidly iterate on cures. Although we do have a mountain of data in Ancestry and 23andme. I don't think that medical researchers have any idea what programmers would be capable of in that space if we were given autonomy. Ethics aside, I see that as the last frontier until we move out into the stars.

Sooo, with my passions out of reach, I turned towards basic survival, mostly CRUD apps to make rent. It's hard to climb a corporate ladder when getting to the top doesn't mean anything to oneself. I don't want success, I want financial freedom so that I can start getting real work done outside of external expectation. To invent real solutions that would help free people from their day to day chores and bills so they can self-actualize. That's why I'm such a proponent of UBI. When any of us struggle, we all struggle.

So far none of the projects I've been involved with have won the internet lottery yet. And my body/psyche won't let me work through burnout like I used to. Somehow I have to start over, and that's daunting. I suspect I'm not alone in that feeling.

Thank you!

No, I didn't recognize it at all, thus I didn't have to ask a medical professional anything since my presentation was evidently obvious. The only advice I can give, or what is close to advice as I can get, is to recount how I moved from ignorance to action in my own situation, and to emphasize the importance of getting in front of a professional psychiatric diagnostician as soon as you can. They will know what to ask you. no need to guide them to any particular conclusion, nor would I recommend trying this.

Due to coincidence I happened to have a professor in college who was the same person my parents had been referred to (on my behalf) for behavioral examination and intervention following a sudden precipitous drop in school performance between ages 8 and 9.

This person had given me a battery of performance tests yielding unambiguous data indicating that the deficiency in academic performance (and comorbid peer group socialization problems) resulted from an excess of raw ability. Emphasis on 'raw.'

In those days (80's) this was quite counterintuitive, and perhaps still is. Separate classes for gifted students did not yet exist in our district - "gifted" was still a novety also. Skipping a grade (the conventional solution) was likely to aggravate the problem instead of addressing it. So my circumstances prompted the creation of a trial program mainly so that I could attend it, though I resented being singled out and separated from the few friends I had. to my great relief half a dozen or so other students quickly joined once the program became a reality.

Once we both acknowledged that we had encountered one another many years before, my professor asked whether I had interest in testing again, because they saw that well over a decade of growth had done little to improve the fundamental challenges I faced, though I had become much better at masking them from others as well as from myself.

In the intervening time, the diagnostic profile of ADD had become formalized and increasingly visible outside medical circles, though still mainly centered on early childhood dev stages. They recommended that I look in to getting a formal diagnosis, because although they believed they saw pretty obvious signs I fit this profile, this did not amount to a professional diagnosis.

I, being a teenager still, reflexively rebuffed the entire notion that I might need psychiatric evaluation, or could be meaningfully affected (much less improved) by medication - something I associated with "weakness."

This would turn out to be a catastrophic misjudgement, and although I did eventually get a formal diagnosis and a protocol, delaying for more than a decade was the most regrettable self-inflicted setback of my life, one that unquestionably cost many millions over the next 20 years.

I think calling FAANG programmers neurotypical is a bold statement.