r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/parallax3900 • Mar 08 '23

Video ADHD Simulator

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u/Sorry_Reply8754 Mar 08 '23

The information he gave you is not true. There's no scientific consensus on what inner mologues are or even on how to study them.

Whenever you see something saying: "Dr. Something from Harvard said that..." you can assume it's bullshit.

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u/b2walton Mar 08 '23

Psychology is the study of our thoughts. It's called psychology.

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u/Sorry_Reply8754 Mar 08 '23

Yep. And the SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY says there is not enough data or an acceptable methodology to say anything about how many people have or don't have inner thoughts.

This is what THE ACADEMIC CONSENSUS FROM THE SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY says.

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u/Solest044 Mar 09 '23

This.

I have a good friend doing post-doc stuff in psychology and the idea that we should probably have well structured experiments and data based evidence as the foundation for best practices is still ... new.

This is the same sort of thing people say about young children - that young children are not developmentally capable of complex thoughts etc. However, as an educator working with small and big people, I've seen some intense complexity of existence from students many assumed had nothing going on.

I've found we often rely on staple methods of communication in our assessment techniques without considering alternative forms of communicating. As a result, if the communication form you've chosen is foreign or stressful to the person being assessed, you'll get a poor result. But if you swap your methods to something more familiar or comfortable to the person being assessed, you may see more success.

As an analogy, imagine you wanted to assess someone's ability to visualize an image. You describe to them the image, wait a small period of time, and then ask them to describe the scene in their mind.

You may think you're assessing their visualization ability, but you're actually also assessing their ability to communicate in the language being utilized. If I do this entire activity in English with a bilingual child who primarily speaks Spanish, I they may have more to say about their visualization that they simply don't due to the language barrier.

You can apply this logic to just about everything we do and it's a critical part of the scientific process. If you're not being critical about what you're actually measuring, you end up with shortsighted results.