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Medication as Polytropic Simulation

This is a memoir with receipts: one day — the day the lights came on — reconstructed not from memory but from my own dated messages, quoted verbatim, typos preserved. The machine that recovered them is the one this chapter ends by designing.

Chapter One of a book in progress. Ratified 13 July 2026; the prose is locked. Quotations preserve the original spelling. Historical medication experiences are recorded here, not recommended.

The lights came on at about half past twelve.

It was 1 May 2024. I had taken 30 milligrams of Vyvanse at eleven that morning. At about half past twelve, I noticed that something had changed. I did what I often do when something important happens inside me: I tried to build a system around it before it disappeared.

My wife had asked why I was not applying for a job if the medication was helping.

The conventional answers were available: fear, lack of confidence, avoidance, a difficult job market. None of them described the experience. They assumed I was standing outside my life, weighing the options and refusing to choose. I was trying to describe something more mechanical: the difference between being held inside one object and being able to see the room containing it.

I opened ChatGPT and divided the page into two states: US, unmedicated state, and MS, medicated state.¹

In the unmedicated column I wrote:

“US I travel through time as a subject of my focus as if the object of my focus is some habit based point of eqilibrium and i as the slave am hyper focused to the object of my focus.”¹

The wording is difficult, but the direction is exact. I was not describing myself as the master directing my attention. I was the subject of it. Once something had me, moving away could feel less like changing tasks and more like destroying the state I was in.

The past and future did not disappear intellectually. I knew they existed. But they were not active beside the present. Thinking outside the current focus risked losing it. I wrote that I had “a profound sence that i am killing the object of my focus” because the past and future were only small parts of that state, and therefore “i am killing the now.”¹

This sounds dramatic when compressed into prose. It did not feel dramatic from inside. It felt mechanical.

The same structure appeared in ordinary social moments. Context is made from many small pieces held together: who the other person is, what happened before, what they may expect, what I was about to say, whether it needs to be said now, and what else is happening around us. For me those pieces often competed.

I could be walking with a close friend, meet someone else I knew, and suddenly blank on one of their names. I might tell them to introduce themselves, avoid the introduction, or appear to ignore the person. Even closing a stroller could feel new each time; I had to rediscover the trick of that company’s latch.¹

I described social context as a series of explicit questions:

“Where am i? where are they? who are they ? who am i?”¹

Context did not float around the event. I had to construct it.

Then came a sentence I had not planned:

“There is nothing i ever nead to say that is not urgent.”¹

In the unmedicated state, a thought arrived inside the current focus and pressed to be expressed before the focus moved and the thought became inaccessible.

The medicated column began differently:

“Feels as if the lights were turned on.”¹

I could see and understand more context. I found it easier to answer the phone. I had a general feeling that I could manage. Then I wrote the phrase that still carries the deepest part of the experience:

“Exist in time. Since there now is a past and a future i am able to plan.”¹

I could decide what I would do not now. I could remain involved in the present while allowing the future to exist beside it. I could still focus, but I did not need to put all my strength into holding the object in place. In my words, “it is possible for me to have more then 1 thought in my mind at a time.”¹

Later in the same column, the urgency sentence returned in reverse:

“there is nothing urgent that i have to say.”¹

Unmedicated, everything I needed to say felt urgent. Medicated, there was space between the thought and the world.

That was why my wife’s question was difficult. If I knew this state would remain available, applying for a job felt possible. I could understand context, allow the future to remain present, and move through tasks without pinning each one down with all my strength. But I did not know whether the state would remain.

I described it in the strongest language I had:

“it is like i am freed from jail.”¹

Then I wrote:

“I am so much less lonely”¹

The lights did not merely illuminate tasks. They illuminated other people.

The dark room

Eight months earlier, on 6 September 2023, I had reached for the same image without knowing the language I use now.

After a week taking Ritalin LA 20 milligrams, I wrote that my normal life felt like being in a dark room with a candle. The candle illuminated the object of my hyperfocus. Sometimes I had a laser-like flashlight that let me focus on something at a distance. What I lacked was the ability to see around the room.²

Ritalin felt like a small adjustment to the dimmer:

“taking ritalin 20mg lx feels like the dimmer switch of the room was adjusted stightly that i can now see better in the dim light making the candel and the flashlight less important.”²

The metaphor came before the theory. I did not yet know the word monotropism for concentrating more processing resources into fewer interests at one time, or polytropic for attention distributed more broadly. I knew only that I lived in a dark room and that a pill had touched the dimmer.

Two months later, I described the same experience without the room:

“almost all the time am hyperficused when i take ritalin i am able to broad focus as if i can see more then one thing at a time this is unbelievable i am able to make a little eyecontact and get things done. normally my executive function is terrible.”³

I was trying to explain to my doctor that “focus” was too crude a word. If I said the medication helped me focus, I would be saying almost the opposite of what happened. I already had narrow focus. The unusual experience was broad focus: more than one thing remaining available at a time.

That also made the change in eye contact easier to understand. Eye contact was not a single social behaviour. The person, my thought, their expression, my response and the surrounding context all had to remain present together. When the room was slightly brighter, the person did not disappear behind the thought.

Years later I would call the useful state polytropic simulation. This is a personal description, not a medical category. I am not claiming that stimulant medication turns a monotropic person into a polytropic one. Ritalin and Vyvanse did not affect me identically, and their effects were not stable. The phrase names the shape of the experience: temporary access to breadth.

I did not suddenly acquire depth when the lights came on. The depth was already there. What changed was access to the rest of the room. Broad attention was not a replacement for depth. When it worked, it was a temporary bridge from depth into time, context and relationship.

The window did not stay open

The record matters because memory smooths medication stories into verdicts: it worked, it did not work, the dose was right, the dose was wrong. My messages preserve something less convenient.

I started Vyvanse 30 milligrams around 8 April 2024. During the first week I noticed an improvement in executive function. On 16 April I recorded that days eight and nine had been less effective. On 22 April I wrote in the past tense:

“The first 7 days it helped with ADHD symptoms”⁴

I then stopped before Pesach. On 1 May I restarted, and the contrast became clear again.⁴

That afternoon I said I was desperately scared that the positive effect would stop working again. I was not only feeling more productive. I felt “in the world with potential.” I could make decisions. Things did not feel so fixed and certain. There was more elasticity.⁵

When ChatGPT tried to explain my hesitation in conventional psychological terms, I corrected it:

“No, completely wrong.”⁶

Without the medication I felt as though I had less free choice, stuck inside a system organized around urgency and survival. With the positive effect, I said, “I just feel normal.”⁶

But normality that arrives in a window creates pressure. At 19:43 that evening I wrote:

“Almost as though I need to quickly try to get a job in this medicated state and then I'll be able to do it very well in non-medicated states if I set myself upright. What a tragedy!”⁷

The tragedy was not simply that the effect might stop. I could temporarily see the structure of a workable life and felt responsible for building it before the lights dimmed.

What happened next

Twenty minutes later, at 20:03, I told ChatGPT that it had not satisfactorily grasped the essence of me.⁸

At 20:05 I supplied the part its answer had missed. When I get deeply into something, I can “hack it, crack it, understand it” and go very far in building it. I can take a website, a coding project or an idea to a high level, and then move on.⁹

That is the other side of the narrow state. It produces real depth, but it can also break continuity. Something valuable can become inaccessible when a new object takes over. The remaining work—follow-up, packaging, explanation, contact with another person—may belong to a world that is no longer active.

At 20:07, after the next response, I wrote:

“So that's much better.”¹⁰

I then proposed using periods of positive medication effect to build what I called “a robust AI automation” and train a model on how to interact during my medicated state so I could use it “as a prosthetic during my unmedicated state.”¹⁰

At 20:09 I began specifying the data. My YouTube history could show what had occupied my attention over time. Email and WhatsApp contained relationships and commitments. ChatGPT and Claude held long records of my thinking. I wanted everything placed on a time-based scale in a database, with an LLM for communication and vector search to retrieve what I needed when I needed it.¹¹

I also identified a problem immediately: a ChatGPT conversation contains both my prompts and the machine’s responses. If the conversation is stored without distinguishing the two, retrieval may return something the machine said as though it came from me.¹¹

That distinction is central to this book. The corpus contains my words, AI interpretations, summaries, errors, corrections and better attempts. They cannot be treated as one voice.

In May 2024 the system had no name and did not exist. But the design already contained the main elements of what became Bob: continuous personal data, time as an organizing spine, semantic retrieval, and an AI interface able to return something from outside the current tunnel.

The prosthetic did not begin as a startup idea. It began as a response to unstable access to my own life.

Medication and the machine addressed different layers. Medication sometimes widened what I could hold in the live moment. The machine preserved what the live moment could not hold.

The medication sometimes let me see the room. The machine remembered the room when I could see only the candle.

A memoir with receipts

I am writing this chapter in 2026 with the system imagined in the 2024 message. I did not reconstruct the story by sitting quietly and deciding what the medication must have meant. Memory would have compressed several different states into one later explanation.

Instead, the machine searched the corpus. It recovered the September dark room, the November broad focus, the April fading, the May return of temporal continuity, and the same-evening design of the prosthetic. It returned the original words with dates and conversation identifiers, allowing me to inspect what I actually said beside what an AI later inferred.

That separation is necessary because the corpus contains confident explanations that are not evidence. It contains assistants turning possibilities into mechanisms and personal metaphors into neuroscience. Those explanations may or may not be right. They are not allowed to become autobiography merely because they sound coherent.

What the record can honestly say

This chapter cannot establish why the medications affected me as they did. It cannot tell me what medication I should take now. It does not prove that my theory of attention is medically correct.

It establishes something narrower. In September and November 2023, before I knew the terms monotropic and polytropic, I described Ritalin as adding light around a narrow beam and allowing me to see more than one thing at a time. In April and May 2024, I recorded a similar broadening on Vyvanse, together with its instability. I associated the useful state with planning, context, reduced urgency, social connection, decision-making and the ability to exist in time.

During one of those temporary windows, I designed an external system to preserve context when my attention moved elsewhere. This chapter exists because that system can now recover the dated messages, distinguish my words from machine interpretation, and keep memory from smoothing the record into a cleaner story than the evidence supports.

In November 2023 I asked how to explain the experience to my doctor. The answer took three years and hundreds of thousands of messages. I was not asking for more concentration. I was asking how to gain access to the room without losing what the candle made possible.

The door

If your attention has this shape — one deep channel, a room you cannot see, tunnels that die at the exit — send me one paragraph about your room: mordechaipotash.com/ask. I read everything that comes through that door.

Source ledger

All quotations are taken from the author’s primary ChatGPT record and preserve the original spelling. Historical doses are included only because the author recorded them at the time.