What you're missing is the basic fact that the ADD is a disorder of the reward system. That's why you can use a drug that increases dopamine activity (amphetamines) and thereby fix the ADD.

Without the exogenous dopamine source, the dopamine synapses in the brain do not fire. Without those synapses firing, the causal emotional chain is broken. The feeling is absent. The very same feeling that would be there in other people JUST IS NOT THERE.

Nobody "learns" how to fire their dopamine synapses. They either fire or do not fire. You either have a feeling or not.

The reward system is functioning in ADHD subjects in some circumstances, just not in others. If that were not the case, ADHD subjects could never learn anything, and that clearly isn't the case.

My friend gets excited about conceiving projects and beginning tasks. She has problems with completing them.

My friend is perfectly able to learn new procedures, including complex procedures. On occasion, she performs them with hurricane enthusiasm, such as the time she whipped up a dog carrier backpack for my small dog with her sewing machine in 15 minutes flat. She was amazing on that occasion. And then, for 3 weeks, she couldn't bring herself to hem a curtain - the simplest and most mundane application of a sewing machine. From what other people are saying in this discussion, those are the clues: too simple, too mundane, and the problem is the lack of drive in particular circumstances, not learning the task.

I'm just wondering what the limits are to learning and then what those limits might tell us about the disease mechanism. Since ADHD people are capable of learning, might there be processes they could learn which could alter the application of their disregulated reward system so as to facilitate self-drive in more circumstances?

If not, why not? Or how not? What is the dysfunctional component of neuroanatomy responsible for the condition?

> The reward system is functioning in ADHD subjects in some circumstances, just not in others.

It's functioning differently, regardless of circumstances. It's not "In some circumstances."

> If that were not the case, ADHD subjects could never learn anything, and that clearly isn't the case.

Your reasoning is bad here.

> I'm just wondering what the limits are to learning

You keep using phrases like "limits to learning" that are question-begging and wrong.

> might there be processes they could learn which could alter the application of their disregulated reward system so as to facilitate self-drive in more circumstances?

I don't know what you're talking about.

What you suggested earlier is that ordinary people "learn" to have the emotional reactions to task accomplishments while ADD people do not "learn" to have these same emotional reactions.

That is incorrect: you did not learn to have any such emotional reactions. You are falsely attributing agency to yourself. This is something called Fundamental Attribution Error.

A friend of mine has ADHD and is a street performer in Covent Garden in London, and it fits him to a tee - 15 minutes of hyper-focus on doing the show and interacting with the audience then an immediate reward of gratification and money, which he has to do two or three times a day. It wouldn't fit my ADHD but it fits his perfectly.

> Have you ever had a job that works like that?

Yes, for many years. I do drone work on the side even today.

> help to build an expectation circuit that reinforces completion

It’s not a function of what I “expect” of myself - if anything, if I expect to complete something and fail to do so, I could enter a rapid self-reinforcing failure cycle that is extremely emotionally taxing and difficult to break out of.