The Quote Archive
30 months of describing monotropism before knowing the word. Timestamped evidence from 368,000 messages.
September 2023: The Dark Room
14 months before discovering "monotropism"
"normally my life is me in a dark space with a candle therefore i can only see and concentrate on the object of my hyperfocus, then sometimes i get the use of a laser like flashlight where i can alway focus on objects at a distance to focus on i have very little ability to see around the room, taking ritalin 20mg lx feels like..."
What I described:
- "dark space with a candle" = single narrow attention beam
- "very little ability to see around the room" = no peripheral awareness
- Ritalin creates ability to "see around the room" = distributed attention
What Murray called it: Attention tunnelling (1992)
October 2023: The Prosthetic Idea
14 months before building it
"If there was a metoforical prosthetic that I could insert into my life to assist me greatly what would that look like be practical and creative"
Timeline:
- October 22, 2023: Concept articulated
- December 2025: Brain MCP server built (368K messages indexed)
November 2023: Unbroken Focus
23 months before learning the word
"i think that my most profound disability is the fact that i have an unbroken focus on the object of my focus that goes all the way down to my train of thought, it is all encompasing and deabilitating"
Decoded:
- "unbroken focus" = single channel, no distribution
- "all the way down" = recursive depth, not surface attention
- "all encompasing" = nothing else exists when I'm in it
- "deabilitating" = in a world built for polytropics
November 2023: Medication Effects
"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."
The insight: Ritalin doesn't "fix ADHD." It temporarily simulates polytropic attention.
Mid-2024: The Flow Breakthrough
"Basically, about a year and a half ago, somewhere in the middle of 2024, I was finally able to stop and completely complete the project within a single hyper focus session. This was a game changer for..."
The shift: Stop fighting the monotropism. Design projects for single-session completion.
July 2025: Object Permanence
"no correction turn my 80% of my time are super valueable hyperfocused moments that the value inside gets killed because as i enter a new hyperfocus the previous ones become dead no matter how valuable they"
The problem:
- "value inside gets killed" = information loss when attention shifts
- "previous ones become dead" = not forgotten, actually cease to exist
- "no matter how valuable" = content value irrelevant to attention
Why the prosthetic is necessary.
December 2025: Recognition
"adhd autism and dyslexias are all features i feel like my biggest rel disabilty is being stuck in the momemnt deep very deep but very narrow , that why i am building this prosthetic"
The reframe:
- ADHD, autism, dyslexia = features, not the core
- The core: "stuck in the moment deep very deep but very narrow"
- Response: Build the prosthetic
Why This Matters
These quotes were captured before I had vocabulary for what I was experiencing.
The pattern:
- Lived the experience (decades)
- Described it in my own words (2023-2025)
- Discovered the theory matched (October 2025)
- Built systems in response (ongoing)
This is n=1 evidence: independent articulation that maps perfectly to academic theory.
→ The Discovery Arc | The Prosthetic