> it's someone with ADHD taking a stimulant, even a pretty high dose, for the first time and it having very little effect outside of a mild calm and focus.

Subjective self-evaluation of drug effects is a fascinating topic. It’s a common theme in drug use for people to self-report effects that differ from what other people observe.

For example, benzodiazepine users will commonly report that benzos don’t inebriate them, they just make them feel “normal” while outside observers can clearly see that the person is impaired. In abusers, this phenomenon of false sense of sobriety is a known problem and leads people to drive cars and do other things they’re clearly incapable of doing while drugged, all while believing they’re perfectly sober.

Even with SSRIs, doctors and family members around the patient will report dramatic improvements while patients own self-rating of their condition stays low for a long time. Others can visibly see the improvement in the patient before the patient acknowledges it.

Cocaine and stimulant abusers will often think they feel “normal” or “calm and focused” while talking a mile a minute or doing things like hyper focusing on minutia. My friends who work in an ER have some stories.

What I’m getting at is that it’s common for first-time stimulant users to interpret the euphoria, confidence, and connectedness as a feeling of being “normal”.

The “this is how normal people must feel” thought is a common report from people taking several classes of drugs for the first time and experiencing the brief euphoriant effect that temporarily silences anxieties, dysphoria, worries, and replaces it with a false sense of positivity. Add on top of this the placebo effect that comes from all of us having heard the “ADHD people react differently” and it translates to first-time users interpreting the effect differently.

In my experience people are VERY bad at evaluating how they are affected by amphetamines. Ive given many people amphetamines and the response is usually "I dont feel anything at all" meanwhile, their pupils are huge, theyre tapping all their feet and fingers, and theyre hyper focusing on some minute detail of something without even realizing it.

Exactly. This is an extremely common phenomenon among several drug classes.

The part about feeling “normal” is a common report, as people misinterpret the temporary good feeling as how they think everyone else must feel all the time.

Has this been characterized in literature to any significant extent? This isn't a "challenging" question btw, I hear it repeated but wonder to what extent it's actually true vs. people's later perceptions coloring it and/or odd internal perception. The latter I think is possible because I've read anecdotes from people who say they don't feel much, yet they go from demotivated to get up and do something to sudden motivation to do lots of different things besides what they got up to do, which reads to me as overshooting the mark in terms of effect if not in matching patient's expectations of "how it should feel".