adhd

In order to better understand ADHD, it is imperative that you see the ways in which all of our common, daily experiences are similar to the thinking, feeling, and behavior of an ADHD child.

This is important for two reasons. First, regardless of whether you are a teacher, parent, or researcher, little can be gained until you begin to see the world through the eyes of an ADHD child. Invaluable insights are acquired by mapping the experience of a child through on our own personal experience. Formal research experiments can only validate, not originate, these insights. Second, by personalizing the experiences of the ADHD child, we make an important discovery. This discovery flies in the face of traditional medicine, which wants to identify something as broken in the child's brain and fix it, i.e., medicate it.

This discovery, which supports one of my major tenets, is inescapable. This discovery is that ADHD children think the same way we do. Their situation has just trained them to emphasize certain thought patterns more than others. And we use exactly those same thought patterns on a regular basis, just not as often as the ADHD child does. In fact, most of us would resort to the same strategies if we were put in the same situation as the ADHD child. But because we think of ADHD children as being different, because we think they have a “disability,” we refuse to give ourselves the same disability label — despite the exact same thinking style. 

I will re-emphasize: ADHD children think no differently than we do.

We Think Like ADHD Children All the Time

Let me illustrate by citing a personal experience. While engaged in the relentless drudgery of writing the computer program logic and voice prompts for caer, I was having trouble concentrating. My attention constantly drifted off after I wrote each sentence. I continually caught myself looking out the window, going to the bathroom, making a telephone call, or looking at a magazine.

With great effort, I brought myself back to the tedious, repetitive task at hand — writing another sentence. A large cup of espresso coffee helped increase my willful control over my attention. With the coffee, I temporarily regained the power to make my mind do the required task for a little longer.

Finally, after hours of this struggle, I logged onto the Internet. In just a few seconds, my attention and energy improved dramatically, though I had not changed my position at the very same computer, the very same desk, next to the very same window.

My attention went unbroken for the next hour as I searched the Internet for things that interested me. Thinking back over this scenario, I see my experience exactly parallels that of the ADHD child. I was forcing myself to do a dreaded task, much as a teacher forces a child to do his work in the classroom.

My writing the computer system was very similar to the ADHD child doing math or spelling. Both of our tasks required continuous, sequential attention to detail. Both were repetitive of a similar process with detailed variations. Both were boring because of the repetition, and both of us were required to do the task to achieve a goal.

Though I could keep my body at the task just as the teacher keeps the child at his desk, the unpleasantness of both our tasks soon conditioned our attention to switch to more interesting things. For the child it might be staring out the window, playing with an eraser, talking to a friend in the next row, or wandering around the classroom. For me, it was staring out the window, making a phone call, and reading a magazine.

We both achieved relief from these boring tasks by automatically, against my conscious intention or the teacher’s will, learning to avoid the aversive tasks by shifting our attention away from them — “spacing out” or becoming distracted. Relative to the tasks assigned to us, we each had an “attention” deficit and were being “hyperactive.”

In fact, my cup of espresso worked just like the child’s dose of ritalin (or dexedrine or Cylert). ritalin allows the child to focus his attention on his work in order to please his teacher. Caffeine helps me to force my mind to do what I want it to do, as opposed to helplessly following my learned defense patterns and not performing a tedious task that I don’t want to do.

Both Ritalin and caffeine help us redirect our attention back to the task we intentionally wish to address. Both Ritalin and caffeine are powerful central nervous system stimulants.

(As a sidelight, before stimulant drugs came into widespread use, mothers of ADHD children discovered that a cup or two of coffee in the morning would help their youngsters survive the morning hours in school.)

My time on the Internet also worked like a child’s time on Nintendo. As many parents know, ADHD children can attend to Nintendo for hours, even though they may have been very distracted from the school work that immediately preceded it. My ability to focus my attention rebounded in exactly the same way when I logged on to the Internet.

The Internet and Nintendo share a common feature in that they have no negative history that make a person want to “space out” instead of doing the needed work. At our chosen tasks our attention was flawless. It would seem to take a very peculiar neurological deficit to account for such sudden variation in both of our attentional patterns.

Do I have ADHD? I doubt it as much as I doubt that most kids labeled as such have ADHD, at least as it is normally conceptualized as a neurological disorder. We have to give up the idea that the ADHD child’s mental processes are strange, unusual, defective or inferior. They are just one more variation of the perceptual distortion that all of us use everyday to survive in an often-crazy world.

Your Personal Experience of ADHD

One way Zen masters teach meditation is through painting. But before a Zen master will let you paint a flower, he insists that you become the flower. You must meditate on it until you no longer just see it. You must experience it and know it as part of you. Only after you understand the flower in that depth, does the Zen master believe you can meaningfully paint the flower.

This is even truer when you are trying to “paint” the transient nature of attention. Not only is cognitive understanding not enough, it is, in fact, not even useful.

Let us try an experiment that will help us move beyond a mere intellectual understanding of the distractibility of an ADHD child. Stop reading now and think back over your own experience of having to do some boring, repetitive task for a very long time.

Remember how easy it was to space out or become distracted.

Did you ever try some coffee to help get you back on task? How did it work?

Remember how easy it was to focus your attention on other tasks that captured your interest.

Compare your attention under these two conditions

— boring task vs. interesting task. If you can do this, you have walked in the ADHD child’s shoes, and you have taken a major step in helping them.