Attention
An article in the paper today talks about the brain function of attention and how some researchers are suggesting means of training attention instead of medication for "disorders." I like the direction of training focus rather than attempting to medicate for it, although I generally question the assumption that lack of focus should be treated as a disorder. I think in our society the high valuation of attention might have something to do with having a more productive work force and the huge increase in diagnosis of kids with attention disorders seems to me to have a lot to do with wanting a more docile and controlled classroom--rather than thinking about how the classroom environment should be adapted to the diversity of students. The article does cite some negative associations with lack of attention that it would seem beneficial to deal with through some kind of training or brain exercises--among them the "ability to sort through conflicting evidence, to connect more deeply with people, and even to develop a conscience." But I think it's a mistake to automatically value attention and that something may be lost in that valuation. There's an article here for instance that links attention disorders with creativity. I liked the suggestion of how to adapt the educational environment that this article cites: "Most pertinent, Farley (1981) concluded that the implications of stimulation seeking are of great importance for the childhood disorder of hyperactivity, which he described as a disorder characterized by stimulation seeking. Therefore, he advised that children so diagnosed should be treated with adaptive education rather than adaptive medication. Specifically, he proposed that such children '...be exposed to arousing education, perhaps open-space classrooms, more unstructured conditions, discussion and discovery instructional modes, divergent creativity experiences, arousing, extroverted teachers, and so on' (p.22). In short, nurture their creativity."
Kind of a tangent, but I remember when my son was little and we were standing in line someplace he would usually find something nearby that he could hang off of or swing around on--and I remember doing the same thing when I was a kid--that kind of behavior is almost always deemed inappropriate (kids are supposed to sit still and wait calmly?). It always made me think about the fact that we're primates and that the kind of swinging and hanging on objects behavior must be natural for us. So I think waiting areas should come with some kind of monkey bars. 
Thom Hartmann: Interview "Add and Loving It"
"Instead of changing the schools to adapt to our kids, we're changing our kids to adapt to our schools."
I caught this interview on Thom Hartmann's radio show yesterday with Patrick McKenna who's doing the show "ADD and Loving It" for Canadian TV.
Hartmann is a former psychotherapist and someone with ADD. One of the fascinating ideas he mentions is his idea that people with ADD or ADHD actually have a mindset more adapted to a hunter/gatherer society than an agricultural one. He also describes a teaching experience he observed in a classroom in Taiwan which I thought was great.
Unfortunately this snippet from the radio show doesn't include the listeners who called in--there was a very good discussion about using Ritalin. No single "right" answer as far as using it or not--but a range of suggestions from using it temporarily while one trains oneself in new attention behaviors, to using it at lower doses, to using it and then taking time off and going back on.
Hartmann has a number of good books on the subject it looks like. The hunter/gatherer idea is expanded on in:
Beyond ADD: Hunting for Reasons in the Past & Present (looks at ADD and ADHD from an evolutionary perspective)
and this book has a number of exercises for dealing with ADD/ADHD:
Healing ADD: Simple Exercises that Will Change Your Daily Life
Thom Hartmann
Ahhh, I can't remember if I watched Thom Hartmann on TV or read an article once... but I remember this. I looked him up in fact and found a pretty informative site that discusses this issue from different angles. I really like his view on the matter.
These links are from the same site, I just pulled out two other linked articles which I thought were interesting as well.
Do ADD genes exist because they make a population more fit? Does a creative and restless minority help us adapt? (the "hunter" mindset is briefly mentioned here)
Treating Children with Drugs
This editorial, "Mind Altering Drugs and the Problem Child" touched on use of drug therapies for ADD/ADHD as well as other diagnoses like bipolar disorders and the prescription of psychotropic drugs (there was an incident around here a couple of years ago in which a young child--3 years old--had been given psychotropic medications which her parents over-dosed her with when she was "unruly" resulting in her death).
The author, a pediatrician, advocates for training parents in "attachment theory": "if we can help this mother to join her child, to accept his low frustration tolerance as part of him, not a reflection of her own failure as a parent, she can help him regulate his frustration. He will then learn to manage his feelings on his own. Most important, if she can do this, she may actually change the way his brain handles stress and strong emotions."
If you put that description together with something the author says later--I think he's making an interesting distinction between over-identification and empathy: "Studies have shown that a parent's capacity to think about and understand a child's experience from the child's perspective is associated with a child's increased cognitive resourcefulness, greater social skills, and better capacity to regulate emotions."
In the first instance the parent is highly connected to the child but in a negative way--looking at the child as an extension of herself and her status as a parent. And then when the child doesn't behave properly--that kind of narcissism actually has to create an artifical distancing--not taking any responsibility for the child, because acknowledging responsibility would mean that the parent is "bad." Instead, if parents can gain a sense of the child as not an extended part of them--they can actually connect and see the world through the child's eyes.
Doesn't that seem like it could be a general model of problems in our culture? We tend to describe our culture as narcissistic--a "Me" generation. But then if the prescription for change is to not be so self-centered, I think we lose sight of the fact that narcissism is actually an over-connection with other people and a very weak sense of self. Only with a stronger sense of self can people then see the world through the eyes of others, and not see everyone as an extension of self.
Medicating Problems
Found this to be a good editorial on how we treat very complex problems with medication instead of support at many levels of relationship.
Creativity
Heh... monkey bars in the waiting room...
I saw a TED talk with speaker Sir Ken Robinson, he's an advocate for creating learning systems that nurture creativity rather than "stabilizing" them. One incredible story he tells is similar to yours and your sons - about a young girl in the 1930's, always fidgety, had trouble concentrating. She was told she has a learning disability, which now would be referred to as ADHD. She went to a specialist who ended up recognizing (through experiment) that she wasn't "sick", she just needs/wants to dance. After a successful career in ballet, she later founded her own dance company. Had she been put on medication and told to calm down, she'd likely never had known her potential.
Creativity
I've seen that video--and, yeah, I was thinking of that story too. That girl's story also reminded me of things I've read connecting cognition to movement--that one actually thinks better if not sitting completely still.
One question I had about the creativity and ADD/ADHD correlation was is this an either/or division between creativity and attention--or even polarities on a spectrum? Or can one have both? Would using brain focussing exercises or meditation rather than medication increase the liklihood of retaining creativity? I would think it would because medications are so untargetted.
My upstairs neighbor is ADHD and before he was on medication he used to do these verbal "riffs" that could go on for hours. Driving to the beach with him (beach is an hour away) used to be a proof that he could talk non-stop which to be honest, I usually found pretty amusing 'cause I thought he made unusual connections (that must be one of the links to creativity--that associativeness), but could be difficult on the way home when the other kids would be asleep and he'd keep waking them up. Also they were hard to break into--that is hard to have a back and forth exchange/conversation with him. Though he's on medication, he hasn't really lost that associativeness; it's just a bit less pronounced.
My son on the other hand seems almost the exact opposite. His attention tends to be very focussed. And verbally he and my neighbor (they're the same age) have always made a pretty funny pair--my neighbor doing his riff and my son making ironic commentary--sometimes we refer to them as Martin and Lewis.
So then I'm thinking--but my son doesn't seem to lack creativity--so how is his creativity different? One thing I picked up in the article was the description of people with ADD or ADHD as risk takers or stimulation seekers--because of low arousal. My interpretation of this and the connection to creativity is that for some people with ADD/ADHD, instead of trying to increase stimulation by becoming risk takers, they create their own stimulation. Thinking about my son as a baby, he had the opposite problem. I remember my pediatrician telling me not to worry about noise waking the baby because babies have an ability to tune out the world--the younger they are in fact, the better able to tune out they are. And then as they get older they start to interact and tune-in more and more. But then when I took my son in at two weeks, the pediatrician said he seemed unusually alert and visually focussed. Soon afterwards he became "colicky" (which was kind of a horrible experience--non-stop crying, very little sleeping). I always thought the two were related--that he was over-stimulated.
Interesting that another difference between the upstairs neighbor and my son is that my neighbor is the risk taker, and my son has sort of taken on the role of his protector--as in, "You don't really want to stick that up your nose, do you?"
The article on creativity cites Robert Frost's and Frank Lloyd Wright's day-dreaming as kids. I wonder if daydreaming could both be a reaction to low stimulation from the environment and over-stimulation?
Another thing cited in the article is the higher incidence of cross-eye hand dominance in people with ADD and ADHD (that is, that you might be right-handed but left-eyed, or vice-versa). That is usually looked at as a sign of greater communication between the two hemispheres. I'm actually left-eyed and right-handed (which I know from archery class where they tested us--and I wound up needing to shoot left-handed), but again more like my son as far as attention. I also know that women generally have a thicker corpus callosums--thus more hemispheric connection--and that problems with ADD/ADHD are more pronounced in men. That just makes me wonder if part of the problem but also the creative aspect of ADD/ADHD is the increased communication between the two sides but with less of an ability to give order to the extra input. And that's reminding me of DL's comment on postmodernism in the Painting thread--that division of the verbal and visual--with the verbal associated with the analytic (focussed?) and the visual with the emotive (impulsive?). I wonder if the way in which to overcome either extreme (tangent: would the disorder associated with focus be autism?) is to train in things that bring together different levels--like using imagery, or in irony, or punning--that is to give them a structure?
And, no, I'm not trying to elicit more students for the gag department at Vaudville U.....no....reeeeeeeeeeealy...trust me....would I lie to you?
A maturing mind needs playtime
A coworker of mine sent this article on about ADD, but in turn it made me reflect upon how things have changed in this society since the diagnosis of this problem increased to the levels that it has today.
When I think of industrialization - in general, it's a highly structured way of getting things done in order to mass produce. There are so many probems that this causes physically - not just in the form of pollution, but psychologically as in making people simply cogs within that machine. The cost to benefit is often not even analyzed because the goal is no longer the benefit of the human species in general - but to make a profit.
In any case - I found this article very interesting. Here's the link and some excerpts:
Playground time proves helpful for students with ADD.
His findings: The rats with laboratory-induced ADD played more frequently than rats whose brains had not been altered.
Panksepp then divided the rats into two groups: Those who were allowed to play as much as they wanted and those who were allowed only limited play. The results were even more surprising. That rats that were allowed ample opportunities for play did not become more wild, rambunctious or violent. Instead, they simply played normally and grew up to be non-hyperactive and socially well-adjusted—at least by rat standards.
However, the hyperactive rats that had only limited opportunities for play grew into rather rambunctious rats that had difficulty reading social cues from other rats.
"Clearly, play seems to be an essential part of social and brain development," says Panksepp. "It's only after the need for play has been met that animals are ready to move on to more mature stages of development."
This research has convinced Panksepp that the restlessness seen in children with ADHD may simply be the children's way of expressing an innate need for more play. Instead of medicating children to stifle their behavior, Panksepp argues for providing kids with more opportunity to meet that need. In fact, he believes that this could be the key to ensuring their development into focused, socially adept adults.
We don't expect adults to engage in highly focused mental activity for hours on end without a break. Breaks (in the form of recess) are no less important for kids, and Panksepp's research suggests that they're even more important for kids with ADHD.