But, all in all, my brain is my favorite amusement ever.

Me, too! One of my friend's favorite ways to amuse herself around me is to ask me what I'm thinking at a given moment and then ask me how I got there. It's a circuitous route. Watch for landsharks.

While I think it is a sign of maturity to be able to force yourself to at least look like you're paying attention in certain situations, taking away a kid's natural vitality is not the solution. It's interesting to me that, as a culture, we praise people who are able to buckle down and work with very focused attention, but the big stories about successful people tend to come from their ability to come up with ideas out of the blue or think of new applications for something that no one else would have thought of. We want our kids to focus and get through it, but we celebrate the flash of genius.

But a lot of flashes of genius are really in a long line of failures. For example, Edison worked for months before he came up with the light bulb.

I took a design class (as in usability, not artistic) and that was one of the big points. You may have a flash of brilliance, but rarely is it in the first five minutes. You got keep working at it - you might have a bright flash - or even just a significant refinement.

What I think is funny is a read that one of the symptoms of ADD (at least in one of its forms) is becoming focussed for a "long time" on somthing and your attention is not easily disturbed. As in the attention may bounce around every 5 seconds for 10 minutes but then be focussed on one thing for 5 minutes. Seemed like kind of what ADD means.

But a lot of flashes of genius are really in a long line of failures.

That's part of my point. It's more about how we present information. We tell our kids to work really hard and keep at it to get places, but give them bite-sized pieces of history that talk about how people just came up with something great. Because those are the good stories. It's more boring to hear about how freaking many experiments Philo Farnsworth probably had to do than the fact that now we had television. In reality, it's probably that the great minds had to capitalize on both working diligently and being adaptable and making unusual connections. We're sending mixed messages is what I'm saying.

Flashes of genius have to be followed up by long periods of work to develop them or the idea isn't going to go anywhere. Newton may have had a flash of insight when the apple hit his head but it still took him 18 months to write up the Principia. (I think I'm agreeing violently with you here, NumberSix.)

Ms. Heffernan conflates "obsession" and "focus" to argue that a long attention span is overrated. I agree that both are needed, but I get a little sad when I think how many kids can't sit still long enough to read Moby Dick, which is absolutely brilliant. Still, it was probably ever thus; the only difference now is that we expect all children to be above average in every category and panic when it isn't true.

At some point, we stopped calling Tom Sawyer-style distractibility either animal spirits or a discipline problem. We started to call it sick

How much of that is due to the expectations of helicopter parents for trophy children?

I think it is a sign of maturity to be able to force yourself to at least look like you're paying attention in certain situations,

I do this with people I don't know very well. It's nicer.

With Gregg or people I know well, I'll sometimes admit that I checked out for a bit and ask them to repeat something. It's nicer than faking that I know what they're talking about if I suddenly went on a mental foray and stopped paying attention to them.

Here is a really great article about gluten sensitivity and the brain and how they are now finding out that gluten sensitivity can and does affect people on a neurological level without showing any signs of gastrointestinal distress! This does not surprise me. Also linking gluten consumption to ADHD. I am with you on the ADHD myth as well. Ritalin is essentially speed/amphetamine as it functions on the brain in exactly the same way. Lots of research out these proving this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-david-perlmutter-md/gluten-impacts-the-brain_b_785901.html

As I've said many times, I don't consider ADHD a disorder (I just have to go along with that to get Ritalin, which helps me focus better when I write)

Wait - so it's not a disorder, but you take drugs to alleviate the symptoms? Help me understand the logic of that.

In mild forms, ADHD is a mere annoyance. In more acute instances, it is debilitating to a child's learning. I'm not saying that the diagnosis is not overused, because it is, but there are some who have a real problem, and need help.

> so it's not a disorder, but you take drugs
> to alleviate the symptoms?

Don't be priggish... That's not as logical as it sounds. Sobriety isn't a disorder, and I greatly prefer it. But I nonetheless have a glass of wine nowadays to back off an get some perspective on it.

Matters of consciousness like this aren't as rote and simple as people want them to be. Glib people often sound like they're trying to live their lives in an ROTC recruitment poster: Honor! Sobriety! Achievement! Emotional Detachment!

Robots!

"Wait - so it's not a disorder, but you take drugs to alleviate the symptoms? Help me understand the logic of that."

I can't answer for Amy but I can tell you how it works for me (I have ADD not ADHD). 75% of the time, allowing my brain free range is fine. In fact it's better than fine. My crazy spiderweb brain connects ideas from really disparate directions easily. (It feels like clicking through random wikipedia links in my head.) Hyperfocusing is also fun, I paint gaming miniatures.

But there are times when that's a real drawback. If I'm doing something monotonous at work. If I have a deadline approaching for something I'm writing. If need to *do* math instead of just explore it. That's when I pop a pill to help me focus. Truthfully it feels like cheating. I get the best of both worlds. My ineresteing brain to keep me amused and churn out ideas. And then being able to slam it down on railroad tracks to focus when I need to.

Wait - so it's not a disorder, but you take drugs to alleviate the symptoms? Help me understand the logic of that.

Being sleepy in the morning is not a disorder, yet I drink coffee to alleviate the symptoms.

Amy, I don't think ADD is a disorder either. I think it's an alternate (and in some ways superior) way that some people are wired.

I completely identify with your squirrels analogy--I've been told by several people that the way I switch subjects multiple times during any given conversation outs me as someone with ADD, so now I'm going to think of it as my squirrels all wanting their say.

I've also been told that since ephedra (which is speed) makes me calm and focused rather than jittery, well, that's also a key sign.

Been resisting actual medication though. My boyfriend is hypervigilant about his bills, and mine are automated except for rent which is easy to remember, so I have that particular problem licked ;)

Back in 1980, when I was a tenth grade bookworm with a serious lack of good grades but a vocabulary that was college level, I took a test. Some people are really big on tests, but I have never been really impressed with any except this one. It measured how abstract/concrete, linear/random your thinking patterns were. I maxed out in abstract/random, I could go from A to G and back to C in a conversation, take a left turn at Albequerque, and still arrive at he same answers my more linear classmates had. I just couldn't prove to my teachers that I had actually done the work because they couldn't follow my logic.
My kids are the same way, my 27 yr old put herself thru college on scholarships, and the 17 yr old is going to be either an artist, a writer, or a permanent fixture in my basement, the jury is still out :P

Hyperfocusing is also fun, I paint gaming miniatures.
Me too! Absolutely LOVE Reapers miniatures, especially anything sculpted by Sandra Garrity.

"Wait - so it's not a disorder, but you take drugs to alleviate the symptoms? Help me understand the logic of that."

Not a disorder per se, but certainly a different order. The funniest thing I ever herd my doc say about taking drugs for it, is that she can tell who needs and doesn't need ritalin or similar. People with ADD notice a subtle change when on it, while normal people speed. People with ADD often forget to take it until they have a good regemin, becuse they don't crave it, while normal people eventually do.

i took adderall for several years after finding out my ADD at 40. "huh, well that explains college" But I also discovered that not only did it kill my creativity, but I stopped dreaming as well. Er, yeah, this is a problem. I figured that since I had gotten through 40 years without, I would just stop taking stuff for it, because it wasn't helping so much. What I did notice was it change my sense of Time. Suddenly I was on time every place... heh, kinda wigged people out. But the downsides were too great, Including having to go to a doctro's office every damn month to get a prescription becuse of these things being controlled substances.

what happens a lot with adults who figure out undiagnosed ADD/ADHD, is that they have spent years organically making workarounds for their problems...if they made it through school OK, a stim may help, but they already have much help in place. It is GOOD to know you have an issue, though, so you can frame the understanding. People on the heavier end of ADD, need more help to make it work, and sometimes there is no good answer, or the answer is expensive. I have #1son in a private highschool now to deal with similar issues. He MAY have a slight issue with ADD, and has Aspergers too... All the IEP's and suchlike that public schools provide didn't change the fact that a teacher of 33 students couldn't really tollerate one student getting up and pacing, nor could they accept that he didn't want to be placced in groups for all the group projects they seem to do in highschool these days.

Because he spoke the truth about what you can't say. That other students didn't really like him much, but wanted to be in his group becasue he was so smart, so they could piggyback. He figured out that being gifted to those teachers meant they would pile on more work, but not let him run ahead. He went from a D student with a 135IQ, to a A student who blows the cap off the tests. ADD? hard to tell... he didn't respond too well to the ritalin and others, so I don't think it was the correct drug/maybe he doens't need it. ADD itself isn't just one thing where the magic bullet takes care of it.

Certainly he is going to have the same problems with the workworld that many of us with similar probelms have. You are expected to buckle down and get things done, be on time, be organized... It can be a nightmare. the sytems engineers at work? They hate me. They are hyper organized people. I have piles on my desk. But the smart ones know that I can reach into a given pile and pull out what I am looking for. It's not that I am disorganized, it's that my organization is totally different.

It's the interface between the worlds that is often the problem.

Interesting note on attention spans and such? Who does it disproportionately effect? Not the people who design schools and the learning process. They know how the 80% in the middle should learn, and they are willing to force everyone to that. There is a certain logic to that, since the needs of the many, blah, blah. But. Great leaps forward are not so much started by that 80%. They may be facilitated by them, refined, made workable, but they don't start it. Don't talk about Edison, as much as Nikolai Tesla. Light bulbs run on electricity, but Edison's model of Direct currentwouldn't have worked on the giga-scale we live on. It was Tesla that figured it out... and he was kinda out there.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-George Bernard Shaw

It's nicer than faking that I know what they're talking about if I suddenly went on a mental foray and stopped paying attention to them.

That's what I meant by those "certain situations." That we do sometimes have to fake it so as not to be rude, but it would be ruder to do that to someone we know. I've had to do that--tell a friend "I'm sorry, my mind was wandering, could you repeat that?" The people that know me well know it's a risk that something they say will spark my brain to go in a completely different direction than their conversation, and I have to work to backtrack.

I've found that many of us that are good at what we do (unix sysadmin) all realize that if we were in school today, we'd likely be branded with ADD or ADHD and they'd try to put us on Ritalin or something. Most of us realize that the same thing that make us ADD is likely also what allows us to multi-task in ways most people can't. I can easily sit in a meeting or on a conf call while reading email or doing other work and still hear what's going on. I can also do things like run tests to troubleshoot a problem while also doing email and listening in on a conference call at the same time.

I've actually been dinged on review in the past because people complained that I didn't stop typing to give them my full attention. Never mind that I can listen and reply to stuff while continuing to do my job. Worse is that the people who complain are the ones that only bother me with either inane questions they should already have the answers too (or should go look them up themselves) or are really just trying to get me to do their work for them.

As others have mentioned though, I can also periodically get hyper-focused on things. I've found that, especially with big scripts or programs that I find really cool or will be a big improvement for things... I can get so sucked in that it's almost scary when I finall step back from it. I can burn hours that can stretch into a few days (with some sleep mixed in). Sadly, when I start to get into that state, I find I need to stay focused to finish the idea or I can lose it. I've burned too many weekends on things that I got the idea for on Friday.

Odd.. my personal data in the last post was truncated when I previewed and I only noticed after hitting submit (of course).

Forgot to add: I rarely ever watch a movie or TV show intently. I pretty much always have my laptop (or iPad more lately) in my lap browsing/reading sites or playing games while watching something.

Interesting. I don't think I have any form of ADD or ADHD, but I do have occasional problems with generalized anxiety. Now and then I find myself in an interaction with someone that develops odd patterns like that. A former colleague and I used to complete each other's sentences, all the damn time, and without meaning to. She and I got used to it, but it drove other people nuts when they tried to follow our conversations.

Rosemary, the deal with Ritalin is what a psychologist I know calls the "paradoxical effect of stimulants". You would think that stimulants would make someone impatient and unable to focus, but on some people, it has the opposite effect -- it improves concentration. And I think this happens with a lot of people who don't think of themselves with ADD or anything like that. Even weirder: Ritalin is an effective treatment for narcolepsy. A friend of mine has problems with narcolepsy and Ritalin helps her sleep.

I will say, though, that while "short attention span" is used as an all-purpose insult these days, there is such a thing as too short. My borderline ex had an attention span measured in microseconds. She was incapable of holding a job and had a need to be entertained 24/7.

This means that I really care about what they have to say -- more than I care about looking good by seeming to have been paying attention!

Exactly! And the people I care about know this. They get that it means more that I occasionally have to ask them to repeat themselves than to fake it. If I didn't care, I wouldn't bother to ask.

I could go from A to G and back to C in a conversation, take a left turn at Albequerque, and still arrive at he same answers my more linear classmates had

Hee. I'm like that in some situations (which is why I always have to show all my steps when doing something with math). But my internal Bugs Bunny will get to Palm Springs in the end!

I've generally been pretty sure I'm not ADD, but reading the descriptions make me wonder a bit. When I work in an office, my attention goes from what I'm doing to what's going on in the office, the conversations, etc., then right back to what I'm doing. I have a hard time focusing on certain things without some noise in the background (usually music or conversations).

I learned early on that I was absent-minded and have spent some time setting up systems so I can find certain things. Like bills go at the top of one pile. And my keys only are allowed to be in a few places. Helps a lot as long as you only do this for fairly important things (so that it's not too tough to remember) and stick to it.

If I didn't do two or more things at the same time, I'd never get anything done. Adderall lets me finish one thing and go on to the next without hopping around. Far less stressful.

I have a hard time focusing on certain things without some noise in the background (usually music or conversations).

I'm that way, too. Now that I'm back in school, I have the radio going softly when I'm studying. Not so loud I can really understand lyrics, though, because that's equally distracting. Soft noise helps occupy that part of my brain, freeing up other parts for information processing. Otherwise my brain fills in the silence, which just leads to no good.

I was never diagnosed ADD, but my former counselor said it's likely I have a mild form of it. It's nothing I've needed medication for, but I do have to sometimes make conscious effort to be focused, which, counterintuitive as it may sound to others (like my mom, who can't for the life of her understand how I can study with background noise), includes not having total silence. Amy's right about the benefits, though: it's cool when my brain makes interesting leaps. Just ask me why Disney World makes me think of lawn flamingos.

Go wih classical, or some other form of insturmental music, numbersix - then you wont have to worry about lyrics

Actually, it's funny, luj, because I need the words. I've tried with some of my favorite classical music and classical stations on the radio. It's weird, but instrumental music makes me listen more. I get more engaged. I think it's like Kris said above: music with lyrics is more like background conversation to me and I can listen with one part of my brain and have the other parts I need free to focus on what I'm doing.

Chalk me up as another person that needs background music while working too. I just can't work in complete silence. I do the same with the TV when I work at home.

NumberSix, I can't sleep in a room that's too quiet. Sometimes in the winter (when we aren't using the ceiling fan at night), I have to put the fan switch on the thermostat in the "on" position, just for the white noise.

I was going to comment, but... oooh, shiny!

No. I can concentrate. But when I read, it's so loud in my head I don't hear lyrics or spoken words.