ADHD — It’s all in the hands

Posted by on April 5th, 2011 | Comments off

Can certain hand movements reveal ADHD?

Two studies, both funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and published in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Neurology, reveal that ADHD children have a greater amount of unintentional hand movement than children not labeled ADHD.

Researchers from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore performed joint research using sequential finger-tapping experiments on children with ADHD. The researchers found that ADHD children exhibited more than twice the amount of unintentional movements than typical children on one of the two tests used.

Additionally, the researchers measured cortical inhibition with magnetic pulses (transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS) and compared the results to children without ADHD.

Let’s do a little brain anatomy here to make things clearer. The cortex is a layer or sheet of neural tissue that is outermost to the cerebrum. The cortex is responsible for attention, memory, consciousness, thinking, perceptual awareness, and language. The motor cortex is a term that describes regions of the cerebral cortex. The motor cortex plays a key role in the planning, control, and execution of voluntary motor functions (like hand movement).

Cortical inhibition is a term used to describe the cortex’s ability to control these functions.  By using magnetic pulses directed across the cortex, the researchers discovered that children with ADHD were less able to inhibit their hand movements than children without ADHD. ADHD children presented unintentional hand movements about 40 percent more of the time than children without ADHD.

“We now have a real, quantifiable measure of a problem with controlling behavior in these children,” said Dr. Stewart Mostofsky, primary author of the study performed at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

“From a clinical standpoint, the critical issue is … they do have differences with these aspects of normal motor control,” Mostofsky said. “We have to recognize that and account for that in considering how to work with children with ADHD.”

Notably, ADHD children that presented the greatest inability to inhibit their hand movement usually received more severe parental reports of hyperactivity and impulsivity.

The question obviously missing is, “What is the significance of these two studies?” They do not provide any direct applications for either diagnosis or treatment of ADHD. Could any parent with an ADHD child tell the researchers that their ADHD child could not control himself like other children his age? The answer is likely a resounding, YES!

The studies do identify patterns of inhibition control. This has been documented in previous studies and is a known factor in ADHD. Could the researchers develop a diagnostic tool based on inhibition control? Yes. As a matter of fact, this type of measurement is commonly obtained in a Computerized Performance Test or “CPT.”

The CPT typically flashes a letter, number, or symbol on a computer screen. The student is tasked to press the space bar or mouse when a preselected number, letter, or symbol appears on the screen. The computer will measure how many times the student clicks correctly, incorrectly, unnecessarily, or impulsively. A wide variety of data are obtained from a CPT. Yet they can only be part of a comprehensive evaluation for evidence of ADHD as so many variables are involved that may mimic ADHD.

So, while studies like the finger tapping study are interesting, they do not provide significant insight into the field nor do they provide basis for a single method of diagnosis. One may wonder why we fund such studies given what is already known in the field.

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Training the ADHD Brain

Posted by on September 27th, 2010 | Comments off

For years, we at Play Attention, have trained thousands and thousands of people to better pay attention, learn the cognitive skills they need to succeed, and change their behavior. Our results have spoken clearly for us since 1994. Now science is catching up.

Two recent distinct studies validate the brain’s ability to change. While a vast plethora of research confirms these studies’ findings, they are noteworthy. The first study demonstrates the efficacy of skill training, and the second demonstrates how teaching skills rewires the living brain.

The first study, published in the August 25 Journal of the American Medical Association, was performed by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). They utilized cognitive behavioral therapy as a direct intervention for ADHD adults. Cognitive therapy teaches skills for managing life challenges.

The researchers at  MGH found that while medications were the first line of treatment, many patients still persist with underlying symptoms.  While previous studies on cognitive behavioral therapy for ADHD were small and short term, the researchers at MGH claim their study to be the first to conduct full-scale randomized, controlled trial of the efficiency of an individually-delivered, non-medication treatment of ADHD among adults.

“Medications are very effective in ‘turning down the volume’ on ADHD symptoms, but they do not teach people skills,” commented Steven Safren, PhD, ABPP, director of Behavioral Medicine in the MGH Department of Psychiatry, who led the study. “This study shows that a skills-based approach can help patients learn how to cope with their attention problems and better manage this significant and impairing disorder.”

“Sessions were designed specifically to meet the needs of ADHD patients and included things like starting and maintaining calendar and task list systems, breaking large tasks into manageable steps, and shaping tasks to be as long as your attention span will permit,” commented Safren, an associate professor of Psychology in the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry. “The treatment is half like taking a course and half like being in traditional psychotherapy.”

Like Play Attention has been doing since 1994, the researchers provided training sessions mainly that included skills training in filtering of distractions, organization, problem solving, and planning.

Safren’s group receiving cognitive and behavioral training demonstrated advanced control of their symptoms over their control group.  This benefit had persisted when measured three and nine months after the training.

The second study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience (August 25, 2010, 30 34 11493-11500 doi 10.1523 JNEUROSCI.1550-10.2010), examined the brains of rats when they learned to control their impulses.  The researchers documented synaptic changes in the medial prefrontal cortex. They concluded that the rat’s brains rewired themselves to produce the impulse controls necessary to be successful in the tasks the scientists had established for them.

Other past studies have confirmed that the brain will rewire to make changes for skills, impulse control, organization, etc. We’re glad that science is catching up to an learning process that we’ve done at Play Attention for sixteen years now.  That’s beyond cutting edge; it’s leading the way for others.

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What Lurks Below the ADHD Iceberg?

Posted by on February 1st, 2010 | Comments off

Virtually anyone that knows, teaches, counsels, or works with an ADHD person is aware that ADHD is not a simple matter of attention deficit. That’s just the tip of a very large iceberg.

As a matter of fact, the term ‘attention deficit’ is actually a misnomer of sorts. ADHD people have diffused attention, not a deficit or lack of attention. Ask them. I often asked ADHD students what was happening in my classroom. They could tell me about the bird outside the window, the cobwebs in the corner of the room, a little about my lesson, a little about the whispering around them, and a little about when the air conditioner was turning on and off. That’s actually a great amount of attention. It’s just scattered or diffused over a wide area all day long.

A true hallmark of ADHD is the brain’s inability to direct attention for long periods without becoming distracted. So, it’s not a deficit at all; ADHD is an inability to direct attention. But there’s more.

ADHD is also a matter of difficulty in multiple domains of cognition. These domains are also labeled “Executive Functions.” Aside from diffused attention, ADHD also encompasses difficulty in organization of thought and tasks; sustaining effort while filtering out distractions; memory (both short-term and working memory); managing behavior/emotion; and visually directing attention and actions.

How does one cope with all these areas? It seems a monumental task. Of course, the primary medical intervention is medication. Does medication actually address all of these cognitive domains? No, it does not. Medication has limitations. That’s a fact. That’s why many parents do not see academic, behavioral, or social improvements [see the MTA study] over time. Another fact is that many of these cognitive domains can be strengthened by direct instruction.

Several small and large software companies have introduced themselves recently into the brain fitness category. Each company tends to address a specific domain like memory or focus. So, to satisfy the cognitive and behavioral needs of an ADHD person, one would need to purchase many of these games.

As the original pioneer and developer back in the late 1980s,  I saw that there was a vast gap in the needs of the ADHD person and what was being delivered. By 1994, I developed Play Attention to teach sustained attention, visual tracking with attention (like watching a teacher move about the classroom), organizing and finishing tasks, memory, filtering out distractions, and motor skills. I even included behavioral shaping. Later this year we’ll deliver social skills, more working memory & short-term memory modules, and more.  We’ve received 3 patents for this pioneering effort.

Play Attention is a careful collaboration between you, the Play Attention software, and the Play Attention professional support staff. It’s provided us with a 92% satisfaction rating.

Of course, to get results, you need to use it. Next week I’ll address how Play Attention transcends being useful to being compelling.

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Driving under the influence of ADHD

Posted by on March 15th, 2008 | Comments off

The University of Virginia wished to test whether ADHD medication helps young adults while facing driving distractions.

Research suggests that ADHD drivers have a greater likelihood of having or causing an accident. Obviously, hallmarks of the ‘disorder’ are inattention, distractibility, and sometimes hyperactivity. So, when their cell phone rings and they answer, bad things tend to happen.

According to Daniel Cox, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and neurosciences at the University of Virginia Health System, as a group young ADHD drivers are two to four times more likely to have a car accident than non-ADHD drivers. Cox’ research will examine the effects of methylphenidate (MPH), a controlled-release stimulant worn as a patch, on young ADHD drivers facing real-life distractions.

This is rather clever marketing as the research is funded by Shire Pharmaceuticals, the pharmaceutical mega-giant who makes Adderall and the MPH patch. As I’ve stated before, it’s always questionable when a pharmaceutical giant funds a university study on its own medications. In this instance, it will make great marketing if the good Dr. Cox finds that young adults drive better while on meds! But, heck, since stimulant medication has the same effect on non-ADHD people, shouldn’t we all take it prior to driving? Regardless of that fact, if young ADHD people can wear a patch and drive better, that’ll sell millions of dollars worth of medicine!

The study would likely be significantly more impressive if Dr. Cox used unmedicated non-ADHD young adults and medicated non-ADHD young adults as control groups. I’d be more than eager to see those results.

Or maybe, just maybe, ADHD or not, we should put our cell phones away, put out our cigarettes, not eat in the car, put our pet in a pet carrier, and focus on driving. Shouldn’t we demand that of our ADHD teens before placing a stimulant patch on their arms? 

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Brain Study May Shed Light on Attention Disorders

Posted by on April 16th, 2007 | Comments off

New research shows it takes one part of the brain to start concentrating and another to be distracted.

This discovery could help scientists develop better treatments for attention deficit disorder .

The study, Top-down versus bottom-up control of attention in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices, performed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in of the journal Science, reveals that attention may have two forms: willful and reflexive. While this information is not new – cognitive psychologists have written about this for many years – the study finds that these two types of attention are controlled by distinct areas of the brain. Willful attention seems to be controlled by the frontal region of the brain in the prefrontal cortex while reflexive attention seems to be activated by the parietal cortex toward the back of the brain.

Put simply, if one is reading a book, then likely the prefrontal cortex is engaged in commanding attention like the conductor of an orchestra. If, while reading, a firecracker explodes nearby, your reflexive attention will activate from the parietal cortex command center shifting control away from the prefrontal cortex.

“This ability to willfully focus your attention is physically separate in the brain from distracting things grabbing your attention,” said Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Now we know these two things are separate, it raises the possibility that we can fix them independently,” Miller said.

RESEARCH

MIT’s research sheds a little more light on the subject of attention because until now researchers have examined only one region at a time. Studying both regions allows us to examine their collaborative interactions, functions, and purposes.

Miller used EEG electrodes connected to the heads of monkeys to examine the complex interplay between the prefrontal cortex and parietal regions during tests of attention and bursts of reflexive attention.

When the monkeys voluntarily concentrated, the so-called executive center in the front of the brain – the prefrontal cortex – was in charge. But when something distracting grabbed the monkeys’ attention, that signal originated in the parietal cortex, toward the back of the brain.

ADHD IMPLICATIONS

Miller concluded that once the prefrontal and parietal regions signaled each other (see my blogs on neural networks), the electrical activity in these two areas began vibrating in synchrony. However, as EEG specialists have known for quite some time, willful concentration involved lower-frequency neuron activity. Distraction occurred at higher frequencies. This again lends credence to EEG training to produce better attention.

While the study sheds a little more light on the subject of concentration, it examined only two portions of the brain. I contend that the entire brain is involved in concentration. The brain seems to work as an orchestra works. While the conductor is not in command, the players tune and rehearse each of their own will. When the conductor steps to the stage, taps his baton, all the individual players each snap to attention and begin to play in synchrony. It is a metaphor for brain function – our brains are formed of many different parts that perform jobs independently of each other. When necessary, a conductor taps his baton and attention is achieved as the individual parts work in synchrony.

For a person with an attention problem or AD/HD, the conductor is not controllable at-will unless the object of attention is highly stimulating like a three ring circus. A little attention may be sustained if the object of attention is only moderately stimulating, but the other conductor responsible for reflexive attention quickly takes command and distraction ensues.

ADHD persons don’t have at-will command over either conductor responsible for willful attention or reflexive attention. Do we know why this is so? No, it may be caused by a variety of factors. Can they be taught to control these conductors? Absolutely. The brain is very flexible and can compensate. All educational systems are built upon this foundation. So, let’s take this out of the realm of medical mystery and dysfunction. Let’s place it back in the realm where it is a skill that can be improved like any other.

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John Ratey: “Train Your Brain”

Posted by on June 20th, 2005 | Comments off

From A User’s Guide to the Brain by Dr. John J. Ratey, M.D.

…the brain is subject to the same kinds of influences and dysfunctions as other organs. Like a set of muscles, it responds to use and disuse by either growing and remaining vital or decaying, and thus, for the first time, we are learning to see mental weaknesses as physical systems in need of training and practice. The brain is a dynamic, highly sensitive yet robust system that may adapt, for better or worse, to almost any element of its environment. If we are going to set about training our brains to succeed in the world, we certainly need to learn about the various factors that can influence brain functions.

…Neural Darwinism is the theory that explains why the brain needs to be plastic, that is, able to change as our environment and experiences change. That is why we can learn in the first place, and unlearn too, and why people with brain injuries can recover lost functions. The concept also underlies two of the mantras of this book. “Neurons that fire together wire together” means that the more we repeat the same actions and thoughts–from practicing a tennis serve to memorizing multiplication tables–the more we encourage the formation of certain connections and the more fixed the neural circuits in the brain for that activity become.

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Good Morning America Features Play Attention

Posted by on June 20th, 2005 | Comments off

Play Attention was featured on the ABC News Show – Good Morning America on June 20,2005.

Some parents are trying to get their kids to refocus by using a video game.

Former teacher Peter Freer invented a concentration game called “Play Attention,” which borrows from technology and exercises developed by NASA to sharpen pilots’ focus.

To play the game, a person will put on a helmet with sensors attached to it. The goal is to use your powers of concentration to make a virtual alien rise to the top of the screen. If you get distracted, the alien will fall down the screen.

Freer says that after logging 40 to 60 hours playing the game over several weeks, children and adults showed permanent improvement in their attention spans.

“The more [you] do this, the better you’ll be able to do it at will,” Freer says.

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Are We a Nation of ‘Psuedo-ADD’ Sufferers?

Posted by on June 20th, 2005 | Comments off

Are We a Nation of ‘Psuedo-ADD’ Sufferers?

Society’s Breakneck Pace Encourages Lack of Focus, Concentration, Some Say

Americans often have hundreds of television channels to choose from, and high-speed Internet access, e-mail and personal digital assistants keeping them connected – but if you are so “connected” that you’re beginning to feel rather disconnected, you may not be alone, some mental health experts say.

We are becoming a nation of attention deficit disorder sufferers, says Dr. John Ratey, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of “Delivered from Distraction.”

“We value not spending much time thinking about one thing,” Ratey says. “These are hallmark symptoms of people with what we call pseudo-ADD.”

A Nation of Multi-Taskers

Hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents have received a clinical ADD diagnosis for an inability to focus and concentrate in school. But what about the non-medical problem of “cultural” ADD?

Being able to multi-task effectively is a prized quality in our society. Take Eileen O’Connor, a former ABC News producer and now a wife, mother of five, law student and non-profit executive. She feels like being able to multi-task is the only way to cram all she needs to do into her hectic days.

“I would go to class, listen to the lecture and on one [computer] screen be taking notes,” O’Connor says. “And on another screen, I was on my e-mail, actually e-mailing [my kids] or people in the office.”

But Ratey argues that multi-tasking is not as efficient as we might think.

“The brain is not riveted, it’s not focused,” he says. “You’re seeing a lot more noise in the brain. You’re using more of your brain to try and pay attention.”

One recent study showed that workers don’t spend more than three minutes on any given task, and they’re usually interrupted every two minutes.

Other research said it takes a person 50 percent longer to complete two tasks done simultaneously than if they were done separately.

In other words, asking your brain to keep hitting pause and play doesn’t save time.

Kids in Overdrive

Even busy, supercharged moms like O’Connor worry about kids growing up in overdrive, trying to do a million things at once – even homework.

Jim Steyer is the chief executive officer and founder of Common Sense Media, a non-profit group that encourages family-friendly entertainment. He says Americans are raising a generation of media-saturated kids.

In fact, the latest figures show kids spend 8½ hours a day using different kinds of media – from television to computers to video games.

“They’re spending too many hours in front of the screen – either a TV screen or a computer screen – and it does contribute in some ways to attention deficit disorder,” Steyer said.

Video Game Helps Concentration

Some parents are trying to get their kids to refocus by using a video game.

Former teacher Peter Freer invented a concentration game called “Play Attention,” which borrows from technology and exercises developed by NASA to sharpen pilots’ focus.

To play the game, a person will put on a helmet with sensors attached to it. The goal is to use your powers of concentration to make a virtual alien rise to the top of the screen. If you get distracted, the alien will fall down the screen.

Freer says that after logging 40 to 60 hours playing the game over several weeks, children and adults showed permanent improvement in their attention spans.

“The more [you] do this, the better you’ll be able to do it at will,” Freer says.

But do you really need a video game to improve concentration? O’Connor and her family are determined to slow down a bit and enjoy the simpler things.

“A typical day is nuts,” O’Connor said. “But then there are times when we say, ‘Whoa, we just gotta stop here.’ We do stop with a family dinner, and I think that sort of brings us back to reality.”

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Children and Cognitive Overload

Posted by on April 14th, 2005 | Comments off

As Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we are in an age where we are inundated with information. Postman states that the average Sunday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a person in the 1700s got in a lifetime.

Now, The Seattle times reports We’re shooting through technological rapids that have opened doors and changed the dynamic of work, how we communicate and live, and sometimes even think. All these tools have made our lives easier in many ways. But they’re also stirring deep unease. Some are concerned that the need for speed is shrinking our attention spans, prompting our search for answers to take the mile-wide-but-inch-deep route and settling us into a rhythm of constant interruption in which deadlines are relentless and tasks are never quite finished.

Scientists call this phenomenon “cognitive overload,” and say it encompasses the modern-day angst of stress, multitasking, distraction and data flurries.

In fact, multitasking — a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once — has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential. This is such a topic of study that it has sprouted a number of terms, from “online compulsive disorder” to “data smog.” Two Harvard professors see evidence of what they call “pseudo-attention deficit disorder” — shorter attention spans influenced by technology and the constant waves of information washing over us. When the brain gets excited over some rapid data and is stimulated, it releases a “dopamine squirt,” they say.

WE ARE WHAT WE THINK “We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before,” says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder. “I think that’s why we’re seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death.”

This is of particular interest when it comes to children who have grown up in the fast lane where Web pages that take more than five seconds to load are considered lame. Is the speed and ease compromising their attention spans? Their perspective? Their humanity? Even their work ethic? Or are we just threatened that they will lap us old fogies?

Little is understood about the Information Age’s effect on this generation, but it is a burgeoning area of research. Ratey wonders if kids would read “The Red Badge of Courage” to complete their homework or simply comb the Internet for essays explaining it all for them.

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Children Today: Multi-tasking or Multi-distracted?

Posted by on April 13th, 2005 | Comments off

In my interviews with thousands of people that I’ve met at conferences and seminars, I’ve found one underlying current especially relevant to the pace of life right now: most of us feel overwhelmed. We are exposed to information from cell phones, faxes, email, TV, radio, pagers, PDAs, print media, computers, the Internet, etc. This constant bombardment results in a feeling of information overload. It’s probably the brain’s natural response to being inundated by information non-related to its survival as most of the information transmitted to us is fairly useless; it’s throw-away, disposable information. Most people I’ve interviewed say that they cannot even recall what they received in their email or heard on the news the previous week. Throw away, disposable information.

According to USA Today in an article entitled, “So much media, so little attention span“, children that are exposed to 8½ hours of TV, video games, computers and other media a day — often at once — may be losing the ability to concentrate. The article questions, “Are their developing brains becoming hard-wired to “multi-task lite” rather than learn the focused critical thinking needed for a democracy?

These troubling questions are raised by a Kaiser Family Foundation media study this month, says educational psychologist David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family, a Minneapolis non-profit. Even more troubling is the answer: We don’t know, Walsh and other experts in the field say.”

As I noted previously, adults feel inundated by information. Children respond differently. School psychologists and teachers typically report that children have a more difficult time attending now than every before. Children have a more difficult time staying still and listening if the presentation is not highly entertaining.

“The problem intensifies after third grade, when harder course work requires children to concentrate, adds Susan Ratteree, who supervises other public-school psychologists in suburban New Orleans. Diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) “have gone through the roof,” she says. Though the disorder is more recognized these days, children seem to be different too, “and many teachers think the fast-paced media is having an effect.”

Children are more attuned to distractions around them. “They attend to everything — the air vents creaking, someone talking. They bounce from task to task. Teachers here say kids have more trouble getting organized, and their attention spans are not as good as they used to be,” says school psychologist Tamara Waters-Wheeler of the Bismarck-Mandan, N.D., public schools.

Studies with college students and adults show that the brain doesn’t work as well when it focuses on more than one task, Walsh says. If the challenge demands a lot of attention, mental performance is particularly poor. But he says there are no such studies on today’s kids as they multi-task with new media — instant- messaging, plugged into an iPod and doing homework at the same time.”

Science Daily from a study that appeared in the May 13, 1999, issue of the journal Nature(1), relates multitasking behaviors to the prefrontal cortex. “Investigators have mapped a region of the brain responsible for a certain kind of multitasking behavior, the uniquely human ability to perform several separate tasks consecutively while keeping the goals of each task in mind. Using imaging technology, scientists from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) found that a specific type of multitasking behavior, called branching, can be mapped to a certain region of the brain that is especially well developed in humans compared to other primates.”

“The results of this study suggest that the anterior prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is most developed in humans, mediates the ability to depart temporarily from a main task in order to explore alternative tasks before returning to the main task at the departed point,” says Jordan Grafman, Ph.D., Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the NINDS and a co-author of the study.

“We believe that this finding is important because branching processes appear to play a key role in human cognition,” says Etienne Koechlin, Ph.D., also of the NINDS Cognitive Neuroscience Section and a co-author of the study. “In everyday life, we often need to interrupt an ongoing task to respond to external events and we all experience how demanding it is to react to these events while keeping our minds on the original task.”

According to previous studies, humans may be the only species capable of performing branching, which involves keeping a goal in mind over time (working memory) while at the same time being able to change focus among tasks (attentional resource allocation). For example, people who are interrupted by a phone call while reading must be able to keep in mind the memory of what they were reading just before talking on the phone. Once the phone call is over, they should be able to return to the last sentence read and continue reading.”

Almost everyone shifts attention from one task to the next during a normal day. ADHD people shift attention more so than others, but have lesser ability to focus for very long on mundane or ordinary levels of stimulation.

It is important to put the following question: how much can we shift our attention before the tasks at hand do not get completed or begin to suffer in performance. Given our differences as a species, this will likely vary among the population and the complexity of the tasks.

Recent research issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society,>indicates that our brains weren’t made to multitask. A splendid example is driving while speaking on a cell phone. Some states have outlawed this behavior due to increased accident rates. It seems that we are far too distracted to focus on driving if we’re talking or dialing.

The researchers explain the multi-tasking/distracting phenomenon using two terms: “passive queuing” and “active monitoring.” Passive queuing implies that new incoming information has to line up for a chance at being processed – a queue – just as you wait in a queue in the doctor’s office. A focal point in the brain receives and processes the information one piece at a time.

Active monitoring (people who swear they can multi-task) suggests that the brain can process two things at once – it just needs to use a complicated mechanism to keep the two processes separate.

Researchers from MIT think that the brain works by passive queuing, the non-multi- tasking approach. “…in a study to be published in the June issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, [researchers] examined the brain activity involved in multitasking. They gave people two simple tasks. Task one was identifying shapes, and for some subjects, task two was identifying letters, for others it was identifying colors. The subjects were forced to switch from one task to the other in either one and a half seconds or one tenth of a second. When they had to switch faster, subjects would take as much as twice as long to respond than when switching more slowly.

Using MRI technology, Jiang, Saxe and Kanwisher examined subjects’ brain activity while performing these tasks. They observed no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished.”

It is logical to ask then, if we expose ourselves to enough high-input stimulation (media, computers, cell phones, etc.) will this rewire the brain to accommodate the input? The USA Today article suggests that some research on media-exposure “suggests that children’s brains might be changing so they can juggle and concentrate better than their elders.

Scores on intelligence tests have been steadily rising since the 1940s, says University of Utah neuropsychologist Sam Goldstein. The tests measure a child’s ability to shift and divide attention, but they also cover problem-solving and comprehension skills. “They’re smarter,” Goldstein says.

Another germane fact: In the Kaiser study, computer use and TV didn’t seem to affect grades, but more time playing video games and less time reading were linked to poorer grades. About half of kids have a video game player in their rooms; more than two-thirds have TV sets.

Violent video games and TV have been shown to encourage aggressive behavior, says Michael Rich, a Harvard pediatrician and director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. Also, the more TV watched, the more overweight a kid is likely to be, he says.”

Although no long-term research has been performed to verify brain changes, it is widely accepted that the brain changes due to the external environment (neuroplasticity). Therefore, it makes perfect sense that all initial indications point to the fact that we are changing as a species due to our technology.

Is our change for the better or worse? If the answer is related to driving and speaking on a cell phone, the answer is obviously worse. If it’s related increased IQ scores it’s for the better.

Still, the fact that children want to be entertained more now than ever before, the fact that they have a more difficult time sitting still and listening, the fact that they cannot pay attention to something as simple and beautiful as a flower because “it’s boring” is most disturbing. Proponents of the technology evolution/revolution propose that children can now learn faster and must have more stimulating input. It’s difficult to argue against that. However, there exists a fine line between entertainment and education. Our finest discoveries have come from carefully examining the nuances of relationships, cells, atoms, and the cosmos. I would maintain that our survival as a species depends on our ability to fathom the great subtleties of life. This is not discovered through high stimulation, but by a careful, quiet examination of the world around us.

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