The premise behind Learning

Does everyone have ADHD? Is the number of cases of people with ADHD going up? These questions came from an interesting conversation I had with a Starbucks partner yesterday In the Ina and LaCholla Starbucks.

As we talked I was able to articulate some of the ideas that I have been pondering for quite a while. To begin to answer these questions I will first use an analogy to describe the process that I believe happens in normal people, and then what it would be like from the eyes of someone with ADHD. You will notice the similarities and the differences between them, then I will use those to explain further if everyone does in fact have ADHD.

So a lawyer reads a new law for the first time. As he reads it he is using the left, logical side of his brain to interpret the meaning behind the law. The left side of his brain will begin to analyze the words and what they individually mean, then put them together in a corporate context to begin to understand what their use collectively means as a whole. Now a good lawyer will begin to use his right hemisphere, or creative side and allow his mind to wander through different cenario and applications that he might use this new law. He might wonder why this law was enacted as a clue to how to use it, what loopholes this new law creates, any number of paradigm's concerning the laws application, interpretation, or it's ambiguity. If he were introduced to this new law in a meeting, it would be quite distracting for him to have to do this and not pay attention to how the meeting was proceeding. My point with this is that the good lawyer know the balance of how much he can allow himself to think about this subject according to the appropriateness of the situation.

I will explain cycle rates, and then we will look at this same cenario with the creative knob turned up.

Cycle rate? What is that? This is a way of thinking about the balance between being logical, being creative, or simply being aware of stimulus. For a "normal" person, they look at a problem, and slowly look at it from different angles. They may read the law, and think of another law that it reminds them of. This would be the personal filter of past experience. Then once they have gone down that path for a while, and may or may not have given them any new revelation to the new law, they look at the law analyticity, is the law clearly stated or is it hazy or ambiguous. There are tons of these different perspectives that they could look at the law from, some more relevant, some less relevant. You could say they cycled through different filters that they had, to see which would apply or where appropriate.

Now lets turn the cycle rate up. As this person starts to think of the past experience of the law, before they have finished, they start looking at the wording of the new law, then they realize the old law was worded a little funky, well gee there was this one law that was really funky in wording, but that came about because of the amount of people working on the law. Maybe this new law had too many people giving input to it, Man my sock is really bothering me, maybe those people who wrote the law had socks that bothered them too, or their room was dimly lit like mine. Who, where did that come from? When the cycle rate for going through personal filters, the current stimulus is sometimes more pressing in the mind that what one was thinking about, but this could flip also. If they are driving and the physical stimulus of driving is what is important, and driving by an old building with interesting architecture passes, the driver could start thinking about architects, what kind of schooling they must go through, all that crazy math. Speaking of math, I wonder what my instantaneous velocity is at this moment, am I speeding up at an increasing rate, or am I accelerating at a constant rate? Ok, sorry to do that to you, I know it can get confusing to be thrown down random paths like that.

But what did we learn from this? "Normal" people have the same brain process as ADHD people. In fact, this ability to connect past events to our lives to help us interpret present information is vital. So is the ability to see different perspectives when approaching a problem. These are considers good skills to have. The problem arises when these skills are taken slightly farther than necessary. This cycling through logical, then creative, then sensory impute, is handy and troublesome. I would like to talk about this at some length later on, but feel it would draw me away from my topic.

As I have learned, must continue on the topic. So what were we talking about? Aha yes, everyone has this ability to cycle through different inputs, both physical and mental, and in the mental, from both sides of the brain. I will give some examples of where this is very good, and let you think about these taken to the extreme.

A good salesman has the ability to look at the customers objections from their perspective and overcome them in a way adequate to that customer. What if you looked at situations from other peoples perspective too often? Especially without ever knowing if you were able to actually see it from their perspective?

Lawyers look at the ambiguity of language to find multiple meanings in the laws, aswell as the testimony of witnesses, or even contractual agreements. What if you herd the multiple interpretations of what everyone said? And not necessarily all the time, but that was one of the things your brain cycled through?

A good chess player is able to look at tons and tons of lines of strategy to see which ones work better, but take this skill out of context and apply it to social situations, or simply a question someone asks you. This skill being a positive one in the chess setting, suddenly becomes a weakness when applied to situations where quick decisions and assessing of the situation is a must.

I will sum up what conclusions I make from all of this. ADHD is simply the natural creative ability that we all posses, simply taken to a higher thinking cycle rate. It is not even thinking faster, is is just more jumping around. And even this skill is beneficial applied to some concepts. Another way I can put the cycle rate, is that the subconscious thoughts are continually interrupting what I am consciously doing. A different perspective on this, is that the natural feedback loop in my mind is like low volume elevator music, you only hear it when it stops or something really interesting comes up. But for me the volume is turned up a little more, so I hear the thought process of my subconscious continually working, and this can be distracting. One last analogy for this. As I was talking to the Starbucks partner, she herd the incorrect grammar that she had said, and immediately corrected it. This is the internal subconscious listing to what she said and alerting her to the incorrect grammar. So we all have this subconscious voice filtering information, it is just a little louder in ADHD, but in some cases it can be much louder.

I think there was good information here. Again as usual, any comments are appreciated. If you have any other ways of thinking about these, let me know, or if there was something not quite as clear, I would love to know how to express these ideas better. The only thing not very beneficial is criticism without a way to fix it.