Additional Blog: The Final Frontier

The brain is an interesting thing. And it is a very interesting thing through which to analyze itself. As much time as we have spent exploring space, the deep ocean I often wonder if the real final frontier is right between our ears.

I have a bit of a vested interested in understanding the brain, mainly because I\’ve been told mine doesn\’t work right, or at least doesn\’t work normally . . . ummm more to come, when I can get it working again. haha. . . oy.

Note: It’s now four days since I wrote the above (seriously).  So, I have something to tell you. The stuff about being told my brain doesn’t work right, it’s true. Believe it or not, yours truly Georgetown grad school student that she now is, was actually not selected to be in the top 1/4th of her elementary school class to be in the gifted program. And when I say gifted, that’s kinda a joke because I grew up in rural Appalachia where the public school systems were, well, lets just say that when I graduated from high school years later– no one in the history of my high school had ever gotten into an ivy . . . EVER. But that’s beside the point, just as having an IQ score in the 98th percentile when I was 6 was also apparently beside the point. What is the point then, well the point is I have ADD.

I HAVE ADD. There, I said it.

It’s okay, go ahead pass your judgment:

A) roll your eyes

B) laugh and say, “doesn’t everybody?!”

C) attribute my “ADD” to the color of my hair

D) let go of your preconceptions and hear me out.

First,  how is ADD “officially” characterized? For the answer we turn to the psychiatrist’s bible, a book I feel I have become too intimately familiar with as I seem at one point or another to have been diagnosed with everything in it:  (DSM-IV-TR).  You are probably somewhat familiar with at least some of the characteristics i.e. restlessness, forgetfulness, impulsivity etc.  In section D) of the DSM criteria it states  “There must be clear evidence of clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.” How might this be proven you wonder? Well, in my case I was sent in for half a day’s worth of testing conducted by the Dean of William & Mary’s School of Education. That’s right, I wasn’t diagnosed until I was in college.

And the reason my ADD was caught then differs from the reason you might suspect. I first started to wonder if there was a problem second semester of my freshman year. I sat down at my desk to work on getting together to-do lists for the various committee heads from the student environmental club. All of the other students had over committed themselves and, in classic William & Mary style, were now too busy worrying about their GPAs to get organized and follow-through on anything. I was chairing Earth Week 2000, a series of over 25 different activities, and at 3PM I remember sitting down at my pc to get to work.  The next thing I knew I was looking at my monitor and it said 3AM. I had no recollection of having gotten up to go to the bathroom or eat. All I knew was I had let 12 hours slip by and still had not started to study for my mid-terms. First semester I had been ranked 32 out of a 1000 in my class. Second semester, well let’s just say I didn’t exactly make Dean’s List.

As it turns out, what I had experienced and often still struggle with is something called “hyperfocus.” Most in the field of psychiatry now agree the term “deficit” doesn’t describe ADD very well, as it is not so often a lack of it as it is an inability to control one’s attention. This inability stems from the fact that people with ADD have smaller pre-frontal cortexes, this is the area of the brain that controls executive functioning. They also typically produce slower electrical waves (yep, believe it or not but your brain is giving off measurable impulses 24/7). Hyperfocus, just like distractability, is directly linked to abnormally low levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that the brain relies on to filter stimuli and switch between tasks/certain states of mind.  In other words, people with ADD have less control over how they process things because they have less control over how their own synapse fire off. They are often attracted to high stress environments and risk taking because they rely on adrenaline to compensate for their lack of dopamine. People with ADD also fidget a lot because physical activity sets off a chain reaction of endorphins in the brain that helps activate synapse when the brain alone itself cannot. Isn’t that amazing???

When you really stop to think about “thinking” –it’s a pretty wild thing to wrap your head around. Even wilder is this, neurofeedback, which is an alternative treatment to ADD prescription medication that is built around translating your brain’s electrical waves into a computer game so you can “train” your brain to produce more useful waves –sign me up (after I pay off my student loans). Seriously though, affordable or not–the fact we are starting to understand things like this is remarkable.  I can only wonder if Moore’s Law applies to neurology . . .