My visit only lasted a few minutes and the medical part of it was over before I knew it.  He concurred with the medication I was taking and with dosages and schedules.  Then he quizzed me on my background and interests, as it turned out, to see if I might be of service to the ADD/ADHD community.  It wasn’t his suggestion but this meeting was one of the reasons I started this blog.  I heard him speak on a couple of times and my appointment with him two years ago only lasted perhaps 20 minutes but I will miss him.  Not only was he a great resource to the ADD/ADHD community he was, in my experience, a kind and caring individual.

It was on reading his obituary and remembering his visual/non-verbal working memory test that led to a mini-ah ha moment.  I had always marveled that one of the profound and noticeable effects of even a small dose of ritalin would lead to a great improvement in my hand-writing.  I’m no expert but I would bet that there is a large component of visual/non-verbal working memory skill in handwriting.

I had come to the conclusion that my ADD was getting worse and I had lost the ability to read long-form narratives. Having read about about a new book, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains I’m now not so sure about the ADD being the culprit.   Author Nicholas Carr says that the Internet has changed our brains to the the point where we can’t concentrate on most deep-thinking tasks without seeking distractions.  See The Glove and Mail website here for more about Carr’s thesis.

I feel a bit vindicated that the problem may be our modern world and not the disorder I thought I had wrestled into some form of manageability.  One thing I do know, as I am now in the middle of the third novel this year, is that things started to change two years ago. Why then?  I was making frequent trips to a lodge in Algonquin Park where the only distractions were the forest, the other guests, the animals, the odd canoe and some of the best cooking I have ever tasted.  I did take up my notebook computer and once every evening I would watch a DVD on it. Most of the rest of the time I read novels. I knocked off about four that summer and although I only went up half the time last summer I completed a couple more.  Two summers ago those novels were the first I had read to completion in more than a decade. With no distractions it seemed my brain was content to revert to a state where it didn’t require new and novel distractions every couple of minutes.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not complaining and I don’t think the Internet is the end of the world as we know it. I’m just observing. I’m also aware of a quote from Canada’s premier literary critic Northrup Frye who said,”The book is the most technologically advanced communications medium ever invented because it moves at precisely the speed of the reader.”  Frye died before the Internet reached its current level of penetration into our lives. I wonder if he would agree with those words today.

Carr says that long-form narratives are not the way our brains have always worked.  To the contrary, according to him we are programed to be easily distracted.  He goes on to say that gathering information from Google or other methods on the Internet, take in information from many different sources at a fairly shallow level and the information never makes the transition in our brains from short-term memory to long-term.  With print there are no distractions and we get much more information more deeply into the brain and thus into long-term memory.  That information can then connect in our brains to other information, other material we have read, or even with our own experience.  Using the Internet  information is held and manipulated mostly in short-term or working memory but then it is gone or is not available to connect with our own experience or learning.  In other words, I guess, we don’t learn at depth.

When asked how he managed to keep from being distracted enough to write the book, Carr said it took him two weeks before he could overcome the panic of not checking his email or other activities on his computer.

What’s my point? Well it comes back to the up side and the down side of neuroplasticity again. If you think reading long-form narratives is a good thing then the Internet can change your brain for the worse.  The up side is that you can change back if circumstances, or desires, warrant it.

I found that, with a little practice, I could put such an occurrence aside and move on with life most of the time. It echoed Abraham Lincoln’s comment that most people are about as happy as they choose to be. The promise of neuroplasticity is that your can exercise some control over what your brain does. Now that’s not to say that it is easy. It isn’t but it is possible. The promise too is that not only can you change your brain you can change it by yourself.

Last winter, one 20 degrees-below-zero night, I was on my way to meet some people and, after driving a few blocks in my car, it started to run, roughly, on three cylinders with a lot of noise and smoke. I immediately drove home parked it and called the friend I was supposed to pick up at her home to say I couldn’t make it. She said she wanted to see the movie we and our friends had planned to see and was going to go anyway–on public transit. To my own amusement, I found myself feeling disappointed that she wasn’t going to just spend the evening at home as I thought I was about to do. As I was on the phone, talking to her, standing on the street, my local bus appeared in the distance, headed to a stop right where I was standing. I thought of Brendan, and how I had resolved not to have a day ruined by just the sort of occurrence I was experiencing. I told my friend I would meet her at the theatre and got on the bus and turned my attention to how I would complete the journey; meet up with her and our friends. It was magic. It worked and really wasn’t that difficult. After the movie our friends drove us home. We had seen the film we had intended to see, spent time with good company and the only bump in all of this was that my car still didn’t work.

Arriving home I typed the symptoms of what the car was doing into Google, fearing that it was something really expensive, my head now back into the problem and what I got back was that the symptoms matched that of a part that I had received a recall letter for but hadn’t got around to attending to.

The next day I called my auto service and had the car towed to the dealership and a few hours later they called to say the part was repaired under the recall as I had suspected. They even came, picked me up and drove me to the dealership to retrieve my car.

I try to remember this not just when my car won’t start or run right but whenever there is any kind of glitch in my plans and try to ask myself the question, “Do I want to deal with the problem the best I can and get on with my day?” Life’s too short, as they say. But more importantly, I know I have it within me to change the way I react to such event. A good friend once asked me the question: “How many of the things you have worried about have actually happened?”

The humorous answer is: “Hardly any of them and so I guess worrying about them has a positive effect.” But the true answer is just the first part of that statement…hardly any of them. How upset would I have been about my car breaking down had I known how easily it would be dealt with? Not much. I’m at a point in my life where I can see the end of it and how I spent that time is incredibly important. I want that time to be filled with moments with my friends enjoying mutual interests not stuck at home brooding about a broken car.

It seems that there is another community in New Jersey where, in the 1920’s, the community leaders decided to design the town to be car friendly.  There were no traffic engineers back then (there was hardly any traffic) and so the idea was turned over to, well ordinary engineers.  They went about building a system that mimicked the flow of water and in hydraulics, if you want the water to flow nicely, yoiu remove any obstacles that might slow it down.  You know–things such as cyclists, animals or people.  Hence the idea of sidewalks elevated just a bit above the roadway where the pedestrians could carry on whatever they wanted to: walking, sitting, eating along with their dogs and whatever other encumbrances they might want but where it would not hinder the progress of automobiles and trucks.  Of course, at certain points these pedestrians might want to get to the other side and since they were tax-payers you had to at least pretend to accommodate them, traffics signals were developed to allow them across the streets (quickly) and then the cars could go back to racing on to their various destinations unimpeded.

In Drachten, the only accommodation to making a change in direction whether you are a driver, a cyclist or a pedestrian, is a roundabout in the middle of town.  Cars must enter from the left but cyclists and pedestrians can enter wherever they want.  It would be chaos right?  Well that’s the point.  Since it is chaotic drivers tend to be more mindful and to drive more cautiously.  I have a number of friends who are fire-fighters.  They  hate speed bumps.  Some of them are paramedics and they tell of back injuries made worse by speed-bumps.  Studies now show that speed-bumps actually cause drivers to speed up, almost as if they were making up the time lost going over the bumps.  So why do homeowners still insist on having them installed on their streets?  Because intuitively they understand that the bumps will slow traffic even if they don’t.

Why is this discussion taking place in a blog that is primarily about neuroplasticity?  For one thing if you want to get your brain to change a habit, you must first get it to break the routine, to know what it is you want to accomplish.  Vision is absolutely essential to changing habit.  So is perseverance and so is thinking it through with all the facts you can find.  But there is another reason I have written about this.  I don’t like control freaks.  I particularly don’t like control freaks that haven’t thought it through where the issue is not getting you to do something differently but getting you to do it there way.  And then were are back to neuroplasticity again because almost everything we know about this topic has been discovered in the last ten years, where most of the knowledge in this fields is still undiscovered, we must question everything.  This consumes both time and energy and beyond that…it is just hard.  But if you want to change, successfully, you have to do it just as the people in Drachten had to do it.  But if you do do it, the results might just amaze you.

Now, I know that there are a lot of treatments out there they looked like quackery even a few decades ago that utilize neuroplasticity to effect cures, or at least relief, for ailments that were thought to be permanent.  Why am I writing about this in this post on this blog?  The Mozart effect did not really go anywhere and I’m sure that almost no one now remembers Alfred Tomatis.  The Listening Centre in Toronto fell on hard times, could not pay their rent and closed.  One of the practitioners took up another career while the other followed some interest in the method to Mexico where there was a supportive clientele.  But these days I read daily about miracles involving neuroplasticity. There are people blinded by strokes who can see again, Alzheimer’s patients that have no neurological symptoms, schizophrenics who improve their working memory and become symptom free.  We are on the frontier of many great discoveries but to get there we might have to put away our skepticism and allow ourselves to experience awe and wonder without the dash of skepticism so many of us have developed as adults to prevent disappointment in chasing down blind channels or after miraculous cures.  I say us and I mean me and if I write it hear perhaps I will be a little more likely to follow the advice of Herbert Spencer who wrote:  “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance–that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

I replied that I was okay with it and then she began to tell me this was not an isolated incident and about how frustrated and defeated she felt. I asked if she had considered an assessment. (Shouldn’t everybody?) She said she wanted to but her husband insisted it was just a phase and that she was just like any othen child of her age.   She seemed to be without hope and then suddenly the two returned and I turned back to my meal with a new perspective on what was actually going on and the drama of what had been to me, just minutes before, just an annoyance.  I left the restaurant much saddened and perhaps a bit ashamed of my inital reaction.  I’ve thought often of that day and that sad woman and how utterly without hope she seemed and wondered how many of the situations that annoy me at the time have a similar kind of back story. In my last post I wrote of the artist getting his paintings blown around by the wind, to his annoyance and then giving up trying to control the situation and going to the beach where he welcomed the same wind as a cooling breeze.

I get angry far more than I’m comfortable with but, as best I can, I now try to pause and ask myself some questions. Is my brain trying to wake me up? Do I have all the facts? And perhaps the most important question, do I really want to feel this way? Most of the time I don’t want to be angry but occasionally I let it spin out a little and then die of it’s own lack of inertia and try to return my brain to a more beneficial state.  If it isn’t late at night, when I should be in bed, and my brain is trying to wake itself up, I ask if there is a better way to accomplish that.  Can I go for a workout or even a walk?  Am I hungry?  Have I taken on too much that day?  Do I need a nap?

Today I went to buy a lock that immobilizes the scooter when it is parked.  The sales guy said to me, “Don’t lose the key.  We’ll have to take a cutting torch to it to get it off.”

I replied, “I’m going to lose the key I have ADHD.”

He said, without a pause, “That’s why some people buy a third key.”

Most of the time I think I’m the only one (plus a few of my friends) who loses things like keys and directions and receipts.  Hell I even lost the ownership certificate on the way back from registering the scooter this morning.  The truth is I lose a lot of things but wallets and keys I don’t (touch wood).  I use a trick I learned many years ago to always leave them in the same place.  My wallet is only ever in two places.  One is in my pocket and the other is on my bedroom dresser top.  Same with the keys. Oh I have occasionally left my wallet on a counter top while paying for somethings but I’ve been lucky.  Either the clerk found it and hurried after me or I’ve noticed before I got to far away.  Once or twice I’ve left my keys in the lock in the door after opening it and noticed they weren’t in my pocket (or on my dresser ) and gone to look at the door.

My worry now is that I have put the scooter key and the lock key on one ring that is different from the one I use for all the rest of the keys.  The reason is that I don’t want the whole bunch of them dangling together hanging from the scooter ignition.  I am worried but I plan to follow the same rules although it will mean having two sets of keys in my pocket or on the top of my dresser.  I do know that I won’t have to worry about leaving them in the door.