How often have you been asked this question: Didn’t you see the sign? It usually follows an action that illustrates quick clearly that we didn’t see the sign. It’s an interesting question from a number of standpoints. If you answer “yes” does this mean that you are obstinate or malicious? Does it mean that you saw the sign and went ahead and did what the sign indicated not to do anyway? Almost always it means that you didn’t see the sign in which case the question is unnecessary, the action illustrates that you didn’t see the sign. The more important question is really why didn’t you see the sign and that leads to some rather obvious answers. “No I didn’t see it because your door is covered in signs.”
“No I didn’t see it because I wasn’t looking at the spot where you put the sign.”
“No it is one of 2,456 signs that I didn’t see today because I have better things to do.”
For me the answer is quite often, “I have ADHD and I spend large chunks of my day being distracted.” Or if I really wanted to tell the truth, “I have ADHD and I only see things that are of interest to me. Quite obviously your sign wasn’t one of them”
The real truth is that most of us don’t see things unless we are looking for them and there is a video on youtube that is making the rounds now that really illustrates this point. There is a group of men passing around a basket ball. Voice-over asks that we count the number of times the basketball is passed amongst the players wearing white. Then the voice-over asks if we saw the moonwalking bear. The video rolls back and plays again. Sure enough there is a guy in a bear suit moonwalking through the players and he literally walks from one side of the screen to the other. The lesson–we see what we want to see. In addition, working memory has a limited capacity and we use it to focus on one thing at a time. Some people claim they can multitask and therefor do more than one thing at a time but I doubt it. There is research somewhere, I believe, that demonstrates that no one really multitasks with any efficiency. I will try to find it for a future post.
Adults with ADHD can become warn out with people who ask, “Didn’t you see the sign?” And we are probably asked that question more than most. I now rest in the comfort that most people didn’t see the gorilla and they probably won’t see the sign either. People who ask that question will probably ask that question a lot and, who knows, maybe they just like to feel smug about it and that’s why they put up the sign and then repeatedly ask people, “Didn’t you see the sign?”
Sometimes I can have some fun with it and the dialogue goes like this:
“Didn’t you see the sign?”
“What sign?”
“That sign.”
“You mean this sign?”
“Yes, that sign.”
“No I didn’t see it. Was I supposed to?”
“Of course you were supposed to. Why do you think I put it there?”
“I don’t know. Why did you put it there?”
“I put it there because I want people to (whatever the sign says).”
“Then why wouldn’t you put it where I could see it?”
“I did.”
“Well obviously you didn’t or I would have seen it.”
Try it next time. At the very least you will make the sign person angry, or hopefully embarrassed but I’ll bet you won’t be shamed by the question, “Didn’t you see the sign?”
With the new mobile phone law coming into effect in Ontario (many jurisdictions in North America already have similar laws in force) distractions while fiddling with the phones should be severely reduced but a new study shows that most of the distraction is still present while using hands-free devices. The problem has to do with working memory or rather the way it works talking to someone in the car versus someone who is not. There have been a number of studies to show you can be just as distracted while holding a mobile phone as you are using a hands-free device but a new study speculates on why this is so. Working memory may be quite taxed in a conversation and some of it needs to be freed up to cope with an emergency situation such as a road hazard. Working memory is one aspect of the human brain that has a limit on how well it will work and an earlier post on this blog suggests this is somewhere between seven and nine items–such as numbers, words or visual relationships for everyone. The study used a driving simulator while the test subjects held conversations with passengers who were in the car and with others who were not. Those who had conversations with others who were not in the car demonstrated slow reaction times in speed of braking responses and hazard avoidance. What the researchers found was that when the other party was in the car they demonstrated “conversation suppression”. In other words their speech slowed down in reaction to hazards they could see being in the car with the driver and this allowed the driver to free up working memory and shift focus to the road. Of course other parties in conversations with the driver who were not in the car demonstrated no such conversation suppression because they could not see the hazards. As an end-note the researchers say that talking to an in-car passenger might actually improve driver performance because both parties are able to see any hazard on the road that might present itself and the passenger can provide a verbal warning to the driver and even point to the hazard focusing the driver even more.
A recent study by British and German scientists found that the part of the brain usually associted wtih long-term memory may also be associated with working memory. The study focused on the hippocampus which has traditionally been thought to have a role in long-term memory, spatial memory and navigation. This is also one of the first parts of the brain to suffer in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
The study looked at patients with temporal lobe epilepsy which causes problems in the hippocampus leading to short-term memory problems. The researchers said, “The patients could not distinguish the studied images from new images after 60 minutes but performed normally after five seconds.” Professor Emrah Duzel of University College London went on to say that a striking deficit emerged even at five seconds when the subjects were asked to recall the detailed arrangements of objects within scenes in photographs.
The study concluded that there are two distinct short-term memory networks within the brain. The other one that is separate from the hippocampus remains intact in patients with hippocampus-related disorders.
Nathan Cashdollar, also from University College London said, “This is the fist functional and anatomical evidence showing which mechanisms are shared between short-term and long-term memory and which are independent.”
The findings of this study, I think, are interesting in showing that there are distinct elements to short-term memory and that they are located in different areas of the brain. When I was in Dr. Attila Turgay’s (one of the leading experts on ADHD in Canada) office last year he did three separate tests for short-term memory: verbal, numerical and spatial. It was only spatial short-term memory with which I had trouble. If indeed this function is located in a different part of the brain than either verbal or numeric working memory it does make sense that one aspect of working memory would by dysfunctional while the other two are intact.
A new study from Dr Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, suggests that using Facebook has beneficial effects on working memory while Twitter can be detrimental. She describes working memory as “the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information in short-term memory.”
Dr. Alloway, one of the leading researchers in the working memory, said that Twitter provides an endless stream of information but that it is also quite succinct so you don’t have to process the information. “Therefore,” Dr. Alloway said, “Your attention span is being reduced and you are not engaging your brain and improving neural connections”
Dr. Alloway has conducted many studies about working memory and believes that it is far more important than IQ when it comes to living in the world and that it is the real foundation for learning.
She said, “It doesn’t matter if your mother left school at 15 or got a PhD, it’s a level playing field. Not only does working memory have a profound impact on every aspect of our working lives but now there is exciting evidence that we can train it and improve it.”
A new study, that will be published in the August edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology, conducted at the University of York in the U.K. shows that stimulant medication significantly increases visuo-spatial working memory but that Cogmed Working Memory Training leads to significant improvements in all four critical measures of working memory: verbal and visuo-spatial short-term and visuo-spatial working memory. In addition the training effects were still in place when the subjects were retested six months later.
The subjects were 25 children with ADHD. The study is the latest from the team of Joni Holmes Ph.D and Susan Gathercole Ph.D who have been performing independent research examining the impact of Cogmed training on subjects with ADHD and working memory problems.