By now most of you have seen the Youtube video of the gorilla walking through a group of people passing a basketball and marveled that you missed him as he passed through the players. Don’t worry, apparently about half of the people that watch the video miss the gorilla. If you haven’t seen it you can follow this link: basketball gorilla . The mechanism at work here is called in-attentional blindness and happens to people when their cognitive capacity is stressed or with individuals with lower working memory capacity. That would be me. You can read an article about the implications here. One implication the article describes is driving and talking on the phone. Driving is an attention rich task and so is talking on the phone and you really can’t do both at the same time. Hence the reason we now have a low prohibiting it. Yeah I know you can do it. So can I. Or so I thought. Apparently one of the giveaways that you are not paying attention happens when your eyes are focused, almost unblinkingly and straight ahead, on the road in front. You don’t normally drive like that. When you drive normally, your eyes move around, scanning the area, not just in front of you, but to the sides as well and then, every so often, also check the rear and side view mirrors. The gorilla video is another nail in the coffin that people with low working memory capacity (pretty well anyone with ADHD) may think they can multi-task but actually can’t. Suffice it to say, I no longer try to do both although I do use a Bluetooth hands-free speaker even though another finding says that in terms of attentional capacity, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference whether you are holding a phone or talking hands-free.
Study co-author Jason Watson, assistant professor of psychology, said: “The potential implications are that if we are all paying attention as we are driving, some individuals may have enough extra flexibility in their attention to notice distractions that could cause accidents.”
However he went on to say, “That doesn’t mean people ought to be self-distracting by talking on a cell phone while driving — even if they have better control over their attention. Our prior research has shown that very few individuals [only 2.5 percent] are capable of handling driving and talking on a cell phone without impairment.”
A comment made in a lecture a few years ago by Umesh Jain, who heads the ADHD clinic at Center For Addiction and Mental Health here in Toronto came back to haunt me over the last couple of days. He said that the major difference between treatment for Adults with ADHD and children is that with the adults you must first deal with the self esteem issues or you won’t get anywhere with treatment. With children, he went on to say, there usually aren’t any self esteem issue. There hasn’t been time. It is a different story with adults where has been failure after failure, defeat after defeat and years of not measuring up, all leading to self condemnation and despair. This is probably the reason that I have trouble controlling my anger when I encounter people who refuse to recognize that the disorder even exists. I hesitate to say that only a person who has been through the kind of failure that a lifetime with ADHD can breed can really understand that. Someone who has been down that path can have a special empathy for another fellow traveler. Perhaps some of us have developed a mechanism that prevents us from feeling sorry for ourselves. You could say this is a part of the resiliency that comes with making it into adulthood coping with a disorder that can be so debilitating. This mechanism doesn’t prevent us from feeling sorry for another individual who is struggling, perhaps still undiagnosed.
I have been puzzled lately, by how quickly I can be moved to tears, not in public, but in the privacy of my own apartment. Any suggestion on television or on the Internet that has to do with human suffering can trigger tears. After the potential for embarrassment I do hold them back in public. It doesn’t seem appropriate for a person with a second degree black belt in karate. But I am still affected.
On the other hand there is an upside to being an adult who has ADHD. Years of failure and defeat but never giving up means you have to have developed resiliency. It means you have staying power and you can survive. If you are an adult who has just been diagnosed–this simple fact may offer hope, perhaps enough hope to help you raise your self esteem.
I did a lot of talking yesterday and at the beginning of the day I marveled at how I could find the right words talking over coffee with a friend. I went to a karate class, helped a couple of friends who were going to a grading Saturday (one black belt, the other 2nd degree black) with terminology. Then I went to the dermatologist and although I had to wait an hour and a half before I saw her, I managed to ask all the questions I needed to. Not like the last time. Then in the evening, with no dinner, I went to an event where a number of people spoke to the group, including me, more than once. The first time I needed to address three topics, briefly, and had some difficulty remembering the three while I waited to speak. When I did speak I did okay with a few rough edges but the last time I spoke to the group, about an hour later, I was quite tongue tied. I forgot a large part of what I wanted to say and what I did say was difficult with a few long pauses as I searched for the right word and then, in despair, an alternative word. I don’t think many of the attendees took any note of the problems. I did. In fact I was much more unsettled than I probably should have been. Why? I think it is because verbal skills is my strongest suit. On pych assessments I have usually scored in the gifted range. It felt almost as if that gift had been taken away from me, even though it was only briefly. I had resolved in the past not to fight it and when I get any kind of tip-off that it could happen, or might happen, I try to keep what I have to say brief, if not avoid speaking at all. I didn’t last night and probably more than anything that is what is bothering me. I had lots of warning that it might happen, even that it was starting to happen. Lots of people, especially past the age of 50, have word finding problems at one time or another. I doubt though, that they present their difficulties in front of a hundred people as I did. I think, mostly I am reminding myself, in writing this post, of my resolve to watch for the signs in the future and then cut my losses.
Any of you had this problem and if so how do you deal with it?
A new idea about why we dream was posted in Bill Klemm’s blog, thankyoubrain, yesterday. Bill is a semi-retired professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University. He says we dream because the brain becomes activated in REM sleep and that activated brains want to think and thinking while sleeping is experssed as dreams. Bill than asks why we have REM sleep at all. He cautions that it is a oversimplification but REM helps to re-boot a sleeping brain so that we can wake and be conscious. I don’t tend to remember dreams much and most that I do have seem pretty half hazard but the most vivid and the ones that seem to stick in memory are ones that I have in the morning in the hour or so before my alarm goes off. This happens even if I have awakened and fallen asleep again thinking I have more time before I have to get up so my last waking thought would be that I have to get up soon.
I had one dream about a week ago in which two people were present that I actually had to meet later in the day, one for lunch together and the other for dinner. In the portion of the dream with the person I was meeting the events were comical. Not so with the dinner partner. That portiion of the dream provided insights that were more or less absent from my waking brain, or at least had been until that dream.
My father’s mother, my grandmother, developed dementia in her 80′s, I was about 14 at the time. It was not a pretty sight. She didn’t know me, she didn’t know my father and most of the time she didn’t know where she was. She was in a Salvation Army Home For The Aged and, I might add, well looked after. I also have a vivid memory of a neighbor trying to break down our front door, with her caregiver trying sesparately to prevent her, while I cowered just inside trying to remain invisible. She was calling out to be let in and I was trying to give the impression that no one was home. This time I was about 10. I know times have changed since those times and there is better care and better medication for what we used to call senility but better still would be not to have it at all. New studies in neuroplasticity indicate that it can be avoided and, if you do get it, you might be able to overcome at least some of the symptoms. This is reported in an earlier post in the blog referring to the Nuns’ Study. This study reported, amongst other things, that nuns who showed physical symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease but no neurological symptoms had been active in teaching right up until they died. This would tend to indicate that keeping the brain active is good but engaging with other humans is even better. A post yesterday in the Huffington Post authored by Dr. Marie Pasinski, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital suggest that activites present us with new ideas and challenges and require us to adapt in new and different ways are best to keep the brain healthy. She also emphasizes eating right, particularly foods rich in antioxidants such as Omega 3′s. She suggests seeking things that ignite passion which enhances our brains ability to learn and remember. “By enriching your mind each day with new experiences and information you are building up what is called ‘cognitive reserve’. It’s like putting money in the bank–the more information you have stored over time, the more resilient your brain will become.”
My earliest impressions of dementia are from a time when there was little that could be done about it. Those impressions need to be brought forward and rexamined in light of what medicine can accomplish now. But more importantly, there is much I can accomplish now and the time to start is today. Apparently reading posts on blogs is good. Writing them is even better.