Edward Hallowell on Ferraris

ADD stands for Attention Deficit Disorder. Toss in an H for ADHD and you have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I would guess that the majority of people diagnosed with either ADD or ADHD probably hone in on the word “disorder”, as in something is out of order compared to what it normally should be.

Edward Hallowell, at November’s Learning and the Brain conference, spoke about the UP side of ADD. He began by noting that ADD is often painted in a negative light, and that the medical model looks at the pathology of the situation, leading to an “evaluation that tells you how defective you are.” He went on to say that “the model creates the problem/disability of shame, fear and being unsuccessful.”

I don’t think he meant to imply there isn’t a problem, just that the problem is in the misunderstanding of ADD. He shared the eyeglass story, which I have heard before. Do we tell people who are nearsighted to simply squint harder (which is the equivalent of telling a person who is struggling with learning to work harder). Of course we don’t; we tell them to get a pair of glasses. Imagine how a child who has difficulty sitting still or focusing feels when they are told they should work harder. (Just what does it mean to “work harder” – work with more difficulty, work more laboriously?)

Hallowell approaches ADD from a strength-based model, much like Sally Shaywitz views Dyslexia as being surrounded by a sea of strengths. He tells kids that they have a “Ferrari engine for a brain” but “with bicycle brakes” – the mechanism for revving up and getting going simply  does not match the mechanism for slowing down and stopping. How to take advantage of this?

Creativity is impulsivity gone right!

Hallowell noted other benefits that come with ADHD.

• Distractibility is helpful to let you step aside and then return to the topic. (Remember the last time you got stuck trying to come up with a solution that seemed elusive?)
• Hyperactivity provides energy as you get older. (Anyone out there who would like an energy boost on a regular basis, and one that comes from yourself rather than a cup of coffee?)

Ultimately, Hallowell suggests doing what you are good at, what you like, and what adds value (to a community and by earning you a salary). Ideally, he says, “try to spend your time at the intersection of these three”, which is not unlike the suggestions made by Ken Robinson or Mel Levine.

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Happy Birthday R one week from today!

Edward Hallowell on ADD or Modern Life – which is it?

The feeling of being connected to something is the “single most important precursor to happiness and health.”

So said Edward Hallowell in his November Learning & the Brain talk, Crazy Busy. He went on to draw lines between our need for connecting and our using modern technology to facilitate that connecting. While we may, indeed, be chatting more, he noted that our face-to-face time and the quality of our connections are likely suffering because the technology lets us “live at a distance” while encouraging brief communiqués, thus fostering a “breadth over depth” mentality.

The result is lots of quick interactions that take place via texting, emails, and social networking tools. (Curiously, he did not mention video chatting and its potential benefits, which I think provides ample opportunity for long conversations while seeing who you are talking with. We had hour long conversations with our son when he lived in Japan and, more recently, in Olympia, WA., and always ended with a virtual family hug. )

Hallowell made the case that the fast-paced use of technology for connecting with others leads to people who are busy and have shorter attention spans, which causes them to make impulsive decisions. This approach of paying “continuous partial attention” to many inputs creates behavior that mimics ADD: impulsivity, hyperactivity, and decreased attention spans. This begs the question: “Is it ADD or a severe case of modern life?”  The answer: “Take the Vermont Test” – “environmentally induced” behavior is a severe case of modern life; genetically influenced behavior is a case of ADD.

Next post: Hallowell’s prescription, and the UP side of ADD

JK Rowling at Harvard

Sunday evening my husband found JK Rowling’s Harvard graduation talk, given in June 2008. I am a Harry Potter fan, but that is surely not a prerequisite for appreciating the humor and insights that Rowling shares.

Part 1

Part 2

Edward Hallowell on Crazy Busy

I first heard of Edward Hallowell a year ago, when reading John Ratey’s book SPARK. Ratey and Hallowell collaborated on books about ADHD, and I eventually purchased one of them, Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping With Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adolescence. At least, to the best of my memory, that was the book. I never actually read the book, due to a purely emotional response that prevented me from going any further after scanning the text. Somewhere in the last third of the book I stumbled upon mention of our local high school and stopped to read about Hallowell’s experience with some of the personnel and programs at the school. His description did not jive with what I knew of the school, and this colored my sensibilities to the point where I gave the book away to a student who was researching the subject. That was the end of my association with Edward Hallowell until encountering him at last November’s Learning and the Brain conference.

Hallowell kicked off the morning series of keynotes with an engaging talk, Crazy Busy: Dealing with an Overstretched, Overbooked, Distracted Life. A prolific author, in 2007 he had published a book with a similar name, Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life. I have not read this book, but suspect that Hallowell’s talk mirrored much of the book. It was just Ed and the audience, no slides, just a comfortable presenter and lively story teller. His authenticity was never in doubt, as in addition to his professional credentials, Edward Hallowell has ADD and dyslexia. He knows of what he speaks.

Lingering is a dying art

Modern life poses a number of challenges, among them dealing with the variety and quantity of information that comes galloping towards us on a daily basis. If we set ourselves the task of managing all of this input, then we will have difficulty finding the time to relax and linger. Hallowell went on to note that we become “victims of our own enthusiasm”, of which we may have infinite quantities, but which is balanced by finite quantities of energy. At this point he had me thinking of the lyrics to an old camp song:

Mmm Mmm, I want to linger
Mmm Mmm, a little longer
Mmm Mmm a little longer with you

As with many of the conference’s keynoters, Hallowell talked a bit about the myth of multitasking, which he said we do as a way to deal with all of that information overload. Well, we think we are multitasking, but we are really just switching quickly between each task, and the result is that we wind up doing none of them particularly well. He cautioned that “if any one of the tasks is cognitively demanding” we should not, and probably do not, multitask.

No multitasking with this post, or rather, no multi-messaging. I will stop here and let you linger on the thoughts, and return in a few days to reconnect, which is what Hallowell next spoke about – connections.

Contemplate Conferences = Chase away winter blues!

CAPE COD INSTITUTE

While doing some research about Edward Hallowell (topic of my next post), I was directed to the Cape Cod Institute, located in Eastham, Massachusetts. Thirty-one years this institute has been around, and for almost all of those years I’ve been just a few miles away for part of each summer, yet the institute and I never crossed paths. Am tickled to have now discovered it!

The Institute consists of 27 courses, each running for a week and spread out over the course of the summer from June 21 to August 27. The courses are “for mental health and management professionals”, though they seem to attract educators and others in related professions.

ALBUQUERQUE ACADEMY – Brain Research: Learning & Applications, the 2010 Brain Institute

An email from Lisa, the conference coordinator, reminded me of this institute, presented by Greenleaf Learning and entering its fourth summer in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I wrote about this conference just about a year ago; definitely no accident that right about mid-winter the thought of summer conferences comes to mind! I have also written extensively about Bob Greenleaf, who is presenting three other brain and learning institutes in 2010.

The Albuquerque Brain and Learning Institute is particularly notable to me because a number of the presentations will be focusing on the impact of our digital lives on our developing brains. This is similar to the topic of last November’s Learning & the Brain conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thus, it is not surprising that some of the presenters straddle both the institute and the conference.

Of the three keynoters scheduled for Albuquerque, I am familiar with two of them, having heard David Eagleman at the 2008 CAIS Brain, Learning and Applications Institute, which is another of the conferences presented by Greenleaf. Marilee Sprenger is the other keynoter whose name resonates. I am a huge fan of her books and have been wanting to see her in person for years.

Good for the body, good for the brain, good for the planet

Michael Pollan talked passionately at PopTech 2009 about helping the environment and feeding our bodies: we help sustain the earth, and the food we harvest can help sustain us!

Eat Food ~ Not too much ~ Mostly plants

grow gardens ~ home cook meals ~ eat with people

Dan Buettner, National Geographic writer and explorer, talks about the “Blue Zones” in the world, places where people are healthily living into their hundreds. What’s their secret? What are the commonalities between each of these geographically disparate communities (Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Okinawa, Japan; and Loma Linda, United States)?

Move Naturally

Right Outlook:  Downshift ~ Purpose Now

Eat Wisely:  Wine @5 ~ Plant Slant ~ 80% Rule

Connect:  Loved Ones First ~ Belong ~ Right Tribe

[UPDATE: February 2, 2010 – The 6th grade Science teacher at my school quite enjoyed Dan's talk. Turns out the teacher has been referencing the "Blue Zones" with his classes, and they have followed Dan and his team of researchers as they visited Italy and Greece in 2007. This teacher pointed me to The Longevity Game. While this is a PR device for an insurance company, playing the game does get you to stop and think about your lifestyle and how it impacts your health.]

Keeping the juices flowing

I’ve been doing a lot of off computer thinking since my Dad died this summer; luckily, blogs cannot sue for neglect. With another new year just days away, I wanted to thank those of you who have visited and those of you who have left your imprint in comments. The brain image came from my son’s girlfriend’s Facebook page. I suppose it can be interpreted any number of ways, including mine: For 2010, let’s keep our juices flowing!

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My Dad was an entrepreneur. While he was alive, it never occurred to me to describe him as such, but I’ve been thinking about him – his birthday was December 19 – and thinking about the future.

My Dad embraced life with zest and humor and determination. He was born in 1925 and saw his father’s Studebaker dealership decimated by the Depression of the 1930s. It decimated his father, as well, the accumulated stress, slight paunch, and cigar smokes felling him with a heart attack at the age of 52. (Cigars were a family business on my grandmother’s side, and she even had one named for her.)

My Dad ran a mutual fund for a number of years while also managing a small accounting practice and being CFO of a major appliance chain. He was a CPA (certified public accountant) and lawyer, specializing in tax law. Starting a mutual fund and small accounting practice both surely fall in the category of entrepreneur. Motivated by the Depression, and being in the army during World War II, I think my Dad just figured you make your own opportunities and you work assiduously to provide for yourself and your family. I think he would smile to hear me describe him as an entrepreneur. And perhaps he would smile to know that, as I think about the future, the idea of being an entrepreneur is crossing my mind.

Brain Power from the New York Times

Throughout 2009 the New York Times published a series of six articles that discussed the latest findings in brain research. Here they are, starting with the most recent.

• Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them – explains how our brains learn math. It turns out there are optimal developmental times and methods for introducing our brains to math, and they aren’t when/what you might have expected.  The following comment got me thinking about when and how we teach reading:

A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds. Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

The process may take longer to develop than many assume. A study published in March by neuroscientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands suggested that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sound until about age 11.

• Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk – talks about psychosurgery and its impact on those with O.C.D. (obsessive compulsive disorder). To paraphrase Shakespeare: To intervene via surgery or not to intervene via surgery. That is the question.

• After Injury, Fighting to Regain a Sense of Self – reminded me of anecdotes shared by V.S. Ramachandran in his book Phantoms in the Brain (probably THE book that pulled me in to the world of our brains). Essentially, injury can cause the brain to play some cruel tricks on itself, including fiddling with one’s sense of self. Is there a spot in our brains that defines who we are?

• In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable –  Call it intuition, a hunch, a feeling in your gut, but most likely you’ve experienced that sensation where you just “know” something to be so. While this article discusses the sensing of danger, it made me think of how we size up people in general, for instance, being “street smart”.

But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before other’s do.

Experience matters, or course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.

Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.

• At the Bridge Table, Clues to a Lucid Old Age – An avid bridge player, my 78 year old Aunt Joan would love this article! The article discusses the 90+ Study, which “has included more than 14,000 people aged 65 and older, and more than 1,000 aged 90 or older.” The question seems to be, which came first – being cognitively active and thus having a sharp brain, or having a sharp brain and thus being cognitively active. One area in which all scientists agree is the importance of social connections for maintaining brain health.

In isolation, a healthy human mind can go blank and quickly become disoriented, psychologists have found.

“There is quite a bit of evidence now suggesting that the more people you have contact with, in your own home or outside, the better you do” mentally and physically, Dr. Kawas said. “Interacting with people regularly, even strangers, uses easily as much brain power as doing puzzles, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this is what it’s all about.”

• Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory – This title opens up all sorts of questions related to ethics. On the other hand, what about a brain that has some unhealthy parts? I did enjoy one possible way of thinking about how our brain keeps memories:

…brain cells activated by an experience keep one another on biological speed-dial, like a group of people joined in common witness of some striking event. Call on one and word quickly goes out to the larger network of cells, each apparently adding some detail, sight, sound, smell. The brain appears to retain a memory by growing thicker, or more efficient, communication lines between these cells.

Richard Restak on Thinking Smart

The liveliest of the three Learning and the Brain opening keynote speakers, Richard Restak took us on a tour of the many ways we can keep our brains going strong. Restak is an accomplished author and presenter, and I suspect his talk, Think Smart: Improving Brain Performance, was a summary of his book by almost the same name, Think Smart – A Neuroscientist’s Prescription for Improving Your Brain’s Performance. As many of the reviews on amazon.com noted, Restak’s book does not cover new territory. What his book does, and what he did in his talk, is compile the known research in a manner that is digestible, interesting and entertaining. If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, then the sugar is Restak’s talk (and based upon the reviews, his book).

Restak touched on each of the following, which are also topics that have periodically been in the news. While they are not new, they are important to maintaining strong cognitive function, and thus worth their weight in repetition!

• “What’s good for the heart is good for the brain.”
• Exercise, Exercise, Exercise
• Sleep is necessary for consolidation of learning.
• Power naps are powerful.

After reviewing the above, Restak went on to discuss his prescription for keeping our brains strong. To a certain degree, you have to accept what neuroscientists like Carol Dweck have been saying for awhile, that intelligence is not fixed. Rather, intelligence is fluid and we have the power to foster that fluidity. To be sure,  impediments such as heredity and injury can sideline attempts to improve brain strength, but in general we have the power to change our brains for the better, just as in general we have the power to improve the healthiness of our bodies. Restak’s list of “Specific Steps to Enhance Brain Performance” include the following areas in which he says we should focus our efforts to strengthen our brains:

• Attention: the equivalent of physical endurance
• Memory – sensory memory, long-term memory, and working memory: correlates with intelligence
• Mental exercises: you choose [which ones to do] because mental exercises are benefit specific
• Visual Observation
• Fine Motor Skills
• Tactile perception
• Logic
• Numbers
• Imagination
• Visual-spatial thinking

There are any number of ways to exercise your brain, including online games. Here is one of the more comprehensive sites, aptly titled games for the brain, which comes from one of the reviews on amazon.com for Restak’s book.

In the youtube video interview below SharpBrains CEO Alvaro Fernandez highlights some of the ways technology can be used to assist with brain training. His comments are appropriate given that the focus of the Learning and the Brain conference was Enhancing Memory and Performance in this Distracting Digital Age, and Restak also briefly touched upon the use of video game technology for strengthening some aspects of the brain. Disclosure: I have never met Alvaro, but I have exchanged emails with him and written a number of blog posts for the SharpBrains blog.

Happy Anniversary Internet! + DARPA’s Network Challenge

[UPDATE: The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team has won! Interesting to read about how they set up their challenge network to maximize participation and benefit as many people as possible.]

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is sponsoring a Network Challenge. Today, Saturday, December 5, 2009, DARPA is launching 10 red 8-foot weather balloons around the United States, in locations that are accessible to the public and visible from points nearby. These balloons will remain in place for 24 hours. Individuals and groups who registered in November are participating in the challenge, the goal of which is to identify the location of all 10 balloons and submit this information to DARPA. The first entity to do so will win the prize of $40,000.

My husband, who I recently described as an inspirationator (inspiration + innovator), created the Independent School Balloon Finding Team, which consists of 16 independent schools. Should this team win the prize, they will donate the funds to Kiva.

As of 8:43 p.m. EST:

As of 6:46 p.m. EST:

As of 5:50 p.m. EST:

As of 3:08 p.m. EST: