ArCHeR, I asked you and Survivor to pretend that each other didn't exist because the discussion you were having with each other was threatening to turn into a flame war.

There are other people here who can respond to what Survivor said about ADD. You do not need to do it. So, yes. I am asking you to not respond at this time.

It's your own fault, though, because I was officially not very interested in this subject until you said it could be interesting

I think that my niece was diagnosed with ADD eventually, I always thought she had more of a mild case of social attachment disorder or something like that because of her father (who erronously believed that he would still be alive after we had decided that he shouldn't be). I think that one problem is that ADD is a collection of symptoms that are usually caused by emotional problems related to important relationships. One key point of the diagnostic criteria is that the symptoms are present in two different situations...meaning that it is not considered necessary that someone display ADD symptoms at all times, it can be entirely situational as long as there is more than one situation which causes it. On the other hand, there are non-situational causes, some of which respond to medication.

If yo would have waited for it to descend into a flame war, I can tell you right now that it wouldn't have. We were practically done debating by the time you said it anyway.

And now, I can't make any response to anything he says? I can't even say, "That's a very good point Survivor. I agree with you fully." All I want to do is clear up a mistake he made about a disease I have. I want to make a correction in another thread to something he said.

Tell you what, if two different people post here that they would like me to allow you and Survivor to go back to responding to each other, I will.

All those two people need to say is, "Yes, please."

I also had/have ADD as a child. You'd have to ask my wife whether I still do, though.
And I believe you can grow out of it. I also believe discipline helps, self and parental.
I believe it can be managed without meds, as well, and I'm about to find out for a fact whether that is true or not, because one of my three and half year old twin daughters has ADD. Oh yeah she does...
She's dancing around my chair right now.

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Yes, I did. I said "two different people" and I meant two people different from you or Survivor or me.

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Ah, but you could have meant two people who weren't the same person

Anyway, on with why I whined so much...

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I mean, if anything, wouldn't people with ADD lack the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time? Isn't that the essential meaning of being easily distracted and having a deficit of attention?

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It's not a deficit of attention, it's an attention deficit. We lack the ability to stay focused, or just the opposite, we focus too much on something we don't need to. The best example would be knots. If you give me a knot, I won't move on until that sucker is untied.

But no one can pay attention to more that one thing at a time. That's my point. People can switch between more than one thing very quickly, but our consiousness only has room to focus on one thing at a time.

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I mean, in a practical sense, no matter how much attention you can pay to just one thing, if you can't divide your attention enough to deal with other things that happen, it isn't like the extra attention does any good.

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ADD is a short-term thing. It's not like we're unable to manage math homework and English homework in one night. It just takes us a while to focus on what that one math question is saying. We divide our attention too much. We look at a question that says, "What did Shakespeare mean by..." and we would think about how odd that "e" is at the end of "Shakespeare" and then think about the spear and so on until we realize we have a question to read. Or we'll just keep reading the same sentence over and over again. It goes something like this in our heads:

"'The inability to distinguish what you originally experienced from what you heard or were told about an event later is called:' Wait, what? 'The inability to distinguish what you originally experienced from what you heard or were told about an event later is called:'-'The inability to distinguish what you originally experienced from what you heard or were told about an event later is called:'Snap out of it. 'The inability to distinguish what you originally experienced from what you heard or were told about an event later is called: A. Semantic memory B. Priming C. Explicit Memory or D. Source Amnesia.' Ok yeah, let's see, it's not A or C. I don't remember what B is, and D is self explanatory. D."

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One problem I've encountered is that I tend to use all my attention for things that normal people don't think deserve attention. "It isn't that I'm unable to hear you, it's that I find you less interesting than what I'm doing right now." I like to read with all my attention devoted to the text, max out the processors and look at the pretty colors in 32 bit native resolution But if what I'm doing isn't very interesting to me, I can divide some of my attention and use it for other things. So if I'm reading the instructions for how to program a VCR or something like that, I can spare plenty of attention to play cards and talk to everyone at the same time. But if I'm reading something for pleasure, then I don't have anything left over for anything else.

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Everyone does that. But you're not thinking about it all at the same time, you're thinking about the cards after you get them delt to you, you're thinking about the instructions when you look down to read them, and you're thinking about the conversation the rest of the time.

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kids who don't or can't do it are the ones labled as ADD

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Thank God you're not the one diagnosing these people. That's not it, or at least shouldn't be. People with ADD can do that easily. It doesn't affect us ALL the time, and it's subtle enough to where they only time we really notice we're doing it is aftaer the fact (like right before the last time I read the question in the above example).

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That might have something to do with why they show a more pronounced ability in that direction.

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It could also have something to do with the hunter/gatherer theory, and as a generalization I think it's a very good theory. Men used to hunt, while women used to gather. Men evolved to be, for the most part, predispositioned to physical activity that would be involved in hunting (again, this is a generaliztion. Please don't yell at me about Williams sisters etc.). Our minds were evolved to focus on one target and how to get that target. We hunted. The modern equivilent would be sports. We hunt the ball, and then when we have the ball, we hunt the goal. When one tribe challenged another for some sort of advantage, they would generally stand in opposing lines, yelling and grunting at the other to try and intimidate the other and demoralize the other tribe before a fight, if not scare it off all together. This is where we get trash talk, war, and team sports.

Women evolved to be able to have children (thus the higher threshold for pain) and to gather edible plants. They are able to see the whole forest and are able to pick out the best from it. They don't have to be quiet while they do it, so they talk more than men. It becomes a social event to go and gather nuts and berries, etc. Women can detect the differences between colors better so they can identify and avoid dangerous plants. The modern equivilent is shopping.

And think about it: isn't shopping just gathering things instead of food? So they have developed this ability to have a conversation, search for things, and protect their children at the same time, whereas men had to focus on one thing silently, while other men helped them to focus on one aspect of the hunt or another. We didn't have to multitask when we hunted, because we were all going after the same goal, and could each specialize in one thing.

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Sometimes I think that's why I really could never play the keyboard, I would listen to the melody and zone out on rhytm, then zone of on melody by concentrating on rhythm alone

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I know what you mean. Sometimes, I find myself listening to music I otherwise wouldn't listen to without several blows to the head, just because I'm lost in the melody and rhythm. I tend to ignore the lyrics.

How else can I excuse the Backstreet Boys? Or Ludacris?

(edited to fix the caps and spelling for ArCHeR's Name)

I was easily distracted. Still am. Back then I was a bit hyperactive. Hard to believe that now...

Anyway, I still think that ADD is overdiagnosed and way overmedicated. I think the first thing I would do if I were in charge of how it's diagnosed would be eliminating the situational element, if the behavior was specific to a few situations rather than being pervasive, then I would look for an underlying reason rather than being satisfied with a label like ADD.

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Concur with ArCHeR (I think that's the way the caps go..)

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Don't worry about it. You can call me Arch if you want

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Eh, I still don't get the distinction between a deficit of attention and an attention deficit. And I think that the situation where you can either stay completely focused on a task to the exclusion of paying attention to your surroundings or you can remain aware of other things to the exclusion of paying attenetion to your current task is basically what would correspond to what I would call a lack of allocable attention.

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A deficit of attention wouldn't allow for the extreme focus part of it. We just wouldn't be able to focus on anything for any length of time.

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Anyway, I still think that ADD is overdiagnosed and way overmedicated.

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The key thing is only being able to focus on a single thing. If you don't have enough attention available to focus on a task and remain aware of your surroundings, then you lack the normal amount of available attention.

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In the words of Inspector Jacques Clouseau: "I knew you'd say that."

We're not unable to focus on more than that one thing. We just don't want to. We allocate all of our attention to it, we don't lose any attention. Think of it like a starship on Star Trek. We don't lose any power, we just divert it all to shields.

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When I say it is overdiagnosed, I mean that sometimes it is diagnosed by stretching the diagnostic criteria a bit. When I say further that it is overmedicated, I mean that in addition to cases where it has been diagnosed for conditions which do not entirely fit the diagnostic criteria

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Ah, but that is a diagnostic problem, not a medication one. Those who are properly diagnosed recieve the proper medication. Those improperly diagnosed aren't recieving too much medication, they're recieving the wrong medication (or more properly they're recieving the wrong treatment).

But I do wonder if it was the medicine that made you do all that, or if the medicine was an excuse your subconscience used to act out supressed violent behavior. Mind you I have no idea what I'm talking about, but it's just a thought. After all, even hypnosis can't make you do anything you wouldn't do drunk...

Edit: Did I really spell hypnosis like that? *shivers*