cause of ADHD | ADHD Information
[QUOTE=sachetm]I've got to go with Glen here. Reflexes seem far more like a genetic disposition and only one of many symptoms than any kind of original cause.
[/QUOTE]
You know, when I first read this book, I thought the exact same thing. Nothing about ADD and ADHD that I knew of had anything to do with reflexes. It was the brain not getting enough blood in the front left lobal region. I even went to Dr. Amen's site and looked at his brain scans. I found it very interesting. I was actually angry that my brain wasn't working as well as everyone elses.
When I took medication, I was assuming that the blood flow was increasing and therefore, my brain was working better. Then the meds seemed to wear off. Why? Why would meds not be as effective after a while? I even tried herbal supplements that worked for me for a while. The had ginko in them which increases blood flow. Those seem to wear off too.
Then I read this book. I was intrigued. I was interested. I wanted to know if it was right.
The book suggests that EVERYONE has this reflex. Some people have matured it and others haven't. When you haven't matured it, it controls you. It makes you uncomfortable. You have to put in ten times the energy other people do to do the same actions (handwriting, physical activities, sitting for long periods of time) I believe that the brain is reacting to the discomfort. We do anything we can to cope with the discomfort we feel from this reflex.
After doing these exercises for about two weeks, I could sit in a theater chair comfortably for TWO hours. I didn't squirm, I didn't sit on my hands, I didn't cross my legs back and forth a million times like I always do everytime I attend that theater with my Mom. SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. I believe these authors and I beleive this theory. I wish that more people would take it seriously and read the book.
When I first read it, I tried to disprove it so many times. I couldn't. If you read it and you can disprove it, I would love to hear from you.
Thanks,
well of course it could be that we are genetically not predisposed to develop that reflex (that that is our genetic fault) so the two don't necessarily contradict each other.
like my index finger bends markedly (like drastically) inward - as does my mothers. simply a genetic charateristic i have inherited from her. a genetic fault possibly or attribute (who knows what benefits bendy index fingers might offer???) so i don't see why equally i might not have inherited a faulty neck reflex maturing system. and perhaps my sister by virtue of being difficult insisted on crawling around on her own whereas i by nature far more passive and agreeable wasn't rushing off in every direction therefore never developed it.... (and neither did my other, equally easy-going sister).
in fact, i would point out that the two of us who have ADD are very easy-going whereas my eldest non-ADDer sister is a complete pain in the neck (no pun intended!) very difficult, very demanding, but extremely successful.
so it could be both. why not?
check out children's vision. Talks about add and visions issues. Are related as we found in our son and wife.
I think that personality might have something to do with why we crawl or don't crawl to mature the reflex. For instance, I see all the symptoms of ADD in my oldest son. He walked at 9 months. I know he didn't crawl much. (btw I can't get him to take ADD or the exercises seriously at all - I wish I would have known about all this when he was younger, I would have done the exercises with him)
Also, we crawl or don't crawl because of our environments. Baby walkers, jumpers, playpens, etc. confine children and do not allow them time to crawl.
I (the one with ADD in my family) am very easy-going also. My sister (also older and also non-ADDer ) is demanding in an emotional sort of way. She is a red personality, I am a white.
I never crawled as a baby. I had casts on my legs. So my situation supports the theory in the book. Perhaps that is why I am so focused on it.
I personally think that the reflex theory makes even more sense when you apply it to all the different personalities out there. We all react to pain differently. We can all react to the reflex bothering us too.
I read a book that claims that ADHD is caused by a reflex that we have as a child that is controlling us. It makes it uncomfortable to sit with your arms and legs bent at the same time. When you have them both bent, your arms want to straighten or your legs want to straighten. I can see this in my classroom with the kids who have a hard time focussing. They are always bending their legs straight, or their arms out. I even had a child in my class at school who hated to sit and would rather stand every time. He was so happy when I put him in the back and allowed him to stand at his desk. When we are so uncomfortable, our minds tend to wander to help us cope with the discomfort. We don't notice it because it has been with us all our lives.
This book claims that you can do therapy in the form of exercises to mature this reflex and that your ADD and ADHD symptoms will go away.
I have tried them and things are improving for me. It is really cool.
and the name of the book is (just in case someone missed it, surely not???? )Stopping ADHD
right? i did get that right now didn't I anni --- suddenly i totally forget. memory huh? i have the memory of an ADDer.
The book is called Stopping ADHD, author O'Dell. I've posted it on here many times, you guys are probably all tired of hearing it from me, but it is my passion now. I love the theory and the way it is helping me. I get on here every night and post somehting about it because I believe it is the cure for ADHD and ADD.
Maybe I'm crazy!! Maybe I'm just a little ADD about this and I'm hyperfocusing.
I think that I should get paid royalties for the sales that I am increasing for the authors!!!
Our daughter had relux issue not our son and he is the one with issues. Explain this one.
I'm more for the studies that show misfiring reflexes and motor functions are the symptoms of ADHD - but surely not the cause. They are running more tests on a Greek system to check eye movement in children - the last tests they ran showed over 90 percent discovery of ADHD without first talking to the child. That's pretty good if they can repeat the test with the same outcome.
Another exciting glimpse into ADHD is the tests being run in universities across north america into vision and ADHD. They have found that in many cases the ADHD child cannot see in their right peripheral area - there's a seemingly blind spot there in most cases. It's still very young but shows promise! I know that I have trouble sometimes seeing things out of the corner of one eye - but not the other. Makes me think.
I go with genetics on ADHD. My father definitely has it. All my uncles had it - all died alone, miserable and using alcohol to self-medicate. It's why I went on my personal discovery search.
Always good to ask why.
I am more inclined to accept the genes Hartmann has identified as the explanation (see "The Edison Gene")The professors in this book also agree that ADHD can be genetic. They claim that the reflex may be stronger in some people and harder to mature. That condition can be inherited.
I don't think that this book has all the exact reasons why this reflex can cause all these problems, I just know that it makes total sense to me.
I did not crawl as a baby. I had casts on my legs for 6 months. These exercises are crawling exercises. They are uncomfortable for me to do. I am following the books directions. Even after doing only a couple weeks of these exercises, I am showing much improvement.
I remember things. That is the most amazing thing to me.
Example:
Before exercises and while not on medication: I get a phone call. Someone from my son's soccer team needs me to bring over his payment so he can pay for his team sweatshirt. I hang up and totally forget about going over to pay for the shirt. I get a second phone call and even perhaps a third before I get over there to pay for the shirt. It just doesn't stay in my mind!!!
On medication: I remember to go that day.
Doing these exercises - not on any medication: I get a call from my son's soccer coach saying that I need to pay for indoor soccer. I hang up the phone. I do a couple of things. I remember. I write out the check, I even take it over to his house. I REMEMBER!! It makes me so happy. I can't say scientifically how this is working, but it is. These authors have been helping people in Indiana for years now. They just are not accepted into the medical arena because they come from an educational background.
You really should get the book and try the exercises for yourself. See if you think they help you. I would love to know of someone else who has tried them. I would love to know if it helps more than just me or not.
Bren
What is relux issue? Do you mean reflex?
I would never have been able to tell that I had a reflex issue. It is a reflex called the STNR. It is a reflex that urges our legs to straighten when our arms are bent and visa versa. It is located in your neck area. So, if you are sitting at a desk in school looking up at the board to copy things, it is hard to be comfortable. This causes the horrible handwriting that ADHD children and adults seem to have. It takes an enormous amount of concentration to get handwriting to look good. I know that mine is horrible. Since doing these exercises though, it has become neater.
Anytime a person with this reflex is required to sit with arms and legs bent at the same time, they will be uncomfortable, perhaps without even realizing it, it feels normal to them, they don't know any different feeling. But if you or your child are more comfortable in a lounging position, and can concentrate better in that type of position, perhaps you are affected by it too, like me.
Babies need this reflex to urge them to crawl and stand. Most babies mature the reflex on their own through crawling. But others - those that walk early, are in walkers, playpens, johnny jump ups, are held too much - etc. do not have sufficient crawling time to mature it. It is a miracle in my opinion that it can be matured as an adult. I feel very lucky and blessed to have found this book.
I hope it can help others too.
i've gotta gotta gotta get this book!but yeah, def genetic in my family. my father for sure also my sister. my uncle and grandfather on my mother's side (boy had it coming from both angles here) but my mother is NOT herself ADD perhaps a recessive gene in there though.
on my father's side of the family - there is one scientist nominated with his team for Nobel Peace Prize working at CERN on some sorta nuclear science thing in Switzerland and another cousin who is a mathematics professor at Stamford/Stanford?? over here in the US and very bright --- extremely bright, extremely bright all my cousins (sickening) but if ADD managed to overcome somehow the negative sides of it. perhaps due to being Scottish and a bit tough?!?
but def. genetic connections in my family. what was referred to in the past as being 'eccentric'. we have a HUGE eccentric streak running in my family - that's for sure. barely a sane one among us, excepting my mother. how she escaped it i have no idea.
I've got to go with Glen here. Reflexes seem far more like a genetic disposition and only one of many symptoms than any kind of original cause.
Genes result in "default" physiology. Since both the brain and body are "plastic" and changable, the patterns can change, but not wihout an effort.
The problem is that although they are starting to think of body/brain as a system (you can even throw spirit into the mix since it seems to have a physical component too, though far less understood), exactly how that system works--what connects with what--is little understood. Add in that the patterns are different for different individuals and it becomes a nighmare and very much a matter of trial and error for a given individual.
sachetm38653.2434606481get these weird (wired) experiments on the brain.. urgh yuk, spooky:with thanks to hhuang@MIT.EDU via mitch@thehub.com.au]
[from pages 152-161 of the paperback edition]
'...If New Orleans is a city with an overripe id, it is also home to Tulane University Medical School and its unique department of neurology and psychiatry. ... In 1950, [Dr. Robert G.] Heath first put depth electrodes into the brain of a human mental patient. ... His electrodes charted the circuitry of pain in some of the illest brains in Louisiana. It was the first time electrodes had been used inside human brain tissue (except very briefly during epileptic operations just to guide neurosurgeons around the homogenous macaroni of the cortex), and so Heath's operations were controversial, to say the least.
In the years from 1950 to 1952, he implanted brain electrodes in twenty-six patients. Some of them suffered from incurable epilepsy, intractable physical pain, Parkinson's disease, and other medical conditions, but most came out of the dimly lit back wards of the state mental hospitals. With dental burr-drills, Heath and his co-workers drilled through the patients' skulls, guided the electrodes carefully into specific sites, and then left them there, at first for a few days, later for years at a time. ...
"By implanting electrodes and taking recordings from these deep-lying areas," he explains, "we were able to localize the brain's pleasure and pain systems. We'd interview a patient about pleasant subjects and see the pleasure system firing. If we had a patient who flew into a rage attack, as many psychotics did, we'd find the 'punishment' system firing." The pleasure system includes the septal area and part of the almond-shaped amygdala; the other half of the amygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus, and the tegmentum (in the midbrain) constitute the punishment system.
... Whenever a mental patient flew into a violent rage or turned into a catatonic zombie, the EEG was almost certain to display the telltale sawtooth pattern. If the patient got well, the spike disappeared. ...
"The primary symptom of schizophrenia isn't hallucinations or delusions," he tells us. "It's a defect in the pleasure response. Schizophrenics have a predominance of painful emotions. They function in an almost continuous state of fear or rage, fight or flight, because they don't have the pleasure to neutralize it." ...
It turned out that electrical stimulation of the pleasure center automatically turned off the punishment system -- what Heath calls "the aversive system" -- and vice-versa. And so Heath tried to cure mental illness with direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure neurons. "If we stimulated their pleasure systems, violent psychotics stopped having rage attacks," he says. "We even stimulated the septal area in people suffering from intractable cancer or arthritis pain and we were able to turn off the pain." ... By stimulating the septal pleasure area, he could make homicidal manias, suicide attempts, depressions, or delusions go away -- sometimes for a long time. ...
As it turned out, it took more than a few pulses of current to exorcise madness. Heath had to devise safer electrodes that could be left in the brain for years so that a patient could be restimulated at intervals. Then, in 1976, the "most violent patient in the state" -- a mildly retarded young man who had to be tied to his bed because of his savage outbursts -- received Dr. Heath's first brain pacemaker.
The pacemaker is an array of tiny battery-powered electrodes that delivers 5 minutes of stimulation every 10 minutes to the cerebellum, at the very back of the brain. Its power source, a battery pack about the size of a deck of playing cards, could fit neatly in the patient's pocket. (Later it was miniaturized to matchbook proportions and implanted in the recipient's abdomen; it requires recharging every 5 years.) The cerebellum, Heath learned, is a better entryway to the brain's emotional circuitry. Stimulating a precise half-inch of its cauliflowerlike surface automatically fires the pleasure area and inhibits the rage centers, and so it was no longer necessary to invade the limbic areas farther forward in the brain.
The first pacemaker patient soon stopped trying to slash himself and his caretakers and went home from the hospital. All was well, for a while. Then the man inexplicably went on a rampage and attempted to murder his parents. Before he was subdued, he had severely wounded his next-door neighbor and narrowly missed being shot by the sheriff. Heath's X rays quickly spotted the problem: broken wires between the pacemaker and the power source. Once the wires were reattached, the rage attacks waned again. The young man is now in vocational rehabilitation and doing well.
In 1974 a pretty, intelligent twenty-one-year-old librarian was shot in the head during a holdup. After an operation that removed much of her frontal lobes, she had frequent seizures, was barely conversant, and had to be fed through a tube because she stopped eating. By the end of the next year she was in a continual frenzy. She lashed out at anyone within range and once tried to stab her father. She screamed whenever she was touched and complained of constant, excruciating pain all over her body. Her brain pacemaker was installed in November 1976, and, magically, the rage episodes subsided. She started eating; her memory improved; and her doctors began describing her personality as "pleasant" even "sparkling."
Another patient, a severely depressed former physicist, was troubled by voices that commanded him to choke his wife. When he got one of Dr. Heath's pacemakers in 1977, the infernal voices vanished, along with his perennial gloom. He and his wife began to visit relatives and dine together in restaurants for the first time in years. But *his* wires eventually broke, and once again his wife was threatened with strangulation. When the gadgetry was mended, so was the man's psyche.
Ironically, the many technical snafus that plagued the pacemaker gave Heath the perfect controls for his experiments. ... Even so, the cerebellar pacemaker is not a psychiatric cure-all. By Heath's estimates, about half of the seventy-odd patients have been substantially rehabilitated -- no mean feat, given that pacemaker recipients come from the ranks of the "incurable" -- but other have never emerged from their private hells. For some reason, depressives and patients prone to uncontrollable violence have benefitted most; chronic schizophrenics the least.
Fortunately for posterity, Heath and his colleagues filmed many of their bold journeys into the human emotional apparatus. ... A woman of indeterminate age lies on a narrow cot, a giant bandage covering her skull. At the start of the film she seems locked inside some private vortex of despair. Her face is as blank as her white hospital gown and her voice is a remote, tired monotone.
"Sixty pulses," says a disembodied voice. It belongs to the technician in the next room, who is sending a current to the electrode inside the woman's head. The patient, inside her soundproof cubicle, does not hear him.
Suddenly, she smiles. "Why are you smiling?" asks Dr. Heath, sitting by her bedside.
"I don't know ... Are you doing something to me? [Giggles.] I don't usually sit around and laugh at nothing. I must be laughing at something." "One hundred forty," says the offscreen technician.
The patient giggles again, transformed from a stone-faced zombie into a little girl with a secret joke. "What in the hell are you doing?" she asks. "You must be hitting some goody place."
The "goody place" is the septal pleasure center, which the unseen technician is stimulating with an electrical current. "She was a mean one," Heath muses. "She was hospitalized for years for a schizoaffective illness. ... This film was made in 1969, and the treatment has held on her -- she's doing well."
[From another patient story:] "There -- see the big delta wave appearing in the septal region," Heath tells us. Sure enough, large, languorous waves are now coming from the lead to the septal electrode. "There's almost an exact correlation," he adds. "When he gets a rush of good feeling, the record shows large-amplitude waves in the pleasure system." ...
Along with depth electrodes, Heath's team would often surgically implant a sort of tube, called a canula, through which they could deliver precise amounts of a chemical directly into the brain. Oriental sacred texts (and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) mention a legendary bliss drug called "soma", the food of the Himalayan gods. The real life version might be acetylcholine, a natural chemical neurotransmitter. When the Tulane researchers injected acetylcholine into a patient's septal area, "vigorous activity" showed up on the septal EEG, and the patient usually reported intense pleasure -- including multiple sexual orgasms lasting as long as thirty minutes.
"I can show you a film of one of the recordings," Heath offers, fishing through some of the reels on the shelves. We half expect a neurologic peep show, but the film he digs out is the raw EEG record of a woman patient, who was being treated for epilepsy, under the influence of acetylcholine. A flat, clinical voice-over accompanies the staticky march of brain waves across the screen:
Now we're coming to the start of the changes ... It's in the form of a fast spindle, about 18 per second ... first in the dorsal right anterior septal, then it spreads to the other septal leads. ... This is still correlated with the same clinical findings of intense pleasure and particularly of a sexual nature. A half hour after the acetylcholine injection, the patient is still having orgasms. Heath points at an ominous-looking scrawl on the EEG and notes, "See, it looks like almost like the spoke-and-dome pattern of epileptic seizure. It's a very explosive activity."The flip side of joy is pain. The next film shows a patient having his "aversive system" stimulated. His face twists suddenly into a terrible grimace. One eye turns out and his features contort as though in the spasm of a horrible science-fiction metamorphosis. "It's knocking me out ... I just want to claw..., " he says, gasping like a tortured beast. "I'll kill you...I'll kill you, Dr. Lawrence."
... When [Heath] first showed his movies to an assemblage of psychiatrists, neurologists, and other scientists, some were outraged. Murmurs of medical hubris, mind control, and unsafe human experimentation circulated -- in large part because of the film we just saw. But what looks like a scene from the Spanish Inquisition, Heath assures us, is no more than electrical stimulation of the rage/fear circuits. Unfortunately, the audience, back in 1952, misread it.
"They thought we were hurting him," he tells us. "But we *weren't* hurting him. We were stimulating a site in the tegmentum in the midbrain, and all of a sudden he wanted to kill. He would have, too, if he hadn't been tied down... He started remembering a time when he lost his temper -- when his shirts weren't ironed on right and he wanted to kill his sister. That showed us we'd activated the same circuit that was fired by his spontaneous rage attacks." ...
"As soon as we turned off the current he went back to normal," Heath recalls. "We asked him why he had wanted to kill Dr. Lawrence (not his real name), and he said he had nothing against Dr. Lawrence; he was just there. He's like a psychotic person on the street who lashes out at whoever is around." ...
Heath tells us some of his patients were given "self-stimulators" similar to the ones used by Old's rats. Whenever he felt the urge, the patient could push any of 3 or 4 buttons on the self-stimulator hooked to his belt. Each button was connected to an electrode implanted in a different part of his brain, and the device kept track of the number of times he stimulated each site.
Heath tells of one patient who felt impelled to stimulate his septal region about 1500 times per hour. He happened to be a schizophrenic homosexual who wanted to change his sexual preference. As an experiment, Heath gave the man stag films to watch while he pushed his pleasure-center hotline, and the result was a new interest in female companionship. After clearing things with the state attorney general, the enterprising Tulane doctors went out and hired a "lady of the evening," as Heath delicately put it, for their ardent patient.
"We paid her fifty dollars," Heath recalls. "I told her it might be a little weird, but the room would be completely blacked out with curtains. In the next room we had the instruments for recording his brain waves, and he had enough lead wiring running into the electrodes in his brain so he could move around freely. We stimulated him a few times, the young lady was cooperative, and it was a very successful experience." The conversion was only temporary, however.
"But it doesn't work that way."
Thanks! Those are the kinds of articles I read for my cognitive/affective psych course and actually enjoyed. I find brain functioning absolutely fascinating! Especially for those of us with atypical brain physiology (ADD and ADHD), I would think it even more interesting to understand how our brains are wired and how that wiring affects so many of the behaviors that both give us misery and joy.
For my post-dissertation research (too big, they tell me for my dissertation which will just be a requisite precursor), I want to wire people up--probably using an fMRI--to find out what goes on in their brains during a storytelling vs. a non-story experience. I expect to see a LOT more of the emotion centers (hippocampus, for example), lit up. My goal is to use this data to make teaching and training both more enjoyable AND more effective. And nobody else seems to be looking in this area, for some odd reason, so guess I'll be a pioneer. Cool stuff, eh? 