A Variation of the ADD Diagnosis
When I was told by a doctor that my son had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), I wrestled with the diagnosis. In our case, it is true that the acorn doesn’t fall too far from the tree; however, my son didn’t seem to fit the mold of most ADD kids. He is a bright child with an incredible imagination and can harness incredible focus when motivated. However, we both periodically drift into a fog where we are both unreachable.
Upon years of self-reflection, I determined that I lack space between my ears to hold moderate quantities of information at one time. Imagine you are making a salad for twenty people. You find a large luxurious 24” cutting board and an enormous salad bowl. You begin to systematically cut through all the vegetables one by one until your salad bowl is filled. You toss your salad and serve it to your guests.
Now imagine your cutting board is the size of your palm. To make matters worse, every one is very particular about their salad dressings such that you must serve your guests in individual bowls. To accomplish your goal, you must hyper-focus and work as efficiently as possible. Vegetables are flying. Tear the lettuce because that needs to go in the bowls first, four slices of cucumber, and then slice a whole tomato; place part to the side. The half cut cucumber won’t make a mess so it can sit on the counter, but you need to work out of the rest of the tomato because it will run juice every where. Onto another serving bowl, the priority is to finish off the rest of that tomato, a bit more cucumber while you’re still holding the knife, tear the lettuce and on you go.
In the world of computers, this is called low RAM (random access memory). Like your computer, if you don’t have RAM, you need to compensate with high processing speed or you may as well leave the kitchen. You need to rely on short cuts to make it happen, but you definitely need a system. Statistics is a subject I love. It fits my sensibilities of dealing with what feels like large amounts of information and emotion that I triage for relevance and consequence before processing. If there is no relevance to the task at hand and there is no consequence, what ever it is, can wait.
I am convinced that dreams are a way for the mind to re-sort all the impartial information you’ve accumulated during the day. When you go through the day with a small cutting board, you make countless decisions and process using impartial information. You may receive gobs of information, but you only process the information necessary to perform a particular task. All nonessential information gets suppressed. The information I don’t use is still somewhere in the echo chamber I call my brain, but it is one huge tangled ball of yarn. Not only is there partial information, but there are partial emotions, opinions, feelings, hopes and fears that didn’t make the cut to get me through my busy day.
Dreams are the subconscious unraveling of that tangled ball of yarn like sorting the mail at the central mail terminal. The mind is amazingly efficient at this kind of re-sorting. And my brain is very experienced at this since it gets a lot of practice. Because the subconscious mind is so efficient, it often blends information sorting with emotion sorting to form story dreams.
This is why dreams can be so wacky. Let’s say I leave the house with a sultry kiss from my luscious wife. I’m in a hurry, so I tear away. Before I think much about it, I flip on the radio and am riveted to a live story about an airplane that is trying to make a troubled landing. By the time I get to the office, I learn that the airplane has landed safely. Most of the workday is spent trying to appease my biggest client who is furious over an error that I am frantically trying to sort out. Over all, it’s nothing too out of the ordinary.
But as the ball of yarn untangles, I might go home and dream about being naked in an airport with no money to get home. Meanwhile the radio is instructing me to perform all these random tasks to find my clothes. The money is never found but my suitcase is packed full of my wife’s lingerie that I must wear home. Like so many dreams it is often non-linear, non-sequiter, and makes little sense.
I have no opinion about what dreams actually mean, but that is not the point I would like to make. What is important is that my mind requires that I periodically stop and untangle my ball of yarn. Because my cutting board is so small, I need untangling often; and I sometimes drift into an absent fog that I can best describe as a sort of waking narcolepsy. Even while awake I will momentarily disengage the cotter pin and let the fly wheel run free to untangle my ball of yarn. In those moments, I am only a spectator. I can’t direct the untangling process. I can only observe a gibberish rapid resorting that even I don’t understand. For those around me, it can be quite frustrating, “Hello, anybody in there?”
When I mentioned this theory to a psychiatrist friend, he told me that narcolepsy is often treated with Aderal, a commonly used to treat ADD. I don’t take the medication, but I think it is interesting that the two conditions are so correlated.
I have short cuts that I’ve developed for making quick decisions. I use what are called risk-adjusted weighted probabilities. What are the possible outcomes? What are the probabilities of the various outcomes? What are the benefits and consequences of those outcomes? Make decisions accordingly.
I spent 19 years in the financial markets where statistics and risk played a very large part in the financial instruments I sold. I simplify problems by breaking them down into very simple models.
My son and I have a difficulty fitting in to restrictive environments since we become quickly frustrated and sometimes frustrate others. Our liability is also our strength and I wouldn’t trade our quirky quality for all the tea in China. I’ve learned to embrace it and explore it, while I hope I can teach my wonderful son to do the same.
