Gil Newburn

doing that is probably more important just about than anything else because they say, oh, yeah, I get me.

I understand me because so often they'll come and they don't get themselves.

A couple of questions I always ask people that are not part of the diagnostic criteria, you know, what are you like with conversation?

Because for so many people, yes, everyone knows that someone with hyperactive ADHD cuts across conversations.

What they don't get is they can't do two things in consciousness easily.

They can either listen to the words or they can process what they mean, but they struggle to do both.

I can be sitting here rabbiting on at you and you're hearing all my words and saying, yeah, there's lots of words there and don't have a clue what I've just said.

So these simple things that create major secondary interactional and productivity issues are never even considered as part of a diagnosis.

We can compare all the bits in the brain that light up with the bits that switch off.

And given what we understand about these networks, we can say that if you're just sitting there daydreaming, drifting your mind into the future, into the past, that's a network called the default mode network that might be working.

And there's a lot of literature, for example, about the default mode network not doing the right things in people with ADHD.

The hypotheses, in my view, are completely utterly wrong for that.

The salience network is designed to tell us, is this stimulus relevant to me?

Is it relevant to me because it has potential good or is it potentially bad?

Is it something I can completely ignore?

For example, you might be sitting in an office working.

There are cars going past on the road, but you don't hear the cars consciously.

Your brain hears the cars, but you don't because that network has said irrelevant.

And remember that we've still got very ancient caveman brains.

We're all troglodytes at heart.