Gil Newburn

We can hold two things in consciousness.

And my hypothesis is that it's activation, proper activation of that network, that's the essence of attention deficit disorder.

So you've got little sort of nine-year-old Johnny who suddenly has a good idea in his head so you get the smart-ass comment coming out or that kid gets poked.

But is he any different from the quiet girl who's sitting there daydreaming away and

stuck in whatever she's thinking about and completely misses that the teacher's talking to her.

It's the same phenomenon, different sides of the same coin.

Yeah, you can have this thing in your mind, you can have that thing in your mind, you can't have both.

And these things don't appear in diagnostic criteria, but they are vital to human function.

So all those executive things that you see not working in attention deficit disorder are

are really, I think, secondary to not being able to hold on to data and consciousness.

Doesn't mean you don't have the intellectual capacity to do so, but the system just doesn't work for you.

So living with all that creates stress.

What we understand is that from the process of epigenetics, if you elevate cortisol chronically, that feeds back into the brain and can add little radicals onto DNA.

The salience network starts to lose connections.

So we know from other severe stress environments like American soldiers doing four or five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and having severe PTSD that parts of that network can actually shrink anatomically, sometimes as much as 10 to 15%.

Is it nature?

Is it nurture?

No, it's how these two things interact to create a whole lot of secondary biological changes, which then are characterized by mood-related changes.

What's the only logical species survival thing to do?

You start assuming everything's negative until proven otherwise.