The ADD person produces fewer neurotransmitters than the average person does. In computer terms, this would cause a delay between the two computers talking over the Internet. The connection between the two brain hemispheres in the ADD brain is also in some form of delay. Emotionally speaking, this delay causes a constant state of one thought chasing another, not unlike the old days of talking long-distance on the telephone and hearing that annoying echo. This may or may not be what is precisely going on in the brain, but functionally, it has this effect. Our perception of reality is actually milliseconds behind real time. We think that we are experiencing life in absolute real time, when in fact we are not. It is difficult, if not disturbing, to grasp the concept that our thoughts are slightly behind reality.

Live TV, as you know, is never actually live; it is delayed a few seconds so that if anything offensive is said, there is time to bleep it out. Our brain works in a similar way, but what we see and hear is only delayed by milliseconds. For people with ADD, this delay is enough time for us to lose our train of thought. The more we see and hear at the same time, the more we need neurotransmitters on demand, which causes our mind to skip like a scratched record due to our lack of neurotransmitter genes.

The stream of consciousness tends to exist somewhere in the left or right brain, left being mostly technical and the right being mostly creative. Sudden changes – like a person unexpectedly entering a room – momentarily interrupt communication between the two hemispheres. The interaction between you and your computer is a perfect analogy. When you input too much data in your computer, it crashes. People with ADD react the same way. When too much information is thrown at someone with ADD, they crash, exploding in an outburst of temper.

Like the computer, the ADD mind can pay attention as long as the thinking process is not interrupted. This could explain why ADD people, young and old, tend to need plenty of alone time, can’t stand to be interrupted in their conversation and need to shut out the rest of the world in order to hyper-focus on one thing at a time.

Q: Why does ADD exist?

A: Our society seems to believe that ADD should be eradicated from the gene pool. But has anyone bothered to ponder the possibility that ADD is here for a reason? Who’s to say that ADD is not just another form of evolutionary survival of the fittest? During the caveman era, we were the ones who noticed the faint and almost undetectable rustling of a predator nearby in the bushes. We were the ones who warned the tribe of impending danger. We are hypersensitive to our surroundings now because that’s what saved our lives millions of years ago. Over time we adapted our innate sensitivity to our creativity, where we became the oracles, shaman and spiritual leaders. We were respected for who we were when technology was not the focal point of our society. Today, even though we put a man on the moon 30 years ago, we are still living in physical bodies that are of a two thousand-year-old genetic design. In the days when people used to do just one thing with their lives, like make pottery or define laws, ADD helped, not hindered their genetic survival. In fact, ADD is the careful result of genetic evolution caused by natural selection. The proof exists in the fact that throughout history, there have been a great number of world leaders with some form of ADD.

ADD is an issue today primarily because our society has changed. We live in times of ever widening technological (left brain) expectations for everyone, and not just for our ADD children. The simplest tasks of driving to the store, paying for groceries, and operating a cable TV remote all in one day would have put the average sixteenth century person into a tailspin.

Q: What are the different types of ADD?

A: If you are looking for an answer like ADD versus ADHD, you won’t find it here; I have listed some websites for that. Instead, I prefer to focus on a different picture: left brain versus right brain. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the left brain controls the technical aspects of our personality, and the right brain controls the creative side - a gross assumption, but illustrates the point. Most people either with or without ADD tend to lean more to the right or the left. Some are creative types, some are technical types. With ADD, everything is exaggerated, so you have highly technical ADD people or highly creative ADD people. The differences being that the kids with the technical type of ADD tend to do great in math and spelling. The kids with the creative type typically don’t. The kids with the creative type of ADD are usually intuitive, and good at figuring out other people’s thoughts, where as the kids with the technical type tend to be mystified by other people’s thinking. They both exhibit the same physical and emotional/ developmental characteristics, but not all of the same intellectual traits and learning disabilities.

This is where everyone gets hung up in schools. Just when the educators think they have this whole ADD thing wired, then pop! A new kid with another type of ADD shows up and throws them all for a loop. In the final analysis, you can’t pigeon hole ADD into one single set of personality traits. You have technical people; you have creative people, period. ADD is more about developmental and physiological issues than basic personality types.

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