For some people, “Attention Deficit Disorder” (ADD) can be a real problem. I’ve got it and I don’t view it as a “disorder”, even though as I’ve written, my particular flavor of ADD can sometimes throw up a speed bump. Anyway, now I can point to some science on scatter-brains.
I recently finished Steven Johnson’s Where Good Things Come From: The Natural History of Innovation – a recommended read, by the way. In his chapter on Serendipity, Johnson talks about Robert Thatcher’s 2007 study in which he looked at phase-lock (when neurons are firing at the same frequency) and noise (when they are not synchronized) in brains of children by performing EEGs and then giving them IQ tests. The study has the inspiring title of “Intelligence and EEG Phase Reset: A Two Compartmental Model of Phase Shift and Lock” if you are really adventurous, masochistic, or really like reading academic papers. I guess I’ll go with the first descriptor – I read it and I’m really glad I’m not into research.
For those who want to cut to the chase, Thatcher found that:
Phase shift duration (40 – 90 msec) was positively related to intelligence and the phase lock duration (100 – 800 msec) was negatively related to intelligence.
In layman’s terms, the more disorganized the brain, the smarter someone is. The noise appears to be necessary to help the brain find new connections between neurons.
Celebrate disorder!
Reminds me of a public lecture by a brain surgeon I attended long ago. He used a classification of the level of deterministic chaos in the brain from 0=dead to a maximum of 5 (I believe), which represents a perfectly healthy brain. Healthy because many situations require hair trigger response times and continuous adaptations, which would not be possible in a system only capable of strictly procedural responses. He used a mathematical procedure to analyse EEG’s in order to derive the chaos level. During an epileptic seizure there would be a sudden drop and then a rebound to a normal high level of chaos. He theorised that the brain constantly checks itself and if it detects a dangerous drop in its chaos level, it may do a reset on itself in the form of a seizure.