ADHD and its Functional Twin: VAST (Variable Attention Stimulus Trait)

For many years, I thought of “ADHD” and “ADD” as dysfunctional conditions with which other people struggled, not me. Discussion of these conditions brought back vivid grade school memories of several bright and energetic boys struggling to sit still in their desks for seven hours, while nuns scolded and belittled them. I was fully aware of the social stigma that came with a diagnosis of ADHD. At the same time, I have long been aware that many successful people have been diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve long been convinced that, to some degree, their ADHD traits fueled their success.

Before my divorce in 2014, my wife Anne (in our 18th year of marriage) accused me needing treatment “because of ADHD,” explaining that I was “ruining the marriage.” She had been reading a website called ADHD and Marriage. She insisted that I should see a doctor to get medication for my “problem.” She told me that I was a bad listener. She told me these things repeatedly. It didn’t help that these concerns were hurled at me, not gently broached, but I now understand her frustration better.

An ADHD diagnosis also seemed ridiculous because I had never before been told I exhibited ADHD symptoms. No other human being ever raised a concern about ADHD until Anne proclaimed her diagnosis in black and white. Nor did any instances of ADHD seem apparent in any of my close relatives.

I resented these sole-cause accusations because I saw our marriage to be much more complex than that and far more nuanced. Also, I liked who I was and saw myself as high functioning. I have always been upbeat. I enjoy many activities and I’m fairly good various things, including my legal career, writing and composing music. Also (as I reminded my wife), I was capable of sitting in front of a computer screen for twelve hours per day writing complex appellate briefs. I have received awards for my brief writing. Fellow lawyers (and opposing lawyers) have often expressed that they like working with me. On a regular basis, more than a few of my friends tell me that I am an extremely attentive listener.

After the divorce in 2014, I became increasingly intrigued about ADHD. I started reading various articles and books about ADHD. From this informal research, I became convinced that many of the qualities associated with the ADHD mind are things that describe me well. In December, 2020, Anne died suddenly causing me to do a lot of thinking about a lot of things, including our marriage, including the role ADHD might have played in our struggles over the last few years of our marriage.

More icing on the cake: a counselor has gotten to know me well over the past few months. He recently blurted out: “You are ADHD from top to bottom.” Hmmm. That I am indisputably high-functioning (unlike many people who receive the diagnosis) doesn’t rule out ADHD, but it explains why I pushed back when a diagnosis was hurled at me. I’ve thought further about my ability to writing for many hours at a stretch? After the divorce learned that hyper-focusing is something that some people with ADHD diagnoses do well.

The above paragraphs are a bit awkward for me to re-read because my purpose is here is not to tout my accomplishments. It is not my purpose to drag my marital struggles into the public, post-mortem. My purpose is to show the reasons for my initial confusion and to set the stage to explain something fascinating I’ve recently learned about my way of processing the world. Perhaps my journey might help others. [More . . . ]

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The Meaning of Meaning

What does it mean for a word to have meaning? This simple question affects almost everything we do, every day. Now here’s something mind-blowing: For the past 2,500 years (including up to the present) most of the people studying this question (“How is it that words have meaning?”) have analyzed meaning from their armchairs, content to assume, and then conclude, that meaning is best studied by defining words in terms of other words, without considering human biology.  Long distinguished careers have come and gone without making the human body an essential part of the analysis. Philosopher Mark Johnson describes this failure:

The overwhelming tendency in mainstream analytic philosophy of language is to begin with concepts more-or-less well formed, and then to analyze their relations to one another in propositions and to objects of reference in the world. This leads one to overlook the bodily origins of those concepts and patterns of thought that constitute our understanding of, and reasoning about, our world . . . when I found myself immersed in linguistic philosophy as a graduate student in the 1970s, I did not even realize that I had been plunked down in a landscape that had been invaded by the body snatchers.
Johnson, Mark. Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason (2017).

You would think that this overlooking of the human body when discussing meaning would be impossible, especially



over the past few decades, during which new cognitive science findings are everyday occurrences. Isn’t it obvious that the oral and written words we use, the grunts and scribbles we produce, don’t have any inherent meaning? Isn’t it obvious that it is only when those grunts and scribbles interact with a human body that those grunts and scribbles trigger meaning? Well, apparently not.  It hasn’t been obvious for thousands of years and it is still not obvious to many people. Why not?

Here’s my suspicion.

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My New Project – Cognitive Science Book on False Dichotomies

I haven’t mentioned this to many people until now, but I’m in the early stages of writing a book. I will be focusing on about two dozen false dichotomies that ill-define us. Much of my research involves cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition, but I will touch on many other areas too. Even though I’m just getting started, the process has been both exhilarating and exhausting. Two months ago, when I hit the go button on this project, I didn’t appreciate that this would turn out to be perhaps the most challenging project of my life—these ideas are spilling out of my computer and permeating many other parts of my life, including my practice of law, my art and conversations I’ve been imposing on close friends and random strangers. Throughout my life, I’ve often been told that I’m “different” in that I often crave conversation that challenges me. I've been told that I'm severely allergic to chit chat. I plead guilty to that, and it feels like this allergy is getting worse. It's difficult for me to stop thinking about this project these days.


My outline is currently 100 pages and it will probably get a lot longer before I start trying to distill and wrestle it into a couple dozen digestible chapters. I’m been actively outlining my book for two months. Reviewing the literature has often been like drinking out of a fire hydrant, even though I’ve been given a big assist from the past. I’m repeatedly feeling grateful that the younger version me decided to A) audit dozens of credit hours of graduate level cognitive science classes at Washington University and B) write about many of these topics for twelve years at this website. I wouldn’t have had the audacity to undertake this project without both of these investments. I conclude this even though I can now see that many of my prior writings were naïve and wrong-headed.

I’m lucky to be in a position to dedicate substantial chunks of uninterrupted time to this. It sometimes even feels like a calling, which sounds so terribly self-important. To temper this self-confidence, a voice in my head often whispers that this endeavor is only for my own satisfaction and that I don’t have anything of substantial value to add to ongoing vigorous worldwide conversations by numerous brilliant writers who have made careers doing deep dives into the human condition. That might be correct. We’ll see, but I’m still going to give this a try.

Why does this project speak to me? Once you wrap your head around the past several decades of research of cognitive scientists, once you are no longer merely passively enjoying these concepts, something transformative happens. Once you start breathing these concepts, feeling them in your bones and muscles, almost everything changes, and it can sometimes be scary. I remember a conversation 20 years ago with a close friend. We were discussing a paper I wrote on the role of attention on moral decision-making. I will never forget that look she gave me.

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The brain’s precursors to volitional action

I don't have much to add to this Wikipedia excerpt, but I saw a reference to Benjamin Libet's experiments in an article by John Horgan.  To oversimplify only a bit, Horgan argues that "free will" somehow "emerges" at a level higher than "the level of body and brain understood solely as a physical system."  This sounds like hocus pocus to me.  Here's the Wikipedia excerpt on Libet's experiments:

Implications of Libet's experiments Libet's experiments suggest to some[8] that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore plays no part in their initiation. If unconscious brain processes have already taken steps to initiate an action before consciousness is aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated, according to this interpretation. For instance, Susan Blackmore's interpretation is "that conscious experience takes some time to build up and is much too slow to be responsible for making things happen."[9] Libet finds that conscious volition is exercised in the form of 'the power of veto' (sometimes called "free won't"[10][11]); the idea that conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, Libet suggested that it may still have a part to play in suppressing or withholding certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge. Since the subjective experience of the conscious will to act preceded the action by only 200 milliseconds, this leaves consciousness only 100-150 milliseconds to veto an action (this is because the final 20 milliseconds prior to an act are occupied by the activation of the spinal motor neurones by the primary motor cortex, and the margin of error indicated by tests utilizing the oscillator must also be considered). Libet's experiments have received support from other research related to the Neuroscience of free will.
I question whether even Libet's "power of veto" is "volitional" or "free." I suspect (though I cannot prove) that it's physics all the way down and that everything felt to be "volitional" or "free," even the "power of veto" (I admit that I too experience this apparent power) is physics, not some spooky homunculus bearing our name and facial features, who is pulling our levers.

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Guided meditation Video

I've soured on Sam Harris over the years, but I still find him to be highly articular and engaging. In recent weeks, some friends have indicated that I look absorbed and even anxious, even though my life is filled with joys and possibilities. I have been told that I have tied myself in knots, and I have heard, "You need to get out of your own way." For the umpteenth time, it has been suggested that I consider meditation in order to clear my mind. You can learn about meditation in many places. I've read articles and even a book on meditation. Today, I stumbled across this video by Sam Harris, who has long been an advocate of meditation. The fact that he is also well versed in cognitive science caused me to be interested in his approach to meditation. This is a 26 minute guided meditation. I found myself surprisingly able to hang onto the process and to escape some of the things that have been distracting me as I viewed this video. I'm going to come back to this several more times, while I continue to explore personal meditation.

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