Etiology of ADHD

[Stabile]

Nice little post, dude. (grins…)

moderator's note: the post referenced can be found here ... http://www.addforums.com/forums/show...0&page=1&pp=15

However, with all due respect:

The exact etiology of ADHD is unknown. No one is claiming to know that, at least not right now…

We've been pretty vocal about understanding exactly this, and the more we look at it, the more elegantly our basic models seem to fit. I'm sure that we've mentioned some of it during various posts about our theoretical work.

And in contrast to some stuff being hyped here and elsewhere lately, our work is very scientific. Anyone tells you there's no scientific basis, send 'em to us.

--Tom&Kay

[Stabile]

I understand from private communications that our previous post was somewhat murky.

Oh, well. Sorry. Shame on us.

To clarify:

Our work (nominally in gender differences in human communication) has spun off a specific model of what AD/HD is and how it arises, both in the individual and in the species.

We've been pretty specific about it in bits and pieces, and have gotten used to debating it on those terms, here and elsewhere. But it is not an established scientific fact, even in the same sense that a classification in the DSM represents scientific consensus, if not actual fact.

It is pretty good, though, and since the bigger piece is busy being spectacularly useful as a predictive tool for all kinds of other stuff, we expect our model of AD/HD to survive (eventually) in a form close to what we presently understand.

The following is a longish description of the logical path we might have followed, had this been our direct purpose. It is as short as we could make it, so there are bound to be holes in it. Just point 'em out if it seems appropriate, and we'll try to answer in less than five pages.

* * * * *

Our model of AD/HD stems from our identification of two different logical structures in use in the human brain, and the implications of their use in everyday life.

Logical structures are the form of the way that we organize information in our brains. Since that structural form also dictates how we access it, it also affects how we analyze information, new or old.

Our models of these structures are based in the generally accepted understanding of how neurons and neural networks function, which is unusually deep for this sort of thing.

The difference in the structures is due to a difference in how they arise through association, the fundamental logical principle by which neural structures are organized.

If these logical structures are allowed to form by making one association at a time, they remain flat. That means that the logic that the network represents can be mapped on a two dimensional surface (regardless of the three dimensional nature of a real neural network).

If we allow two associations to be formed simultaneously, the resulting logical structure is of arbitrary dimension. The logical property that determines whether an association is of a higher dimension was first identified by mathematician David Hilbert, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. It's called a metalevel.

There are specific conditions of the operation of a large collection of neural networks such as the one constituting the human mind. One is a mechanism by which a particular set of patterns may be selected on the basis of some arbitrarily determined significance.

Every brain must have several of these mechanisms, which in classical computing were once called 'attention mechanisms'. That is indeed their function in our brains, although we wouldn't recognize most of them, because they're more or less dedicated to specific low level stuff like regulating breathing, maintaining balance, and so on.

At the highest level one or more of these mechanisms are directly associated with what we recognize as attention, and so it's easy to understand how something related to AD/HD might have arisen from our work in this area.

We won't get too far into details of the main body of the work, but please feel free to ask. The bits significant to this discussion are the attention mechanisms associated with conscious cognition, and how they affect the way that we model our universe.

The logical associations that we’re concerned with are formed as a consequence of our conscious awareness and observation of our stream of sensory input. We 'see' patterns in that input, and store a memory of those patterns. If they remind us of similar patterns, we form an association to that previously stored information, and so on.

If we have only one of the low level neural 'attention' processes devoted to the task of maintaining conscious awareness, we are able to observe and remember only one logical relationship at a time. We can (of course!) observe a number of relationships sequentially and store the memory of the whole, within some limits.

The logical structure of that whole, the pattern that the individual relationships fall into with respect to each other, is the flat model referred to earlier. It can always be mapped onto a 2D surface.

If we can observe two relationships simultaneously the pattern changes. We can not only store the memory of the two relationships, we can simultaneously store the memory of their relationship to each other, if any is evident. Such relationships exist and can be observed when one relationship is a class, and the other is a member of the class.

Our usual example is a person being introduced to carpentry, and noticing that some of the characteristics of the complex logical object 'carpentry' are specific to carpentry, and some hold generally to a broader class, a prototype (or model) of a class occupied by carpentry, such as 'trade'.

There are many trades, all instantiated from the general class 'trade'. (If this sounds like object oriented programming, it's not. Computer geeks stole the terminology from logicians.) In fact, carpentry itself is also a model, a general template of behavior and capabilities. We need some details about the specific job before we can actually observe any carpentry happening.

There is an implied hierarchy here that differentiates the higher level logical model 'trade' from the lower level logical model 'carpentry', and this is what David Hilbert actually identified. The term 'meta' allows us to note the difference, and so 'carpentry' is a model, instantiated through details of some specific job, and 'trade' is a metamodel, instantiated in the model 'carpentry'.

The only way to identify the difference between a model and a metamodel is to observe them simultaneously. These relationships can be preserved in a form that can be dealt with sequentially, after the fact, but the metarelationship has to be observed first. Absent that, there's nothing to discuss.

What does this have to do with AD/HD? Well, the idea of having two 'attention' mechanisms at work (rather than one) should be familiar: it's the low level technical neural behavior that we experience as multitasking or multi threading.

There's more, but that's a good beginning, and the rest is related to the differences in the logical structures that arise. But why should we have more than one thread of conscious awareness? Furthermore, is it reasonable to characterize it like that, as a 'thread of consciousness?

The answers are a bit deep, but we can simplify it a bit and there's lots of evidence that this model is pretty sound.

When we consider how the brain functions, how things like the mind and the conscious experience of being arise from the well understood logical function of neurons, we get an entirely different perspective on the character of our own existence.

Ordinarily we interpret being from the point of view of consciousness, or common conscious experience. But the pattern of nature inverts that; the highest brain functions, including conscious being, are the last to arise, both historically and physically.

The structures supporting the conscious mind are 'tacked on' to the more primitive underlying structures that do most of what we think of as the process of conscious being. For example, most of the process of reaching for a drink, lifting it to our lips, and swallowing it takes place outside of the conscious processes.

In fact, it's best to think of the conscious processes as purely interpretive; it's not strictly true, but starting there will get you closer to what actually happens.

And it's necessary to ask 'why?' here, as in why consciousness should arise in the first place, what forces were at work, and so on.

It should be obvious that selection of a conscious process (essentially an active internal model of being in the external world) might provide great benefits to the survival of both the individual and the group.

Structurally there isn't much difference between, say, the model of the act of grasping and lifting a glass (in the cerebellum) and the model representing the image of ourselves performing such an act (for the most part located in the cerebrum).

Neurons are as adept to modeling one as the other, and both models would be expected to arise over a statistically large enough sample of random experiments. The only questions when it comes to selection of this sort of trait are can neurons do it? and is it likely to happen? And then, of course, is it useful?

So we could expect a process equivalent to conscious modeling of the experience of being to arise, and the mechanisms aren't really different from what's already there. Meaning, of course, something needs to control the massive parallel presentation of firing patterns, selecting the significant, separating out what most needs processing. In short, those 'attention' mechanisms we described above.

At lower levels that might keep a processing loop focused on maintaining balance; at the conscious level, we recognize it as 'paying attention'. It's reasonable to expect that these attention mechanisms would arise in sufficient quantity, and for ordinary consciousness that means only one.

In order for a second conscious 'attention' process to arise, we need a mechanism, and we suppose that random statistical variation has produced a long, slow, and relatively small shift in some aspect of brain chemistry.

Did this really happen? We don't know yet, but there are strong indications that it's a likely suspect. It's certainly within the realm of possibility, exactly the sort of statistical biological 'experiment' that could be expected to underlie the process of selection of a new trait, or a change in an old one.

Regardless of the mechanism, the rise of multiple conscious processes can be assumed to accompany the rise of the N-dimensional logical structures to store and analyze information. And both of those events should have left historical traces of a particularly useful sort, because they shouldn't be obvious until we begin to understand the mechanisms, and then go looking for them.

When David Hilbert first identified the logical property 'metalevel', he intended to address a particular problem in mathematics. Ultimately the problem was solved by Kurt Goedel, but nobody thought to look for evidence of metalevels outside the realm of mathematics, despite the obvious fact that logical properties are fundamental to the nature of nature itself.

Of course logic applies generally, to all of nature, and metalevels are everywhere. And for some specific kinds of ideas, they're necessary; they provide a logical perspective that's similar to jumping up in a tree to see the lay of the land.

We can look for this sort of thing, and the prototypical example is the invention of written language. It might seem (in retrospect) that writing only requires recognizing that symbols might have an arbitrary abstract relationship to real objects.

But there are ample examples of the use of meaningful symbols long before the invention of written language, such as cave drawings and decorative adornment of objects. There's something more to written language, the recognition that there are problems that might be solved by the organized use of an abstract symbolic representation.

There's something interesting about putting the two together, the possibility of symbolic representation and the need for a system that uses it: 'seeing' that relationship requires metalevels.

The possibility of abstract symbolic representation is a class of solution, not a specific answer to a problem, and the specific problems that were out there in early social groups were individually isolated by function.

There are many examples of systems of pictographs in use that predate written language and even civilization, to an extent. Writing didn't take off as an idea until two things occurred: some bright person realized that an organized system of symbols was a general solution to a whole class of problems, and in particular one specific problem that was starting to be universally oppressive.

That problem was the burden of maintaining the oral tradition. Previous to the invention of written language, the history of the social group was recorded and maintained by a rigorous process of memorization and ritualized storytelling. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there's a problem of scale as generations pass, even if the task is apportioned among more members of the group.

Typically the process scales until the original purpose is compromised, after which it either moves along in a permanently crippled state or is transformed into an entirely different tradition, religion.

But religious tradition passed and maintained orally places it’s own similar burden on the group, and so the first significant job for written language was to relieve the members of the group of having to memorize everything that the last generation had to remember, plus a whole generation more.

Write that stuff down, and let’s get on with life. There's a lot of speculation about what forces led to the dawning of modern civilization, and most of it is about efficiency; economies of scale, improved nutrition, more efficient agriculture, improved plant stocks, and so on.

All of it is related directly to endowing early social groups with the free time to think longer and more abstractly, which fed back into the equation as increased efficiencies, and so on. None of these popular theories can claim the kind of instantaneous impact (over only a few generations) on free time to think that writing down the oral tradition must have had.

Is that significant? Well, yes, but not just for the impact, or perhaps despite it. The real key is the requirement of the use of metalevels in the logical development of the innovation itself.

Note that it is not necessary to bring the view of metalevels back with the innovation; all that is necessary is a brief excursion into a space in which the perspective makes the solution obvious. When you climb a tree to see which way to go, you don't have to stay up there to walk out of the forest.

Is there evidence that such a process is at work, even today? Sure. In fact, it's codified in the traditional study of mathematics. There are events equivalent to the invention of written language all through the history of math and philosophy.

A great example is the introduction of i, the square root of –1. The problem of this impossible number cropped up as soon as mathematics began to be formalized, and it didn't go away until mathematicians popped their heads up and remodeled reality itself.

What they did was brilliant, and for those not nerdy enough to know, here it is: they decided that all numbers could be broken into two parts, a real part and an imaginary part. The real part is what you would expect, the numbers you know and love, what you learned to manipulate in school.

The imaginary part is the bit that includes the square root of –1. I know it seems too simple, and that much had been done early on. The brilliant bit was explaining it was always there, but we hadn't noticed it.

Why not? Because the numbers we all learn to love in school have a zero coefficient for the imaginary i part. Today everybody goes on happily ignoring that bit, like we always did as long as there's no i, and those of us who dabble in a bit weirder stuff are OK, too.

How is that related? Well, it's significant in the same way, requiring a view of metalevels to formulate, and we're not the only one's who think the introduction of i was a big deal. We have a tape of Ed Witten (the guy that has Einstein's chair at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies) giving a talk, the American Mathematical Society Gibbs Lecture, in which he says exactly that.

In fact, Witten invoked the sense of how the introduction of i changed mathematics to try to give a sense of what the Next Big Step would be like. He was trying to describe metalevels.

There is much more history that we could look at, most of it not math related; there are clear indications that the American Constitution was forged in a process similar to what we just described, so that the document codified wisdom rather than opinion.

That's what Jefferson's argument for tearing down the government every twenty years or so was all about; the Founding Fathers openly addressed the problem of knowing that their own views were certain to change in only a few years time, if they were honest men.

The solution was to describe a process for deriving a correct view rather than a system of rules that were sure to quickly lose relevance. That's the main problem for the American political right in looking at how the Supreme Court has shaped the culture.

The history of the court is that no Justice has ever lived up to expectations, unless you count the expectation of Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers. Supreme Court justices follow the recipe, and occasionally come to enlightened decisions, but never out of line with our founding principles.

If that's the case, why is there any uproar? Aha, back to the question at hand, AD/HD. We are essentially apolitical, although many people would characterize us a liberal. But that's not accurate; what we are is logically different than some people, ADDers versus normals in the arena of how we structure our minds.

Are we characterizing ADDers as liberals and normals as conservatives? Certainly not. We're looking at the way that the debate is trying to influence the group, and there it's pretty clear: while it's laudable to develop the ability to pop your head up above the trees occasionally, it's not acceptable to stay there.

There are many forces at work in making the determination that being in a different logical space is a Bad Thing, and the effects are even more scattered. But why should that surprise us? Take a look at the DSM, and the insanely broad (and in some ways self-contradictory) definition of AD/HD and all of its suggested subtypes.

We don't have time to get into the derivation of the impulses and drives that create these forces in a social context, but we’ve derived them in a similar way. We’ve also derived several other relevant bits that seem significant, especially those that address gender differences.

These all play into the experience of AD/HD, too, part of the big picture of how neural structures give rise to our experience of conscious being. One particularly important part is how instincts work, what they do, and how we manage a modicum of free will and self determinism despite the obvious utility of hardwired behaviors.

As I mentioned, we suppose that there has been a long, slow and relatively small shift in brain chemistry over several thousand years; we base that on the historical record of the use of logical constructs involving metalevels. We think it's roughly five thousand years, give or take.

My dad, who has a PhD in organic chemistry, says it's more like twenty thousand. But if pressed, he has no idea why he thinks that. Literally no idea, and that's part of the puzzle, too, where thoughts like that originate, and how we manage to capture them.

My first paper on this stuff (written years ago and as yet unpublished) is entitled On the Primacy of Theory. (Now you know why it's still unpublished.) It's a monograph establishing a logical argument that original ideas are in fact possible, and suggesting the deepest origins are in the structure of the Universe, the nature of Nature itself.

If the shift in brain chemistry is universal, then way don't we all have AD/HD? The answer is in the logical structures themselves, and also in how we manage free will. Essentially, we all make the choice to apply one or the other model, and here the ordinary variability among individuals may play a part.

Since we aren’t schooled directly in the choice, we make it by following examples, rightly or wrongly, and by the serendipitous modeling of logical elements encoding metarelationships. If we model enough metarelationships our internal logical representations will automatically evolve into the second N-dimensional form, a web-like structure we call 'the metamodel web'.

The struggle for control of this process is intensifying every day; that's why we mentioned the current political crises in the United States and elsewhere. We see the socio-political situation as the cusp of an emergent event, which we won't go into here. Suffice it to say that emergent events are widely believed to be the basis of the exotic and little studied side of evolutionary theory, the speciation event.

So to sum up a bit: we started with neural function and derived models that predict events like the invention of written language and the accelerating pace of technological innovation, social institutions like formal mathematical study, and so on.

These same models predict specific details of how behavior arises, especially social interactions, and especially certain interactions that are intended to establish and maintain conformity.

These mechanisms actually are intended to ensure convergence of the neural networks that represent models of our physical reality and appropriate behavior in that context, but the effect in terms of conscious awareness is a force that seeks to achieve conformity.

One other detail that is critically important: the two different logical forms we’ve been talking about aren't mutually exclusive. If you've followed the description, it should be obvious that the older form is a subset of the new form.

It's somewhat reminiscent of the introduction of i; all of the older conforming ways of analyzing our universe are present and valid, as long as we stay within the long established parameters of flat logical scope.

But get into a strange situation, and those of us able to use the newer forms have an advantage, which maps nicely to the claimed advantages of having/being AD/HD widely discussed in these forums.

And that is the last bit of it, as far as we’re concerned. Sometimes it seems like we’re adults talking to kids; we know normals can't see the issues in the same light we do, and we can compensate for that in various ways.

Buried in that are most of the ordinary coping mechanisms we ADDers use, give or take a twist or two. And so it goes, on and on; everywhere we look, we see how the models based on neural structures seem to fit the experience here, or over here, or in this part of the process of being, or stage of life, or whatever.

It leaks over into other parts of the DSM, of course, as it should, complicating the picture in a way that only a professional could truly appreciate. We’re no experts at that, except in a few areas; we believe we understand AD/HD, and we also have a deep understanding of Dissociative Identity Disorder (what used to be Multiple Personality Disorder) and the process of dissociation in general.

There are a few other places we've looked at in some detail, like autism and Asperger's, but only those aspects that involve how we model reality, or fail to do so.

And that is also related to the experience of having/being AD/HD; there are two different ways to fail to model reality correctly, by forming an incomplete model, or by forming a more complete model that is sufficiently contradictory to trigger the impulse to conform, or at least draw attention to the difference.

If I don't stop here, this will keep right on rolling. The theories we've constructed weren't directed towards explaining AD/HD, but then, AD/HD isn't any simple disorder, is it? It isn't a disorder at all, in our estimation, and we may be the first to be able to say definitively why, at least in theory.

But it is too new to call it established science, so we'll give ya' that. At least we can describe how we’ve established the different parts, but then, it's been over thirty years in the making. We better have something to show for it. (grins..)

[Ichpuchtli]

I have found a quite interesting fact page if you guys would like to read it.

ADHD Facts Page

[Stabile]

That's a commercial web site, and that's the problem with the web, isn't it?

The page is entitled "ADHD Facts Page", and there's no way to regulate or even represent the fact that the 'facts' are really biased opinion, regardless of whether or not they're correct.

Too bad. The honest approach is to either present lots of disclaimers, or not present 'facts' in a commercial setting. There are lots of not-for-profit websites, some of which are maintained gratis by people that have related commercial websites, and openly admit it.

And of course, that makes this the dishonest approach, although I'll bet the guy thinks he's doing the world a favor sharing his intellect with us for a profit befitting it's magnificence.

Sorry if that seems harsh, but that's the way it is. You have to navigate to the home page and look for the tiny 'about us' link to find out what the whole website is really about.

How could you trust the content? How could you tell the distorted opinion from fact?

Why bother?

[GlenW]

Originally Posted by Stabile

That's a commercial web site, and that's the problem with the web, isn't it?

The page is entitled "ADHD Facts Page", and there's no way to regulate or even represent the fact that the 'facts' are really biased opinion, regardless of whether or not they're correct.

It's what is the major problem with the whole Web isn't it?

Being so very free-market and controlled mostly by money you end up with 2 major camps on most arguments about something important to the social, economic or philisophical well-being of society. Just google any word people polarize on and you'll find first the market view, then the religious, then the press and finally science and private citizens. As long as search engines allow groups and companies to pay for the front seat we'll get mostly the opinions of the strongest not the most correct scientifically.

I did a google a couple nights ago to find out the statistics on population taking ritalin 1,5 and 10 years ago respectively. I tried to find an unbiased review of numbers. I got many pages of links. Going down the list - it started with pharmaceutical company stats - underestimates all the way and was very obvious. Keep going a few pages and you get the anti-med campaigns by religious and US republican groups. A whole lot of actual US Govt. stats on abuse - even though I actually specified legal users on prescription in my search parameters. Population on meds suddenly jumps and is again very inaccurate just from looking at the first few numbers.

I had to go through about 20 or 30 pages before I found the NIMH (directly - earlier I'd found an altered copy overestimating stats) and a couple other not-for-profit surveys of users. The numbers are not mind-boggling. In fact NIMH figures are showing a slight but significant drop in new prescriptions from 2000 to 2001 new users of ADHD meds.

It's hard to sift out truth these days. Even the scientific papers of legitimate studies are riddled with info from the drug enforcement agency - wanting to ban or severely restrict all ADD stimulant treatments, republican watchdog agencies bent on the same goals and other obviously biased sources.

I took statistical analysis as part of my university training. It's very easy to bend a statistic to any number of results. I pity the average user trying to find the truth through faulty statistics - let alone the good ones.

So who do you trust? Your government? Your government funded lab? Your "watchdog" groups supposedly looking out for the health of your children?

I don't relish the thought of having to wade through it all. One example - the groups against ritalin using columbine to advocate tightening up restrictions of using meds to treat ADHD in children. Supposedly, 7 or 8 of the "child murderers" in the US in the recent past were taking pharmaceuticals as a part of treatment. They don't mention that millions of children take them (and that includes antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other psychotropic meds) and find real relief from a great number of ills. Hell, even simple food allergies have been know to make children and adults become homicidal, suicidal and hallucinate! The mind is delicate - and not all will benefit from any substance.

I'm no doctor - but I took the information I could find from the most reliable (i.e. seemed to have the least to benefit from me either taking it or protesting it) sources and am now taking dexedrine. Sadly most of my information is from anecdotal evidence on this. I really dislike having to have done it that way as it's notoriously unreliable (it's how homeopathy is still here) and tends to be skewed because of placebo effect.

Still, you take what you can where you can get it I guess.

Thats' it from me for now.

Oh, great forum!! I'm enjoying finding new information a lot.

[scuro]

So, ADHD...not a genetic disorder, not environmental................

BUT...(Not that I accept this model but these would be some questions that I would have.)

ADHD as the next speciation event?

-or is it the current one?
-Just ADHD, or all the other disorders in the DSM4 are part of this event? How do you pick and choose?
-if ADHD is a speciation event, it could have a net benefit or net detriment to the new species. Which one is ADHD?
-if it is a benefit to the new species, why all the statistical negatives?
-will ADHD be a new branch that dies off?
-this new "logical form" you talk about, only ADHDers are capable of using it/seeing it?
-this is the ability to see the "unreal"?
-how does this benefit ADHDers when they are living in the "real" world. Would we not be ostracized and become the runt of the human litter?

[SB_UK]

Originally Posted by scuro

ADHD as the next speciation event?
-or is it the current one?
<>

-Just ADHD, or all the other disorders in the DSM4 are part of this event? How do you pick and choose?
<>.

-if ADHD is a speciation event, it could have a net benefit or net detriment to the new species. Which one is ADHD?
<>

-if it is a benefit to the new species, why all the statistical negatives?
< To provide an exaggerated response - in a world of mediocrity and worse, how would you think that a new 'type' be greeted - with open welcoming arms, or with distrust and aggression?
Also - how would a 7 feet tall man enjoy living in houses with 5 feet high ceilings?>>

-will ADHD be a new branch that dies off?
<>

-this new "logical form" you talk about, only ADHDers are capable of using it/seeing it?
<>

-this is the ability to see the "unreal"?
<>

-how does this benefit ADHDers when they are living in the "real" world.
<>

-Would we not be ostracized and become the runt of the human litter?
<
An additional perspective that I might be able to offer, and which comes from life in a University community for the last 20 years or so - is that I can categorically state that I know many ADDers at the highest level in academia, who have no idea of their ADD.

The phrase that 'no impairment no ADD' is incorrect.
ADD is <>; this immediately previous definition does not require that there be any impairment in the ADDer.
Any apparent impairment in the ADDer arises from th ADDer 'not being from around these parts' or 'not playing the game'.>>

SB.
---

[scuro]

This is a theory?
Is there more then anecdotal evidence to support this contention scientifically?
Are there any Scientists looking into this, any studies? Do you have links?
Does Epigenetics and "gum" in some of the switches play into this theory?
That is, instead of negative outcomes you could get positive outcomes?
Is there a "faith" element here, that is...do you have to be in the believe stage right now to buy into this?

[mctavish23]

I've posted the references for the genetic nature of the disorder many times now.

This is getting old.

Even if I firmly disagree with some evidenced based point, I respect the fact that the data have been proven valid and reliable.

Unless and until they are refuted by equally valid and reliable data, then they are real;whether I like it or not.

Speculation is fine, as long as it recognizes the data in question exist and are valid and reliable.

[Imnapl]

Originally Posted by SB

. . . I can categorically state that I know many ADDers at the highest level in academia, who have no idea of their ADD.

. . .The phrase that 'no impairment no ADD' is incorrect.

It is possible that someone's "impairment" does not affect all aspects of their life.

[SB_UK]

Originally Posted by scuro

This is a theory?

<>

Is there more then anecdotal evidence to support this contention scientifically?

<>

Are there any Scientists looking into this, any studies? Do you have links?

< To reference at least one researcher that is in similar territory - please look at the thread on 'Beebleman'. Rather conveniently, I have just described the work of Crick. Crick has the Nobel prize for the discovery of DNA. He was within Tom&Kay's ballpark before his death.
Is it acceptable for me to reference a European scientist?
I assure you that DNA is found within people on both the Eastern and Western sides of the Atlantic.>>

Does Epigenetics and "gum" in some of the switches play into this theory?
<>

That is, instead of negative outcomes you could get positive outcomes?
<>

Is there a "faith" element here, that is...do you have to be in the believe stage right now to buy into this?
< Would you like me to drop in a quotation of yours, from just a few days ago, where you describe that ADD researcher chap as a prophet.
It is dangerous to adopt the mindset of scientologists when appraising science; and ridiculous to ask trained scientists if they're sure that they've not done the same.>>

---
SB.
---

[SB_UK]

Originally Posted by Imnapl

It is possible that someone's "impairment" does not affect all aspects of their life.

How about, what if a 'very real' "impairment" has not, does not and never will affect any aspect of their lives?

SB.

[Bean Delphiki]

Originally Posted by SB_UK

< To provide an exaggerated response - in a world of mediocrity and worse, how would you think that a new 'type' be greeted - with open welcoming arms, or with distrust and aggression?
Also - how would a 7 feet tall man enjoy living in houses with 5 feet high ceilings?>>

Driving accidents are not caused by "a world of mediocity." Seems to me that you didn't really answer the question.

Stabile,

You lost me here:

Originally Posted by Stabile

At lower levels that might keep a processing loop focused on maintaining balance; at the conscious level, we recognize it as 'paying attention'. It's reasonable to expect that these attention mechanisms would arise in sufficient quantity, and for ordinary consciousness that means only one.

In order for a second conscious 'attention' process to arise, we need a mechanism, and we suppose that random statistical variation has produced a long, slow, and relatively small shift in some aspect of brain chemistry.

Why does "ordinary consciousness" need only one attention mechanism? If it only needs one, why would a second one arise? Am I missing something really obvious here?

Originally Posted by Stabile

Typically the process scales until the original purpose is compromised, after which it either moves along in a permanently crippled state or is transformed into an entirely different tradition, religion.

Did anybody else find this as funny as I did?


Also, most people I know use the word "meta" colloquially, and I'd grasped its meaning only vaguely through context, so it's nice to have a clearer picture.

[SB_UK]

Originally Posted by Bean Delphiki

Driving accidents are not caused by "a world of mediocity." Seems to me that you didn't really answer the question.

If you're suggesting that I haven't offered an adequate explanation to this question:
"-if it is a benefit to the new species, why all the statistical negatives?"

...instead of using driving accidents as an example - (Are you suggesting a link between ADD and driving accidents?) - and taking 'apparent social ineptitude' as an example ... please check out Nova's thread ...

'Why are ADD children/adults socially inept?'

... in which, the myth surrounding this commonly quoted impairment to ADDers is exploded, courtesy of close to 200 posts, and many excellent observations.

SB.

[mctavish23]

The social skills problems for childern with ADHD-C & ADHD-H-I types are long standing and well documented.

And just as an aside, there is a connection between driving accidents and ADHD.

I'd be glad to post the references supporting those if you'd care to see them.