A recent study entitled “The Academic Experience of Male High School Students with ADHD” by Dr. Kristine Kent and Dr. William Pelham Jr. found that adolescents diagnosed with ADHD were significantly more likely to be absent or tardy during the academic year and over eight times more likely to drop out of high school when compared with adolescents who did not show symptoms. Students are often subsequently marginalized into special education programs which simply offer basic remedial level courses. Dr. Sanford Newmark, head of the Pediatric Integrative Neurodevelopmental Program at the University of California, San Francisco, believes that physicians are often inclined to overprescribe ADHD medication such as Ritalin or Adderall, which can be a total game changer for some, but for others, a detriment.
A study recently published in The Journal of Health Economics has shown that a 1997 drug insurance expansion act in Quebec, which exponentially increased access to affordable insurance for prescription drugs, actually caused the number of children using stimulants to double within a decade. The increased access to medications was thought to result in better academic performance in children diagnosed with ADHD, but instead the reverse occurred. Researcher Lauren Jones found that children diagnosed with ADHD who took the prescribed medication still had a decreased chance of making it through school without repeating a grade, and a decreased probability of graduating high school.
Overall it seems that both the educational and health care systems are failing to properly educate the brain of these children with either programs or medication. It seems that the need for James’ “education par excellence” is in dire need.
Desimone’s research with attention and primates has shown that the symptoms prevalent in people diagnosed with ADHD, a broad spectrum of attention and executive control problems, should not be treated due to the magnitude of neural activity but rather the synchrony of neural activity which correlates to the patient’s ability to inhibit inappropriate responses or pay attention. This opens up a new approach to medically treating ADHD. Instead of Adderall, administer drugs specially designed to alter the timing of neural activity in order to amplify brain synchrony, and thereby keep the patient focused.
As a contemplative psychotherapist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, I have witnessed how contemplative interventions can teach one’s brain to sustain attention on a particular stimulus, such as the breath, for a prolonged period of time while thoughts, feelings, and sensations may arise and come in as distractors. However these “distractors” are not forced away but instead understood as stimuli which, when given their space and placed within one’s field of attention, can naturally dissolve away on their own accord through practices like meditation.
Over the past decade, several studies published by pioneering institutions have looked at meditation’s effect on attention and the brain — one of which was the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I worked as a research intern, and the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, which published a study suggesting how meditation can actually build brain tissue around areas of the brain associated with attention. Through meditation with an emphasis on breathing, the individual learns control of their senses. Music may also be a great cognitive help and explain why some students need it for studying. A research team at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that the process of just listening to music may sharpen the brain’s ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.
These findings, among others, are pointing us toward an education that allows for the brain to learn, as William James put it, how to voluntarily bring back a wandering attention, over and over again. When he published “The Principles of Psychology” in 1890, James admitted he didn’t know the practical directions for bringing it about. However, I believe that now we do. Whether contemplative practices and listening exercises should be integrated into schools and especially the treatment regimens of people diagnosed with ADHD is another topic for discussion. But I do think the answer is clear (if you were attending 😀).
This article was originally published in Brain World Magazine’s Spring 2015 issue.
