ADHD and time-blindness

Russel Barkley (no relation to Brigid's dog) is a person who researches ADHD. He is the guy who linked ADHD and many of their struggles for their inability to conceptualize time and to use it to guide their actions.

A comparison between how a "normal adult" and somebody with ADHD respond to deadlines (called "Event" on the graph).

I see this in ADHD kids. They are totally binary in the sense that there is NOW and NOT-NOW. The deadline could be tomorrow or next week or twenty years from now. It is all the same to them...meaningless.

Many of the people in prison have ADHD. They grew up without consequences in the sense that a consequence tomorrow had no meaning for them, even when it was an almost certainty.

In the dry language of one criminal justice scholar "Most felons are not capable of appropriately discounting the probability of future consequences to their current actions."

An example of a profoundly ADHD kid

Smedley had a son named Earl.

Earl had ADHD.

In an effort to train Earl on the benefits of deferring gratification, Smedley made Earl a deal. 

"Earl, I will give you a dollar on Sunday. You can go out and spend it, but if you have that dollar I will give you two dollars on Monday."

On Monday, Earl had the dollar bill that Smedley had marked with his pen in the corner of the bill.

So, on Monday, Smedley traded that dollar bill for two one dollar bills and told Earl "If you have those two dollars tomorrow, then I will trade them for four dollars on Tuesday." 

Since Smedley had proven as good-as-his-word regarding the two dollars for one, Earl was able to produce the two bills on Tuesday and Smedley faithfully produced four...

On Wednesday Earl traded his four bills for eight.

On Thursday Earl traded his eight bills for sixteen.

On Friday Earl traded his sixteen bills for thirty-two. And still, Smedley was willing to offer a 100% "interest rate" if Earl hung onto them for another day. That is, he was willing to give Earl sixty-four dollars on Saturday if Earl still had all thirty-two dollars.

On Saturday, Earl didn't have any money. Smedley was dumbfounded. Earl didn't seem concerned.

Later, Sissy told her dad "Earl played your game until he had enough to buy seven-grams of weed."

Still confused, Smedley asked "But if he had waited one more day he would have had enough money to buy TWO baggies of weed! What is the matter with him?" 

Mr Smedley, your son has ADHD. It was binary in his head. "Not enough money to buy seven-grams was the equivalent of zero, of no-value. Once he had $30 he had enough to buy that baggie (with enough left over for a bag of skittles) and two baggies tomorrow did not compute in his head because the concept of "tomorrow" is a foreign country." 

Back to the video

The narrator describes a very simple experiment to sort ADHD from "normal".

The person performing the test turns on a light bulb and leaves it on for a predetermined amount of time. For the sake of example, let's say it is on for twenty-five seconds.

Then, after a short bit of conversation, the person giving the test hands the switch to the person being tested and tells them, "Turn on the light and turn it off when it has been on as long as I had it on."

A "normal person will likely fall within some range...again, for the sake of argument, let's say between 20 seconds and 30 seconds. An ADHD will turn it off in five-to-fifteen seconds or leave it on for minutes. 

IQ or ADHD

Granted, there will be a huge amount of overlap. A person with ADHD cannot sit through an IQ test so we really cannot measure their "intelligence".

But I propose that time-blindness has such grave consequences that there would be value, and profit, in finding ways to train-the-brain to compensate for that inability.