ADHD is a disorder that has “a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that is more frequently displayed and more severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development”(1). Symptoms are usually seen before the age of 7, and the patient has to show disruption of functioning in 2 environments (eg. Home and school), and have disruption in educational, social or occupational settings. As children are the ones that are usually diagnosed, they can appear fidgety, distracted, hyper and confused. One odd thing about the appearance of the disorder is that at one point or another, children usually look and feel this way. This has led to a hypothesis of over-diagnosing this disorder.

Background reading

Recent

• Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here, 2004
• Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. Spiro, Divided Minds, 2005
• Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day, 2006
• John Elder Robison, Look Me in the Eye, 2007
• Howard Dully and Charles Fleming, My Lobotomy, 2007
• Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold, 2007
• Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, 2006 (fiction)

Earlier

Imagine you are age sixty-five. You are supposed to be relishing your golden years when suddenly, out of nowhere, you suffer a debilitating stroke. Rather than surrender to the illness and become a prison of your own body you decide to rebel. Even though you have severely limited mobility and little coordination, you force yourself to accomplish mundane tasks such as sweeping a porch. Slowly but surely you regain a firm grasp on your faculties. You are even able to return to teaching for another five years. Each day you up the ante on physical challenges and by the age of seventy-three, you are able to fulfill another test—climb the mountains of Colombia.

In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it is understandable for one to overlook the privileged cognitive abilities that he or she bears as a human being in comparison to other species.  In particular, humans, as mammals and apes, are seen as cognitively more advanced than other life forms, such as reptiles, mollusks, and microbes because they can process the greatest amount of information of their social and physical surroundings.