The Root Cause of ADHD in Children

I spent a day at Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast this past Labor Day Weekend. I took lots of long walks, enjoying the ocean breeze, the feel of the sand under my feet, and mostly, the sights and sounds of children playing--digging holes, playing catch, running, wrestling, flying kites, riding bikes, and many other activities as well. It occurred to me that it's rather unusual to see kids doing this in their normal day-to-day lives. It takes a trip to beach, I think--away from television, computers, and video games--to get back to the kinds of basic, fundamental activities that are so vital to a child's healthy development.

What a difference a few decades make. When I was growing up in Detroit and Southfield, Michigan in the  1960s and 1970s, I used to spend hours and hours outside. I have fond memories of playing kick the can or capture the flag on warm summer evenings until well past twilight. Summer mornings, before it got too hot, my best friend, Brian Salesin, and I often rode our bikes to the tennis courts on the grounds of the elementary school we attended. Brian, who was already an expert tennis player at the age of eight, taught me how to play well enough not to embarrass myself.

When school was in session, we played floor hockey in gym class and street hockey on the playground version at recess. After school, pickup games of street hockey often lasted for hours. Depending on the season, there were also pickup football, baseball, and basketball games. And if there weren't enough friends available for a pickup game of baseball, for example, no problem; my next door neighbor John could always be persuaded pretty easily to play curb ball. Curb ball is a game with its own intricate rules in which the players take turn smacking a rubber ball against the curb, trying to make hits and score runs.

I'm not just waxing nostalgic here. As I write about these things, they evoke very vivid sense memories. I can still hear the thwack of the rubber ball against the curb. When we played street hockey, we used a hollow plastic puck that was filled with maybe a dozen or so BBs to give it some weight. I can still hear it skittering across the pavement; I can still see the little piece of black electrical tape covering the hole drilled into the puck so that the BBs could be placed inside it; and I can still remember how the chill of the late Autumn air felt against my face and the dexterity of my movements as I moved the puck toward the goal, passed it, or maneuvered to accept a pass from a teammate. There are also olfactory memories I took for granted at the time but that currently surprise me because they evoke the time and place so vividly--anything from the cherry scented pipe tobacco that my father used to smoke to the smells of stuffed cabbage, stew, or roast brisket diffusing through the air from an open kitchen window.

All sensory perceptions are vital to the health of a developing brain. But the sensory perception most critical to healthy brain development is the input the brain gets from sensory receptors embedded within muscles.

For the past 17 months, I've been taking post-graduate courses in functional neurology through the Carrick Institute of Graduate studies. A phrase that is etched permanently in my mind at this point is this: The brain is a receptor-driven system.

As we move through our lives, holding ourselves upright against gravity, sensory receptors called muscle spindle cells monitor the stretch of muscles and provide a constant barrage of electrical stimulation to the brain. The brain's 30 billion neurons requires this input to maintain existing connections and establish new connections among each other. This is the key to survival, development, learning, and adaptation.

When children spend excessive amounts of time watching television and playing video games (in other words providing neural input that completely or mostly bypass normal pathways over which signals from muscle spindle cells travel), it affects the ability to maintain existing connections and establish new ones. Likewise, anything that diminishes the ability to send, receive, and initiate normal cellular responses to such input affects the ability to maintain connections and establish new ones.

Lack of regular play time diminishes stimulation to the developing brain. Injuries during birth can diminish stimulation by inhibiting the motion of the bones and muscles of a child's neck. Anything that negatively affects a pregnant woman's hormone levels and the normal function of her central nervous system can have a negative impact on the brain of the developing fetus. Toxins in the soil, air, and water supply as well as poor nutrition in general can be detrimental to a developing brain. And childhood obesity, which is associated with decreased muscle mass and muscle tone, also results in decreased brain stimulation.

I don't believe it's a coincidence that children's attention spans have grown shorter and classroom discipline more challenging over the past two or three decades as technological innovations and social changes have made us more passive as a society and more susceptible to environmental and emotional stresses. Over this period of time we have seen

• Higher divorce rates
• Increased consumption of processed and fast foods
• Inadequate day care resources available to single mothers or families where both parents work
• Greater numbers of women having children past the age of thirty-five 

Robert Melillo talks about all these influences and more in his excellent book Disconnected Kids. One statistic cited in Dr. Melillo's book that should give you pause: "The average high school graduate will have spent 15,000 to 18,000 hours watching television but only 12,000 hours in school."

The title of Melillo's book speaks to the growing body of evidence from neural science research that attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as well as many other childhood behavior and developmental disorders, are really just different manifestation of the same basic problem: lack of stimulation to the developing brain leads to imbalances in electrical activity between different parts of the brain. What makes the human species so unique is that our brains are so specialized, with different functions residing in different parts of the brain--often on different sides. But when the various parts of the brain cannot communicate freely, it is, in effect, functionally disconnected and thus cannot integrate its functions properly: thus, you get "disconnected kids."

I encourage anyone with young children to read this book. One of the book's chapters includes a checklist that allows you to identify whether your child has a right brain or a left brain deficiency and the level of severity of the imbalance. Much of the rest of the book from that point on tells you how to go about handling the imbalance. I found it interesting to go through the book from the perspective of what I remember about myself as a child. It was clear to me that although I had some symptoms of disconnection, the endless hours I spent playing outside were a blessing that I had no way of fully appreciating at the time.

In fact, as I grow older and spend more time in front of the computer and less time engaged in physical activity, I notice how much more fragile the state of my central nervous system has become--perhaps in ways that only someone who studies this stuff closely would be aware of--but fragile nonetheless. And that's why I'm turning the computer off now and going out for a run!