Brain surgeon breaks down secret behind ADHD brain
If you don't have ADHD, understanding it can be difficult. It may seem like the person in your life with the diagnosis, whether it be a young child, teen or a spouse, is simply being lazy or messy when seemly small things are big challenges. Their room may always be a wreck, they may constantly forget things or just lay on the couch while the house is destroyed because they have an appointment later that day.
It can look as if the person isn't trying but to the person with the condition, they're likely experiencing a lot of emotions around not being able to push through the mental block to get things done. There are still quite a few people that argue that ADHD isn't real because it's not something they personally believe in but ADHD is a neurological disorder that can be seen in brain scans.
Dr. Daniel Amen, who has scanned over 250,000 brains, breaks down the difference between brains that have ADHD and those that don't in a resurfaced clip.
The brain surgeon appears on the podcast Diary of a CEO where he speaks to the host Steven Bartlett about ADHD. Bartlett himself has the condition and suspects his mother also has it but is undiagnosed. In the clip pulled from the nearly two hour long episode, Dr. Amen answers the burning question on many people's minds, where does ADHD come from?
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"Often, children who have ADHD have one or both parents who have it," Dr. Amen says. "Well, it's genetic. It's clearly genetic. If I don't see it in someone's family, I think head trauma."
If someone has ADHD, they can likely look back at their family and see evidence of the disorder in their relatives, starting with one of their parents. But not everyone realizes they have ADHD and fall into wondering what's wrong with them.
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Bartlett himself shares that he was "useless" in school before explaining his experience growing up, "I just couldn't sit in classrooms. I couldn't sit in classrooms and stay focused on what they were telling me, especially when I wasn't interested. That's been like a defining quality of my life. I'm exceptionally good at not doing things I'm not interested in and I'm good at what I'm interested in but when I'm not interested, I can see my peers almost will themselves to engage in things they weren't interested in and I could never do that. I always said I'm an exceptional quitter."
Hearing someone describe themselves as useless may be jarring to some, especially when it was something reiterated by a teacher. But oftentimes, people with ADHD struggle with feeling like they're inherently broken because they don't have the executive functioning capabilities to force themselves to do things that don't have a payoff large enough to override their brain.
Dr. Amen explains later in the clip that people with ADHD have brains that essentially shut down when faced with completing a task, while people without ADHD have an active brain in the same scenario. But when someone with ADHD is given a stimulant medication like Ritilin, Adderall or Concerta, it activates the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex–the parts of the brain Dr. Amen says are sleepy in people with ADHD.
The doctor further explains that when scanning the brains of people with ADHD, their brains completely deactivate when tasked with concentration but are active while at rest. This is where medication comes in to help the brain activate while focusing, though it's not a cure for the disorder, it's an aid.
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"Having ADHD is like people who wear glasses," Dr. Amen shares. "People who wear glasses aren't dumb, crazy or stupid, our eyeballs are shaped funny and we wear glasses to focus. I said, people that have ADD aren't dumb, crazy or stupid, some of them are the brightest people I know but their frontal lobes deactivate. Taking medicine is like glasses for your frontal lobe, it helps you focus."