A must see! If you have a child with attention issues, you should watch this presentation by Dr. Russell Barkley, a distinguished lecturer from the University of California’s MIND Institute. Research indicates that children with ADHD have difficulties in the executive systems, particularly the non verbal working memory. “The non verbal working memory is the origin of the sense of time, the subjective awareness of time. Which explains why ADHD so disrupts the individual's ability to deal with time. Why they are always late, never prepared, never organized.”
Dr. Barkley continues, “ADHD is a form of time blindness. ADHD children have a near sightedness to the future. Future events have to be immediate and compelling before the individual is capable of dealing with them. Events that lie at a distance across time are of no value to these children. They can’t muster anticipatory responses and prepare for future events. To put it in another way, the ADHD individual lives in the now, and past and future are of little consequence in the regulation of their behavior.’ He calls this deficit in the non verbal working memory, Temporal Neglect Syndrome ("Temporal" is often used for "timing" in scientific articles.).
“My theory of ADHD is that ADHD causes a massive problem with the human sense of time.” Dr. Russell Barkley.
In this presentation, Dr. Barkley speaks of 5 different executive functions that seem to be deficient in ADHD. Please check out the Data Spreadsheet posted this past summer showing gains in executive functioning across the board.
