I never understood how other students in high school could do their homework while watching TV, or even while listening to music. If I needed to concentrate on something, I preferred the silence of my room. Even today, when I am driving and nearing a destination I've never been to before, I turn off or turn down the music as I focus on finding the right address.
I don't have ADD but since I live with people that do, I know how powerless they can be to distractions, especially digital ones like the computer and TV. I feel so bad for my son when he tries so hard to tear himself away from the screen but is completely incapacitated. He literally can't take his eyes off it. I have to turn it off or step in front of the screen to end his hypnosis.
Now when you go grocery shopping, not only do they advertise their products over the loudspeaker, but they also bombard you with TVs on the end caps. It's not enough to throw everything into the isles so there's not enough room for 2 carts abreast, but they have to capture every one of your senses in an attempt to get you to buy more.
It makes me furious that we can't go out to eat without TVs in every corner of the facility; there is nowhere in a restaurant you can sit to get away from the tube. Most people end up putting more food in their mouth as they are unaware of the act of eating due to being absorbed in whatever is on TV. But James' ability to function is impaired so much by that TV that he can't even put that food in his mouth; I constantly have to remind him to eat.
Ironically, it seems that ADD also causes a person to be hyper-focused too. For instance, if such a person is engrossed in a book, they will shut out everything else around them and be in the realm of their text. A lot of people do this when engaged in a book, but not to the extreme characteristic of ADD. Rex resents that I try to prevent him from reading. It's not that I don't want him to read; it's that I don't want him to disappear for days or weeks on end, completely inaccessible to his family.
I am a demanding wife; I require my spouses attention. I realize that my love language (as referred to in the 5 Love Languages) is quality time. But I don't have the corner on the market for this. Everyone needs attention, even if it is not their primary love language. By quality time, I realize that while going and doing something fun with that person is nice, what I really mean is that I need that person's undivided attention, no matter the activity.
I recently read an article called How to Miss a Childhood in which the author, a daycare provider, described how the parents who pick up their kids or take their kids to the park may be there with them physically but are very distant and are missing their entire childhoods because they are really only attuned to their cell phones! Upon my initial reading of the article, I thought "what terrible parents to ignore their kids like that!" Indeed, it angers me to see couples sitting in a restaurant booth together but miles apart as they are in their own little world texting other people. But then it hit me that I may not be glued to a cell phone, but I am certainly guilty of not paying attention to my kids! We all do it: talking to a friend face to face and our child keeps tugging at our shirt asking us a question, reading a book or watching TV or sitting at the computer while our loved one tells us about their day and we nod and say "uh-huh" like we are really listening. It only dawned on me when I saw myself get upset with my husband for reading something while I was trying to read something to him, and then I did something similar just 5 minutes later! What a hypocrite!
It all comes down to our focus. We think we may be giving all our attention to the person at hand but we really aren't. I have been trying to catch myself doing this. And when I do, I stop what I'm doing, fully face the individual (getting down to their level if need be), and give them my full undivided attention. It makes a huge difference. I know because that's what I would appreciate someone doing if I wanted their attention.
We admire those who seem to be able to juggle many balls at once. Multitasking is a skill we strive for. But is cramming everything in at once really as efficient as we pretend? Think about how many times you burned dinner while trying to write an email, break up kids quarreling, and answering the phone at the same time. Maybe it's just me, but I can't give my 100 percent to any of those things when doing them all at once, and then I end up doing a crappy job on all of them. Rex says he's amazed at how I whirl around like the Tasmanian Devil, always working on a million things without skipping a beat. (I say that's why I like dancing to fast songs where I can hide my mistakes.)
Like most people, I prided myself on my talent of multitasking. Recently, I've been reconsidering the virtues of multitasking. One obvious example of people's inability to multitask is cell-phone use while driving. At the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, there were several optical illusions that spoke to me as to why multitasking wasn't as productive as we like to pretend it is.
One of them was the Cheshire Cat Wipe By focusing on one thing with one eye and another with the other eye, "each eye feeds your brain with two very different views. Your brain tries to put these two views together in a way that makes sense, choosing part or all of the view from one eye or the other. When your brain combines and waivers between these views of your friend’s face, it’s called perceptual or binocular rivalry."
I think this is a visual representation of how a person with ADD is unable to focus on more than one thing at a time.
There was another one where there were dots of different colors scattered at different points on a small table. You are supposed to focus on the dot in the center. The colored dots will seem to disappear in a few seconds. The effect is due to retinal fatigue which occurs when the afterimage of an object cancels the stimulus of the object on the retina. This is a visual representation of what I think happens to people hyper-focused like James or my husband who both have ADD.
I don't think it applies only to people with ADD, only it is heightened significantly for them.
I came across the MOST amazing article in regards to this phenomenon called "Is Multi-tasking bad for your brain?" In it, the author explains how the brain processes information, especially when there is interference. And then he makes a connection to how our multi-tasking is leading to man-made-autism.
"Using brain-scans he’s found that if we multi-task while studying, the information goes into the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills, from where it is difficult to retrieve facts and ideas. If we are not distracted, it heads to the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. 'There is a cost to the way that our society is changing. Humans are not built to work this way,' Professor Poldrack says. 'We're really built to focus.' So multi-tasking is actually bad for a child's intellectual development. This growing problem has been christened 'attention deficit trait' by psychiatrist Edward Hallowell. 'As our minds fill with noise, the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything,' he argues. Such scatterbrained attention-swinging may be causing a form of autism among children growing up immersed in technology, affecting their ability to interact with others. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and author of the book iBrain, warns that children who spend their formative years multi-tasking lose out on chances to focus on developing crucial but slow-forming interpersonal skills. ‘With the weakening of the brain’s neural circuitry, controlling human contact, our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret - and even miss - subtle, non-verbal messages,’ he says. He claims this can lead to a form of autism. ‘You can think of it along the scale of Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of it, where there’s not social connectiveness.’"
My thoughts have been somewhat erratic, but they are all connected by the conclusion that multitasking is self-defeating. If I want to do something efficiently, I must focus all of my attention on that one thing and not attempt to do another until I am done focusing on the first thing. And while it may not appear to be so, it is most crucial in relationships.
And just for laughs, while looking up the definition of "multitasking," I came across this example in Urban Dictionary:
"I'm sorry, Joe, I was multitasking. Can you repeat that?"
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