Day: March 29, 2006

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AD/HD

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder is a neurobiological disorder.
People with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder tend to have inordinate amounts of trouble maintaining attention-discipline, may be impulsive, and especially at younger ages are often hyperactive — uncharacteristically so for their age and level of development.

There is no way to diagnose AD/HD without a frame of reference.

There is no value judgment, just a comparison and then an observation.

Right?

Right.

Individual A is an aberration, though they belong to an identifiable sub-group with defining characteristics

AD/HD does not imply lower levels of intelligence — on the contrary.

AD/HD has been associated with certain personality traits that can be seen as other defining “symptoms”: High energy, creativity, alternating extreme empathy/unempathy, strong sense of intuition, trouble/frustration making self understood…

Panksepp says a growing intolerance of childhood playfulness has led to more and more children being labeled with AD/HD

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Attention

From wikipedia:

Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one thing while ignoring other things. Examples include listening carefully to what someone is saying while ignoring other conversations in the room (e.g. the cocktail party problem, Cherry, 1953). Attention can also be split, as when a person drives a car, puts on makeup, and talks on a cell phone at the same time. (Never really try this, however.)

Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Of the many cognitive processes associated with the human mind (decision-making, memory, emotion, etc), attention is considered the most concrete because it is tied so closely to perception. As such, it is a gateway to the rest of cognition.

The most famous definition of attention was provided by one of the first major psychologists, William James:

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” (Principles of Psychology, 1890)

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Memory

From wiktionary:
memory (countable and uncountable; plural memories)
(uncountable)

  1. The ability of an organism to record information about things or events in the brain with the facility of recalling them later at will.
    Memory is a facility common to all animals.
  2. A record of a thing or an event stored in the brain of an organism.
    I have no memory of that event.

And from wikipedia:

Memory is the ability of the brain to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. Although traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In the recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a new branch of science that represents a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience, called cognitive neuroscience.

There are several ways of classifying memories, based on duration, nature and retrieval of information. From an information processing perspective there are three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory:

  • Encoding (processing and combining of received information)
  • Storage (creation of a permanent record of the encoded information)
  • Retrieval/Recall (calling back the stored information in response to some cue for use in some process or activity)

>and a quote: “Memory is but the storage of fragmentary but ‘relevant’ features” – Walter J. Ong
Read on for selections from the OED definition…

Continue reading “Memory”