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Treating ADHD With Games
Mana Knight writes "The Escapist has an article called 'Gaming the Brain' about video games being used to treat ADHD. Quoting: 'One of the more promising therapies is neurofeedback, which involves continually monitoring patients' brainwaves. Subjects attempt to change their brainwaves to a set pattern and receive an auditory signal that tells them whether they were successful. With enough repetition, neurofeedback can rewire a person's brain. A study published in 2005 examines how patients diagnosed with ADHD can learn to better maintain their concentration through neurofeedback. Depending on how individuals respond to this type of treatment, it can even be used as a replacement for medication.'"
You can train concentration through games, but violent games don't train violence.
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I wonder if the appearance of more and better EEG controllers like OCZ's NIA or Emotiv's EPOC will be followed by games directly oriented to the control of those brainwaves.
I then wonder how much experience we have regarding the effect it may have on a little kid to learn to control his brainwaves like some control a plastic guitar.
Will they develop new mental illnesses like mental carpal tunnel or will they develop other skills like the ability to fall asleep at will in less than a second.
From my understanding, this might help people with "real" ADHD too. The brain does not have some static wiring scheme, force it to do something enough and it will make new wiring to handle that something more efficiently. Some of this is probably just teaching concentration, but it sounds like the goal is to keep subjects in a correct thought patterns for long enough patterns that the brain actually starts to rewire to fit these new patterns.
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Wrong.
We're in "Gattaca Territory here". It's tough, but it's not QUITE a total lock. It will just take the ADD subject 7 times as long to train the capability. But "any progress is greater than zero", and all kinds of activities in this class help.
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I didn't read the article, but it's clearly stupid. I'm bored, I'm gonna go play games now.
If ADHD meant "inability to pay attention to anything whatsoever for a long time", you'd have made a great point.
It doesn't. You didn't.
I have moderately severe ADHD. This is easily confirmed by my reaction to the Schedule II stimulants -- they make me calm, and allow me to do things like sit still without vibrating in place. I can quite easily, unmedicated, play a video game for 16 hours straight -- as long as it happens to be catching my interest. If it gets dull, I start doing other things. Often, other things at the same time. I have been known to play WoW for 8 hours while watching old sitcoms on a nearby DVD player and reading a book. There are also times when the game is sufficiently interesting to actually hold my interest for long periods of time. It's not unique to games, either -- get me started on a really interesting math problem, and I'm not going to distract easily. I can program for 16 hours straight, too.
Sometimes.
The disorder, again, isn't that I can't stay on a task for a long time -- it's that I don't necessarily have the ability to *control* what task I'm on. If you give me a really interesting math problem, and then tell me to do something else, it may be beyond my ability to continue the other task without getting side-tracked onto the math problem again.
I'm aware that a lot of people think this is "just laziness". I always assumed it was, until I started comparing notes with other people who have clinical diagnoses of ADHD, and discovered that there are very clear distinctions in the pattern of attention.
So far, I'm on meds a fair chunk of the time, but I like to spend some time off them. There are things I do better unmedicated. Some of them are even work-related! But I like having a choice in the matter... And that means that I have to take a little time now and then to correct people who are going off a vague sense that ADHD is mostly faked, or whatever, because they've got a very weird stereotyped view of what ADHD ought to mean, and think anything that doesn't look like it isn't "real" ADHD.
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My experience from having and being treated for epilepsy is that everything our minds do is wired in. Memory, behaviour and behavioural disorders are all a result of a particular wiring configuration. Change one thing, you change other aspects of the system because they are just different aspects of the same system.
When I had RSI in my right hand I changed to a left handed mouse configuration. When I couldn't make myself work that way I spent a couple of hours browsing porn. My brain rewired itself to accept a left handed mouse. Likewise if you want to change a configuration you call ADHD then give the system some non-ADHD tasks to do with a carrot to keep them at it.
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Ever heard of "hyperfocus"?
I'm diagnosed with ADHD and play WoW for quite long stretches of time. While I tend to have quite a short attentionspan for most things games work quite the opposite for me.
Games tend to calm me down and get me in a state which enables me to really focus and concentrate on a single task or goal for much longer periods of time. A state of mind mostly refered to as hyperfocus. Generally it means that if you find something fun or very interresting it enables you to extremely focus on the subject. A thing most people with adhd will recognize I think.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Everybody has a natural tendency to prefer to do what interests them. There are two things that make it a disorder: (1) you can't control it, and (2) it has a significant, negative impact on your life.
ADHD isn't a new diagnosis, it's just a new name and conceptualization for informal diagnoses people have been making for years. You're doing it here: just not interested. Other diagnoses include "lazy", "unmotivated", and "absent minded". The problem with these informal diagnoses is that they're too simplistic. They're internally consistent if you want to cherry pick certain facts but give you an accurate picture of the individual's life. It's not that students aren't interested in getting along in school, it's that they can't even if they want to. If they don't want to, it's not a disorder.
Likewise, a diagnosis like "lazy" doesn't work either, because people with ADHD have the capacity to work harder than their "normal" counterparts. "Absent minded" or "wooly headed" doesn't cover everything either, because in emergency, high stress situations, people with ADHD may feel, calm, focused, and normal, and show unusual presence of mind. In fact part of the pathology of the disease is that it keeps people's lives on the edge of chaos, and they perform better there.
Brain studies support a biological basis for ADHD. For example when people with ADHD are given a task that normal people perform well on, brain scan suggested that increasing conscious effort actually makes their brains less coordinated. It is literally the case that the harder they try, the worse they do. It's like throwing the throttle all the way forward on an outboard motor: it creates a lot of noise but the props aren't driving the boat forward; their just cavitating.
This may be why games are promising, because the same is true in games. You don't want to try hard, you want to achieve flow state. Think about that for a moment: the problem with labeling ADHD people as lazy and unmotivated is that it leads to exactly the opposite actions than they need. They don't need to try harder, they need to relax. It's like ADHD brains work in a different stimulation band than average brains; the effect of stimulant medications is to shift the band towards the normal spectrum.
Or course ADHD has its problems too. It's a very bad name for a complex of several phenomena: a higher need for stimulation to achieve optimal performance, poor performance at conscious direction of attention, and poor impulse control, each of which is distinct but related to other facets and may manifest itself differently in different people. What is clear though is that there is ample evidence that people who should receive this diagnosis are biologically different. For example a dose of amphetamines that might undermine impulse control in a normal person could improve it in somebody with ADHD.
I believe your point is that ADHD is part of natural human population variation; if so, you'd be right. The exact line between a character quirk and a psychiatric disorder is not clear, nor is is fixed. It may be that in preindustrial societies people who now receive a diagnosis might have provided societies with the benefits of restless, stimulation deprived individuals: as big game hunters, explorers, warriors, craftsmen, or shamans. The problem is that in a society where it is mandatory to regulate your life by the clock and calendar, even moderate ADHD traits are highly mal-adaptive. I've heard it said that the primary symptom of adult ADHD is chronic underachievement.
Of course, one alternative would be to reorganize all of society to make use of each individual's unique characteristics. Unfortunately, that's just not realistic. We can wish society was different than it is, we can work towards that end, but in the meantime you have nothing to offer people who drop through the cracks. It's more pr
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The difference is that it's a matter of absolutes. Lots of people can get into a state of hyperfocus. People with ADHD are often in that state or can't concentrate on a single task at all. Either everything else is shut almost completely out, or any little thing can pull attention away.
Hyperfocus is like a drug. Breaking someone's hyperfocus is like taking cigarettes from a smoker or coffee from a caffeine addict.
ADHD isn't just about dopamine, either. People with ADHD can process any combination of dopamine, serotonin, and/or adrenalin differently. It is often all three.
Poor attitude is not ADHD. Neither are depression, social anxiety disorder, PTSD, OCD, or many other abnormalities with similar ranges of effects. There are diagnostic tests for ADHD that include ruling out other disorders. PET scans, IQ tests, psychological profiles of the whole household, and more are often recommended for proper diagnosis. "Johnny is bored in class" is not a diagnosis of ADHD.
It "sounds like", but it's pretty different.
Most people take quite a while to switch tasks, and tend to have some general awareness of things other than what they're working on. Hyperfocus is generally neither of these. One of the reasons people ask me to help debug stuff that just needs a second opinion is that by the time they've finished their description of the problem, I'm completely on that task, with no idea what I was doing before they started talking. Which means I am more focused on the task ten seconds in than most people would be five minutes in... And massively increases the value of my first-minute responses. ... Of course, I lose my existing state, which is a problem. BUT. Since I do that all the time anyway, I've developed decent coping mechanisms. :)
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