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ADD Pathfinder Newsletter, Issue 1 --- May 2004 |
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I’ve worked with ADD adults now for 9 years. To me too many ADD adults to be coincidental are very creative. Most in the field agree. My groups verbally flow in and out of spontaneous brain-storming, imagery and feelings. Creative experiences—intuitive knowing and realizations, daydream images—are shared right along with ADD challenges. I’ve shared one personal creative moment: “I was in high school. It was the day all entries to an essay contest were due. I’d thought endlessly of a certain idea, but all but given up on how to pull it off. When what I can only describe as a sudden sense of direction and exhilaration filled me. I knew I had to write. Significance hovered in the moment. After a deep breath, in amazement I wrote with a playful ease and flow, I’d never known. No frustrating stop-and-go….I won the statewide contest.”
My personal moment, as well as the experiences I describe as commonly heard from ADD adults, are all natural and normal (I promise to explain each later). I must say they can also be confusing. ADD was not a part of my high school days. I know now I was an over-focused type, whose school achievement was already inconsistent. The essay from the blue made me feel once again different. PROCESSING ON THE RIGHT We are beginning to gleam more elements of processing on the right side of the brain. Harvard psychiatrists, Hallowell and Ratey, saw creativity as a criteria to identify ADD. It isn’t part of the DSM-IV diagnosis. But when we describe thinking styles of creative people, we may as well be describing the thinking of ADD adults. Creativity is a natural process. It is something you already have simply waiting to be released. You can find it within, develop techniques to utilize it, but you cannot just learn it. Neuroscientists confirm that creativity emanates from deep structures in the right brain. Now since I am writing about you, I’ll invite you to take this quick quiz to discover which side of the brain you predominantly use. You may already know; some knew along with poets and artists who foreshadowed scientific research by decades. This informal tool will create awareness. BREAKTHROUGH BRAIN RESEARCH Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize for his breakthrough research some 35 years ago which changed our concept of our brain. This was the first crack in the black box—a brain we could not see. (This research came from surgery patients.) We learned from Dr. Sperry we have two brains—one in each hemisphere: left and right brain. The brains communicate with each other through a complex cabling system, “a bundle of two hundred million fibers processing something like several billion bits per second between the cerebral hemisphere called the corpus callosum.”  Since “Split Brain Theory” our scientific knowledge of the brain has rapidly expanded. The black box is now open. Cognitive neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists, neuroimagining scientists, cognitive psychologists, and neurobiologists have all made contributions. Pioneering educators have drawn from brain functioning research to create practical educational applications. This chart shows how each side perceives life. Sperry found both the left and right brain have high-level, equally complex and sophisticated cognitions. The left brain analyzes and labels in a linear way; the right brain sees the whole and synthesizes in a global fashion.
A SAD BUT TRUE STORY One way to see the differences in processing might just be to say the right brain has a separate way of knowing from the left brain. The following is a dramatic example showing hemispheric specialization at work. The following is a true story:
“’Billy was a sixth grader. His teacher, reviewing the previous day’s math
lesson, called on him to define infinity…Billy squirmed in his seat and said
nothing. “Come on Billy, what’s infinity?” His teacher insisted. He looked at
the floor. Exasperated, she commanded him again to answer, whereupon he
mumbled. “Well, infinity is Billy had verbalized a complex right-brain image and made a non-literal statement. Literally, infinity is nothing like a box of Cream of Wheat, and the teacher looking for a left-brain definition, understandably ignored his answer. Later, Billy was able to explain his image to a more receptive ear: “You see, on a box of Cream of Wheat, there’s a picture of a man holding a box of Cream of Wheat, which shows a man holding a box of Cream of Wheat—and it goes on and on like that forever and ever, even if you can’t see it anymore. Isn’t that infinity?” Billy had a rich right brain understanding of infinity. The literal definition meant so little he couldn’t reproduce it even though he wrote it down the day before. WE NOW KNOW HOW IT WORKS Brain research gives full scientific weight to a way of thinking that Western society had ignored, down-played and even ridiculed. Today we call it right-brained thinking. Up to Sperry’s research our cultural view was humans had a “strong left and a weak right.” Our school systems were designed for left-brained learning. Then came the powerful message that we had cut-off half of our brain. For optimum learning to take place our ideas needed to crackle across the connecting cable of the two brains—back and forth, back and forth, brain aerobics—generating energy in mutual support. A great disadvantage of left mode learning is that it blocks our ability to see the whole picture.
-Roger W. Sperry “Lateral Specialization of Cerebral Function in the Surgically Separated Hemispheres,” 1973. WHY SO DIFFERENT? I know Thom Hartmann with his Hunter/Farmer model of ADD didn’t set out to depict R-Mode. Yet in speculating the prehistoric hunter might be a genetic link of today’s ADD adult, he takes us to the origin of the right brain. Right brain is rooted in man’s survival and sense of intuitive oneness with a natural world. Only hunting societies existed on our planet for 2.5 million years. Hartmann points to the hunter’s scanning, easy distractibility, and love of the adrenaline-filled moment of the hunt as then highly prized traits. Nomadic hunters lived in an ever changing and challenging landscaped controlled by unpredictable natural forces. One can speculate that his thinking would be fluid, nonverbal, fluctuating, and spatial with shifting images and forms. In the face of vast open land, endless forests and jungle, to spot game or water he looked for patterns in the whole—not bits and pieces. THE HUNTER LEFT HIS DRAWINGS Importantly, the hunter expressed his perceptions through imagery. HIS IMAGERY AND PERCEPTIONS WERE EXPRESSED NOT IN WORDS BUT IN DRAWINGS. Drawing predates written language by 10,000 years. It is possible that drawing like language comes from deep innate structures in the brain. Our mascot Kokopelli can be found among these pictographs. 
Educator-Author, Betty Edwards, Ph.D., has dedicated her professional life to applying Sperry’s theory to practical techniques. She believes that children should be taught visual, perceptual cognitions right along with the ABC’s. Edward’s belief is that there are five key cognitions which make R-Mode thinking possible. These are five very basic drawing skills. She does not want us to create a nation of artists, and is consistent in stating her research is not about art with the capital “A”. We don’t expect children who learn to read and write to become great authors. The 3R’s are the keys to L-Mode, and she has found the keys to R-Mode. You may remember Edward’s first book in 1968, ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.’ She collaborated with Sperry. Her first book became the world’s most widely used drawing book, selling 2.5 million copies in 13 languages. It became a training tool far beyond the art field—in fact it was a book about left and right brain thinkers. Betty Edwards has updated The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain as well as Drawing on the Artist Within. This author believes that drawing is a learnable, teachable skill that “every normal person with average eyesight and average eye-hand coordination—who can thread a needle or catch a baseball can learn.” Edwards is a college professor who teaches art classes to non-artistic students, students that have never shown any artistic talent. There is always one she states, who says “I’m your Waterloo.” But she succeeds. For research purposes, Dr. Edwards asks “Tell me, if your perceptions are so different now, after learning to see and draw, what were they like before?” The most usual response has been, “It’s really hard for me to say, but I think I was mostly just naming things—looking at things but not really seeing them.” I will conclude this article with illustrations of this author’s concepts. As a therapist and coach, I believe those with ADD who are also right-brained can benefit from these techniques. We have more research and answers than ever before. Our schools for the most part remain left-brain oriented. Change comes slowly. One neuroscientist points out, “The stars are out all the time. Why is it that we can only see them at night? Because there is so much interference from the sun. The right hemisphere is like that. It constantly sends us messages, but there is too much static going on for us to notice.”
What skills are needed to draw everything? Edges, cross contour, size angle proportion perspective, shading, negative space, color pattern
THE BASIC STRATEGIES OF SATURATION To saturate your mind with information about a problem, I suggest that the following heuristic will help you see whether it fits within the boundaries of the problem, how it fits, where it fits, and why it is important (or unimportant). To achieve that perspective, you will have to be able to:
Paradoxically, these verbal questions can best be answered not by means of language, but by skillful seeing. -Betty Edwards, Ph.D. ©2004 ADD Pathfinders |
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kinda like a box of Cream of Wheat.” “Billy, don’t
be silly,” she snapped, and called on Johnny, who was eager to share his
learning. “Infinity is immeasurable, unbounded space, time or quantity,” he
said. The teacher was pleased, since this was the only appropriate answer she
could imagine. 
“The main theme to emerge…is that there appears to be two modes of thinking,
verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right brain
hemispheres, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science
in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What is comes
down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.”
