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What are your thoughts on ADHD? I’m 16 in high school and it seems that more and more students are being put on meds to fix their lack of discipline. Yeah, I think it’s just, it’s just like psychiatry. Except in extraordinarily rare cases. There are people who are neurologically damaged, who have physiological reasons for difficulty in maintaining optimized attentional focus. You see that in people, for example, who have, who have fetal alcohol syndrome. Most of the time, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a rubbish diagnosis. Panksepp, the same neuroscientist that I talked to you about, who investigated behavior in rats, also noted, this is quite fun, that if you deprive juvenile male rats of the opportunity to play boisterously, they become hyperactive. And also, if you deprive them of the opportunity to play optimally, their prefrontal cortices do not mature well. And the prefrontal cortex matures late and it constitutes, in some sense, the pinnacle of neurological development. And it needs to develop in the course of intense play. And then he noticed that if you administered hyperactive play-deprived rats, amphetamine, Ritalin, that it would inhibit their frenetic playing. And that’s pretty much what’s happening in schools. So the schools are not well adapted to boys. I don’t think they’re particularly well adapted to girls either, by the way, but they’re particularly not well adapted to boys. Boys aren’t designed to sit still and be bored out of their skulls for seven hours a day. And there are boys with particular temperaments who are even less inclined to be able to do that. So, for example, if you’re extroverted, highly social, possessed by a fair bit of enthusiasm and positive emotion, then you’re going to appear more hyperactive. If you’re creative, then your attention is going to be fragmented in some sense by the multiplicity of your interests. So if you’re creative and extroverted, then you have both of those working against you in terms of your quiescent adaptation to the school environment. If you’re disagreeable, which is also more likely if you’re male, then you’re quite likely to push back against what you see as stupid arbitrary rules. And so we know perfectly well, for example, that attention deficit disorder overlaps with childhood conduct disorder and antisocial behavior. And I’m not saying that all children diagnosed with hyperactivity are conduct disordered. I’m saying that more aggressive boys tend to manifest symptoms that sometimes tilt them towards juvenile criminality and sometimes tilt them towards attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. But it’s partly their somewhat rebellious temperament. And so if you’re disagreeable and extroverted and creative, then well, then why wouldn’t you be hyperactive? And so and then you might say, so when when when amphetamines were first used to treat hyperactivity, the hypothesis was the following. So kids who are hyperactive or attention deficit disorder are of a different neurological type. Now, as I said, in rare circumstances, that’s true. But absent evidence for neurological dysfunction, I would hesitate to make that presumption. The run of the mill hyperactive boy, if you put him on amphetamines, Ritalin, his attentional focus improves. Now, the original hypothesis was that’s because these abnormal abnormally neurologically structured hyperactive boys have a paradoxical reaction to amphetamine administration. It calms them down, whereas with normal people, they become more stimulated. OK, there’s a word for that theory, and the word is wrong. OK, so more intelligent and differentiated analysis has indicated that if you give any child amphetamines, they’re the grip of what they’re attending to is stronger. So all children are calmed down by stimulants perversely because the psychomotor stimulant, which is a dopamine agonist, which activates the focal exploratory system, does increase the capacity for focal attention. But it does that with all children. And so a positive reaction to amphetamine in relationship to attentional focus is no indication whatsoever, even in the most minute manner, that the diagnosis was correct. And so. I don’t buy it, except in these rare cases is that we use amphetamines to conveniently modify the behavior of bored boys because we’re too stupid to construct our education systems in a manner that doesn’t drive them mad. Look, you know, normal university students take redline like mad in university because they learn that they can sustain attention, whether that’s productive or not in the long run is a whole different issue, but they can sustain attention with less effort if they use amphetamines. Now, that’s a degenerating game fundamentally, like most drug use. And I suppose if it’s very carefully regulated and the doses are low, then the negative consequences are less dramatic. But I think the whole thing’s just it’s a it’s a psychosocial fraud. It’s a what do they call that when a system produces the there’s a name for a disease that’s created by doctors. I can’t remember it. What’s the word? I actually genetic I had to genetic. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Hyperactivity is an I I actually genetic disease created by schools. Yeah, that’s that’s the case. So boys should play more way more than they do way more. They should play to the point of exhaustion in some sense every day. Really, really. They’ll quit when they’ve had enough. One more question. One more question. I bet your hyper active son has no trouble paying attention when he’s playing video games. Well, that’s worth thinking about, isn’t it?