Rethinking ADHD: It’s Not Forgetfulness, It’s a Different Kind of Seeing
Why the Hunter brain processes the world through sound, not sight—and how to work with it, Not against it
One popular theory to explain Hunters suggests that people with ADHD are very independent, and tend to dislike being told what to do. They prefer to think for themselves, and may therefore place less importance on others’ directions.
But another explanation for this, according to some authorities in the field, is that some people with ADHD easily process auditory or verbal information but have more of a challenge with visual inputs (this is the “auditory subset” of Hunters). Perhaps it’s the result of being so sensitive to so many inputs simultaneously (“distractability”). Or the preference for auditory processing. Or maybe it’s just not having learned memory strategies as kids.
When you say to a “normal” person, “Go to the store and pick up a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread, and some orange juice, then stop at the gas station and fill up the car on the way home,” the “normal” person will create a mental picture of each of those things as they hear them described. They picture the store, the milk, the bread, the juice, and the gas station. This congruence of verbal and visual images makes for high-quality memory.
But a highly auditory ADHD person may only hear the words, without creating the mental pictures so vital to memory. They drive off to the store, repeating to themselves, “Milk, bread, juice, gas; milk, bread, juice, gas ...” until something distracts them and they lose the entire memory.
This problem with auditory processing is fairly well documented among many children with ADHD. However, the percentage of its prevalence among the general, non-ADHD population is unknown. It may be that ADHD people are only slightly more likely to have this problem, or it may be a cardinal symptom/problem.
One ADHD adult described it this way:
“I find my comprehension of long chains of words is improved, vastly, by a picture. That way my brain can directly absorb the pattern. If you un-pattern it and translate it into a linear string of words, then I’m forced to absorb the string and reconstruct the pattern.”
This may also account for the so-very-common reports from parents of ADHD children that their kids are television addicts and hate to read. Reading requires the processing of auditory information (words sounded out within the brain into internal pictures), whereas television is purely external visualization. At the residential treatment facility Louise and I ran in New Hampshire, we found it useful to remove the televisions altogether from the residences of ADHD children. After a few months, the kids began reading, and the habit persisted after the reintroduction of television.
There’s also a debate about the cause of the ADHD/auditory processing problem. One camp says that it’s the result of a hard-wiring problem in the brain, the same mis-wiring problem that’s presumed to cause other ADHD symptoms.
The other camp theorizes that converting auditory information to visual information is a learned behavior, acquired by most people about the time they become proficient with language, between ages two and five. Because ADHD people “weren’t paying attention,” they may be more likely to have simply missed out on learning this vital skill.
Since the skill of converting words to pictures can be taught to ADHD people with relative ease, the latter theory appears probable.
The visual cortex, taking up much of the back of our heads, is vastly larger than the brain regions that process words, which is probably why making pictures produces a more enduring and vivid memory than trying to memorize lists of words.
Just say to an ADHD child, “Will you please visualize that?” and watch for the characteristic movement of their eyes toward the ceiling, which usually means they’re creating an internal mental image.
If this is done each time instructions are given to an ADD child, eventually (often in a matter of weeks) the child will learn this basic skill of auditory processing and it becomes second nature.
For ADHD adults, Harry Lorayne’s Memory Book is wonderful, with its heavy emphasis on several methods to teach this skill, along with what Lorayne calls “original awareness,” which is merely a painless method of teaching yourself to pay attention.
Probably the easiest is to imaging absurd or exaggerated pictures when trying to memorize a list. A store so full of bottles of milk that they’re breaking and spilling out of the front door, with the store workers trying to soak the milk with loaves of bread, while the workers are fortifying themselves for the job by drinking giant glasses of orange juice they’re getting from the orange juice fountain that’s been added to the gas pump in front of the store.
The wild nature of the pictures makes them memorable, and if you tie each item to the one before and after it, you can quickly memorize entire lists from front to back and vice-versa.
There are lots of great memory tricks out there (again, Lorayne’s book is a gold mine) that can help both Hunter kids and adults to improve their ability to optimally function in this Farmer’s world!