Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

by Gabor Maté

I was forever throwing my mind scraps to feed on, as if to a ferocious and malevolent beast that would devour me the moment it was not chewing on something else. All my life I had known no other way to be.

What can be immobilizingly difficult is to arouse the brain’s motivational apparatus in the absence of personal interest.

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The restlessness coexists with long periods of procrastination. The threat of failure or the promise of reward has to be immediate for the motivation apparatus to be turned on.

On the other hand, when there is something one wants, neither patience nor procrastination exist. One has to do it, get it, have it, experience it, immediately.

“I am a person of permanent potential,”

That the traveling always takes longer than I expect, that ice will have to be scraped off the car, that I will not find the keys, that I may get stuck in traffic do not arise in the mind as concrete possibilities.

When visual-spatial orientation is impaired, a person tends to bump his head a lot or run into people unseeingly and have difficulty following physical directions

Each time we scream at someone in traffic, we are telling a story from the earliest part of our life.