The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

by Adam Gazzaley

Starting with selectivity, children and adults who are diagnosed with ADHD are more susceptible to be negatively influenced by distractors than their age-matched peers.43 But those diagnosed with ADHD are not alone in experiencing this burden. On tests of distractibility, all the clinical conditions mentioned in the preceding paragraph exhibit marked impairments. Consider the Stroop test, a classical assessment of distraction where you see words that are written in colored ink and have to say out loud the name of the color, not the name of the written word. For example, if you see the word RED written in blue ink, you should say “blue” rather than “red.” When the color ink and the name are matched (e.g., the word RED in red ink) the response is much more rapid than when RED is written in blue ink. Results of the Stroop test reveal difficulties in suppressing task-irrelevant information for individuals with ADHD, traumatic brain injury, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease.44 The attention deficits experienced by individuals with these conditions extend well beyond the domain of selectivity, notably when it comes to the act of sustaining attention. Deficits in sustained attention are one of the most consistently reported issues in children with ADHD, which involves underactivation of the prefrontal cortex.45 Impaired sustained attention abilities have also been documented in individuals with PTSD, such as rape survivors and war ...