Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

by Gabor Maté

The time sense of the ADD adult or child is warped in other ways. Ask people with ADD how long it will take to perform a particular task, and they will notoriously underestimate. A kind of magical thinking dominates, characteristic of young children: if I will it, it will happen. In magic anything is possible. Castles can be built or destroyed with the wave of a wand, worlds traversed in seven-league boots, you can get from Oz to Kansas by clicking your heels together. Magic vanquishes time. No infant is born with a sense of time. The gradual acquisition of time sense is a task of development that begins in early childhood. At the outset, the infant has no categories such as time, space or causality, no awareness that one event leads to another. It is not until the age of seven or so, Jean Piaget found, that children begin to have a full understanding of time as a continuous flow. Until then, the child is in what Piaget, the great Swiss cognitive psychologist, called the “preoperational stage,” when everything is observed and interpreted from only one point of view, the child’s. “The preoperational child, in his egocentric manner, believes that he can stop time, speed it up, or slow it down.”1 The networks of nerve cells responsible for the various brain activities do not all develop the same way, at the same time, or, necessarily, to the same degree. With ADD we witness a delayed or permanently arrested maturation of the balanced time sense most people achieve by adulthoo...