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

by Gabor Maté

Because the formation of the child’s brain circuits is influenced by the mother’s emotional states, I believe that ADD originates in stresses that affect the mothering parent’s emotional interactions with the infant. They cause the disrupted electrical and chemical circuitry of ADD. Attachment and attunement, two crucial aspects of the infant-parent relationship, are the determining factors. They are the subject of this chapter. The right hemisphere of the mother’s brain, the side where our unconscious emotions reside, programs the infant’s right hemisphere. In the early months, the most important communications between mother and infant are unconscious ones. Incapable of deciphering the meaning of words, the infant receives messages that are purely emotional. They are conveyed by the mother’s gaze, her tone of voice and her body language, all of which reflect her unconscious internal emotional environment. Anything that threatens the mother’s emotional security may disrupt the developing electrical wiring and chemical supplies of the infant brain’s emotion-regulating and attention-allocating systems.b Within minutes following birth, the mother’s odors stimulate the branching of millions of nerve cells in the newborn’s brain. A six-day-old infant can already distinguish the scent of his mother from that of other women. Later on, visual inputs associated with emotions gradually take over as the major influences. By two to seven weeks, the infant will orient toward the mothe...