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

by Gabor Maté

In some children, the nervous system is always in a state of hair-trigger alert. Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, measured the electrical activity of an important nerve, the vagus nerve, in five-month-old babies.1 (The vagus connects the central nervous system with the heart, the lungs and the stomach.) Infants with a higher baseline “tone” in the vagus nerve were also “more emotionally reactive to both positive and mildly stressful stimuli.” These same infants at fourteen months were more reactive to maternal separation. Like hypersensitive instruments, sensitive children register and record even minute changes in their emotional environment. It is not a matter of choice for them; their nervous systems react. It is as if they had invisible antennae projecting in every direction, picking up and conducting into their bodies and their minds the psychic emanations around them. They may have no conscious knowledge of this, any more than an instrument is consciously aware of what measurements it is registering. Unlike instruments, however, the sensory equipment of human beings is not easily shut off. My wife and I learned to recognize our daughter’s moods and behaviors as real-time, instantaneous computer printouts of the psychological atmosphere in our home. If we wanted to know how we were doing as individuals or as a couple, we needed only check the facial expressions and emotional responses of our daughter. What was recorded there did not always reassur...