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

by Gabor Maté

The microcircuitry of the brain is formatted by influences during the first few years of life, a period when the human brain undergoes astonishingly rapid growth. Five-sixths of the branching of nerve cells in the brain occurs after birth. At times in the first year of life, new synapses are being established at a rate of three billion a second. In large part, each infant’s individual experiences in the early years determine which brain structures will develop and how well, and which nerve centers will be connected with which other nerve centers, and establish the networks controlling behavior.3 The intricately programmed interactions between heredity and environment that make for the development of the human brain are determined by a “fantastic, almost surrealistically complex choreography,” in the apt phrase of Dr. J. S. Grotstein of the department of psychiatry at UCLA. Attention deficit disorder results from the miswiring of brain circuits, in susceptible infants, during this crucial period of growth. Of all mammals, the human animal has the least mature brain at birth. Early in their infancy, other animals perform tasks far beyond the capabilities of humans for many months. A horse can walk on the first day of life; infant apes cling to mother’s fur within a few weeks of birth. Human beings are able to coordinate the visual skills, muscle control, balance and orientation in space required for comparable activities only near the end of the first year. In the period fol...