Scattered Minds Quotes

“The truth was that for me, as for all addicts, the excitement was not in the ostensible goal—listening to the music—but in the process of acquiring.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“the driven ADD personality has no idea what his true needs are and must find for them some displaced, symbolic expression.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Attempting to motivate from the outside betrays a lack of faith in the child and in nature. It reflects the anxiety of the parent, not the limitations of the child. It’s unfortunate but true that while we may not be able to transplant genuine motivation into our children, we are altogether too successful when it comes to sowing in them the seeds of our own anxiety.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“If in the photograph the love may be seen in my mother’s face, her fear and worry are reflected in mine.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The letters ADD may equally well stand for Attunement Deficit Disorder.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Of all mammals, the human animal has the least mature brain at birth. Early”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Human infants are born with no capability whatsoever to hide or suppress any feeling, be it hunger, fear, discomfort or pain. Healthy newborns are skilled at communicating anger and have a superbly articulate talent for saying no, as anyone can attest who has witnessed the rage of a frustrated infant or who has ever tried to feed some unwanted substance to a baby. She shouts out her responses to the world, loud and clear. Given the survival value of emotional expression, nature would not have us give up that capacity unless the suppression of emotion was demanded by the environment. When we forget how to say no, we surrender self-esteem.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment.

“When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement.

Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill.

As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions.

A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The areas of the cortex responsible for attention and self-regulation develop in response to the emotional interaction with the person whom we may call the mothering figure. Usually this is the birth mother, but it may be another person, male or female, depending on circumstances.

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. 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 mother’s face in preference to a stranger‘s — and also in preference to the father’s, unless the father is the mothering adult. At seventeen weeks, the infant’s gaze follows the mother’s eyes more closely than her mouth movements, thus fixating on what has been called “the visible portion of the mother’s central nervous system.”

The infant’s right brain reads the mother’s right brain during intense eye-to-eye mutual gaze interactions. As an article in Scientific American expressed it, “Embryologically and anatomically the eye is an extension of the brain; it is almost as if a portion of the brain were in plain sight.” The eyes communicate eloquently the mother’s unconscious emotional states.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The human brain is the most complex entity in the universe. It has between fifty and one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, each branched to form thousands of possible connections with other nerve cells. It has been estimated that laid end to end, the nerve cables of a single human brain would extend into a line several hundred thousand miles long. The total number of connections, or synapses, is in the trillions. The parallel and simultaneous activity of innumerable brain circuits, and networks of circuits, produces millions of firing patterns each and every second of our lives. The brain has well been described as “a supersystcm of systems.”

Even though fully half of the roughly hundred thousand genes in the human organism are dedicated to the central nervous system, the genetic code simply cannot carry enough information to predetermine the infinite number of potential brain circuits. For this reason alone, biological heredity could not by itself account for the densely intertwined psychology and neurophysiology of attention deficit disorder.

Experience in the world determines the fine wiring of the brain. As the neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it, “Much of each brain’s circuitry, at any given moment in adult life, is individual and unique, truly reflective of that particular organism’s history and circumstances.” This is no less true of children and infants. Not even in the brains of genetically identical twins will the same patterns be found in the shape of nerve cells or the numbers and configuration of their synapses with other neurons.

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.

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.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“If a mother has eight children, there are eight mothers. This is not simply because of the fact that the mother was different in her attributes to each of the eight. If she could have been the same with each... each child would have had his or her own mother seen through individual eyes.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“A dramatic illustration of how environment shapes personality is the story of the Gilmore family. On January 17, 1978, in Utah, the convicted double murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, his unyielding refusal to appeal his death sentence having gained him a measure of international notoriety. The shattering story of his childhood, blighted by family violence, alcoholism and spite was chronicled later by his brother Mikal Gilmore in the memoir Shot in the Heart. Mikal, the youngest of four boys, was born when Gary was eleven years old. If children reared in the same family shared the same environment, the differences between siblings would have to be due to genetic inheritance. In the case of the Gilmores, it is easy to see why Mikal, born at a time when the family was enjoying a period of relative stability, would feel he had been brought up in a different world, why the misery of his childhood, as he put it, had been so radically different from the misery of his brothers’ childhood.

Even without such vast chasms in experience, the environment of siblings is never the same. Environment has far greater impact on the structures and circuits of the human brain than was realized even a decade ago. It is what shapes the inherited genetic material. I believe it to be the decisive factor in determining whether the impairments of ADD will or will not appear in a child. Many variables will influence the particular environment a child experiences. Birth order, for one, automatically places siblings in dissimilar situations. The older sibling has to suffer the pain of seeing parental love and attention directed toward an intruder. The younger sibling may need to learn survival in an environment that harbors a stronger, potentially hostile rival, and never comes to know either the special status or the burden of being an only child. The full weight of unconscious parental expectations is far more likely to fall on the firstborn. Historical studies of birth order have established it as an important influence on the shaping of the personality, comparable with sex.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“North American society tries to bury many problems under tons of medications, preferring to ignore the social and cultural causes of people’s stressed mental states. The long-term social consequences of massive drug intake in the treatment of depression, ADD and a host of other conditions are yet to be known. I, too, am concerned about this, even though I prescribe medications to others and continue to take one myself.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The use of rewards—what might be called positive coercion—does not work in the long run any better than threat and punishment, or negative coercion. In the reward, the child senses the parent’s desire to control no less than in the punishment. The issue is the child’s sense of being forced, not the manner in which the force is applied. This was well illustrated in a classic study using magic markers.2 A number of children were screened to select some who showed a natural interest and inclination for playing with magic markers. Those who did were then divided into three different groups. For one group, there was no reward involved and no indication what to do with the markers. Another group was given a small reward to use the markers, and the third was promised a substantial reward. When retested sometime later, the group that had been most rewarded showed the least interest in playing with the magic markers, while the children who had been left uninstructed showed by far the greatest motivation to use them. Simple behaviorist principles would suggest it ought to have been the other way around, another illustration that behavioral approaches have no more than short-term efficacy. At work here, of course, was residual counterwill in response to positive coercion. In a similar experiment, the psychologist Edward Deci observed the behaviors of two groups of college students vis-à-vis a puzzle game they had originally all been equally intrigued by. One group was to receive a monetary reward each time a puzzle was solved; the other was given no external incentive. Once the payments stopped, the paid group proved far more likely to abandon the game than their unpaid counterparts. “Rewards may increase the likelihood of behaviors,” Dr. Deci remarks, “but only so long as the rewards keep coming... Stop the pay, stop the play.” We”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Some development of the capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining contact with one’s own inner world are all”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“She works at fitting in by toning down the strength of her feelings about matters that others seem to think unimportant, by struggling to suppress her intensity and by feigning an interest in what bores her to tears.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“She does not know where to turn, and the all-or-nothing mind-set demands that everything be done at once. Nothing needs to be done at once. The best plan, I find, is not to insist that any one task be finished but to impose a strict time limit in which to work.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“In his best-selling book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, behavioral and brain sciences writer for The New York Times, defines this capacity as “being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and to delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think. . . ”[2] We have only to place a negative qualifier before the “being able” in that sentence, as in “not being able,” and we arrive at a succinct description of the ADD personality.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“parents extend themselves in an effort to understand who their children are and why they do what they do, the right words and actions will follow almost of their own volition.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“the healing ADD calls for is not a process of recovery from some illness. It is a process of becoming whole—which, it so happens, is the original sense of the word healing.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“A person becomes open to respecting the boundaries of others when her own rights and boundaries are respected.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“hear someone’s point of view and to recognize the legitimacy of his feelings is not the same as necessarily agreeing with everything he says or approving of everything he does.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“So the first thing is to create some space in the child’s heart of hearts for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything, or be any different, to earn that love—in fact, she cannot do anything, because the love cannot be won and cannot be lost. It is not conditional. It is completely independent of the child’s behavior. It is just there, regardless of which side the child is acting from, “good” or “bad.” The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“and when our attentional resources are consumed by internal thoughts and feelings, there are few left over for dealing with the world outside.”[7]”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“some people, there will be a greater concentration of developmental problems. This may be because their specific circumstances were worse, or because they were more sensitive, deeply affected by conditions that others with more robust temperaments could better withstand. They are the ones likely to be diagnosed with ADD or with some other “disorder.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“brain, flooded with multiple bits of sensory data, thoughts, feelings and impulses, cannot focus, and the mind or body cannot be still.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and to delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think. . .”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“when everything is observed and interpreted from only one point of view, the child’s.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The family atmosphere in which the child spends the early formative years has a major impact on brain development.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder