Scattered Minds Quotes

“they arouse the inhibitory function. They wake up the cop, alert the underdeveloped and underactive circuitry of the prefrontal cortex. Recognizing that ADD is a problem of development rather than one of pathology”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The cerebral cortex in the frontal lobe is not able to perform its job of prioritizing, selection and inhibition. The 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

“ADD neurologically is as a lack of inhibition,”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The cortex has a split second to decide whether to give permission to the impulse or to cancel it.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Our initial response to a stimulus, whether anxiety producing or pleasurable, is unconscious. It comes not from the cortex but from lower brain centers where emotions originate.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“In other words, in the ADD group electrical activity in the cerebral cortex, or gray matter, slowed down just when it would have been required to speed up.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Dexedrine,”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“ADD seemed to explain many of my behavior patterns, thought processes, childish emotional reactions, my workaholism and other addictive tendencies, the sudden eruptions of bad temper and complete irrationality, the conflicts in my marriage and my Jekyll and Hyde ways of relating to my children. And, too, my humor, which can break from any odd angle and leave people laughing or leave them cold, my joke bouncing back at me, as the Hungarians say, like “peas thrown at a wall.” It also explained my propensity to bump into doorways, hit my head on shelves, drop objects and brush close to people before I notice they are there. No longer mysterious was my ineptness following directions or even remembering them, or my paralytic rage when confronted by a sheet of instructions telling me how to use even the simplest of appliances. Beyond everything, recognition revealed the reason for my lifelong sense of somehow never approaching my potential in terms of self-expression and self-definition—”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“To get through each day, natures that are at all high
strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor cars,
with different gears. There arc mountainous, arduous
days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and
downward-sloping days which one can descend at full
tilt, singing as one goes. - MARCEL PROUST, ln Search of Lost Time”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The restlessness coexists with long periods of procrastination. The threat of failure or the promise of reward has to be immediate for the motivation apparatus to be turned on.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“What can be immobilizingly difficult is to arouse the brain’s motivational apparatus in the absence of personal interest.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests and sometimes one positively ought… One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy… What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. – FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, “Notes from the Underground”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Sick and weak are not useful entries in the dictionary of self-understanding.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Desperate to be out of our mind and unaware, we surrender to the addiction, to be lulled into a walking sleep.”
― 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.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The result in. successive generations of children is seen in alienation, drug use and violence—what Robert Bly has astutely described as “the rage of the unparented.” Bly notes in The”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body.5 During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness—we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge—there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Nobody is born with “attention.” Like language or locomotion, being attentive is a skill we acquire. As with all other skills, the conditions necessary for the development of attention have to be present. It is not an isolated attribute of the child’s but the product of a relationship between the child and her environment. “A”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“What are some of the markers of low self-esteem, besides consciously harsh self-judgment? An inflated, grandiose view of oneself — frequently seen in politicians, for example. Craving the good opinion of others. Frustration with failure. A tendency to blame oneself excessively when things go wrong, or, on the other hand, an insistence on blaming others: in other words, the propensity to blame someone. Mistreating those who are weaker or subordinate, or accepting mistreatment without resistance.

Argumentativeness — having to be in the right or, obversely, assuming that one is always in the wrong. Trying to impose one’s opinion on others or, on the contrary, being afraid to say what one thinks for fear of being judged. Allowing the judgments of others to influence one’s emotions or, its mirror opposite, rigidly rejecting what others may have to say about one’s work or behavior.

Other traits of low self-esteem are an overwrought sense of responsibility for other people in relationships and, an inability to say no. The need to achieve in order to feel good about oneself. How one treats one’s body and psyche speaks volumes about one’s self-esteem: abusing body or soul with harmful chemicals, behaviors, work overload, lack of personal time and space all denote poor self-regard. All of these behaviors and attitudes reveal a fundamental stance towards the self that is conditional and devoid of true self-respect.

Self-esteem based on achievement has been called contingent self-esteem or acquired self-esteem. Unlike contingent self-esteem, true self-esteem has nothing to do with a self-evaluation on the basis of achievement or the lack of it. A person truly comfortable in his own skin doesn’t say, “I am a worthy human being because I can do such and such,” but says, “I am a worthy human being whether or not I can do such and such.”

Contingent self-esteem evaluates; true self-esteem accepts. Contingent self-esteem is fickle, going up and down with a person’s ability to produce results. True self-esteem is steadfast, not adventitious. Contingent self-esteem places great store in what others think. True self-esteem is independent of others’ opinions. Acquired self-esteem is a false imitation of true self-esteem: however good it makes one feel in the moment, it does not esteem the self. It esteems only the achievement, without which the self in its own right would be rejected. True self-esteem is who one is; contingent self-esteem is only what one does.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The mind emanates from the interface between neurophysiological processes and interpersonal relationships. Experience selectively shapes genetic neuronal potential and thus directly influences the structure and function of the brain.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“There are a small number of debilitating conditions with a strong genetic basis, such as muscular dystrophy or Huntington’s disease. These are rare, affecting about one person in ten thousand or even fewer. They do not pose a significant threat to the survival of the species. If, however, we add up the numbers of people plagued by depression or ADD or the other common psychological problems people in this society struggle with, including alcoholism and anxiety, we will have identified no less than a third of the North American population.

Genetic explanations for these conditions assume that after millions of years of evolution, nature would permit a very large number of disordered genes, handicapping a third of humankind, to pass through the screen of natural selection — a highly unlikely proposition.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Genes can be activated or turned off by factors in the environment. In the Cree population of northwestern Ontario, for example, diabetes is found at a rate five times the Canadian national average, despite the traditionally low incidence of diabetes among native peoples. The genetic makeup of the Cree people cannot have changed in a few generations. The destruction of the Crees’ traditional physically active ways of life, the substitution of high-calorie diets for their previous low-fat, low-carbohydrate eating patterns and greatly increased stress levels are responsible for the alarming rise in diabetes rates.

Although heredity is involved in diabetes, it cannot possibly account for the pandemic among Canada’s native peoples, or among the rest of the North American population, for that matter. We will see that in similar ways changes in society are causing more and more children to be affected by attention deficit disorder. It is easy to jump to hasty conclusions about genetic information. Some studies have identified certain genes, for example, that are said to be more common among people with attention deficit disorder or with other related conditions, such as depression, alcoholism or addiction. But even if the existence of these genes is proven, there is no reason to suppose that they can, on their own, induce the development of ADD or any other disorder. First, not everyone with these genes will have the disorders. Second, not everyone with the disorders will be shown to carry the genes.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“When I ask adults to rate themselves according to a simple scale gauging the parenting skills and attention they devote to themselves, the scores tend to be low—so scandalously low that I have advised many of my clients that if they truly were the unfortunate child being parented by them, I would have had little choice but to alert the child protection authorities. (Restraining me was only that first I would have had to blow the whistle on myself.) As”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“When mother and infant are rapturously gazing into each other’s eyes, the infant at some point will look away, to avoid being overstimulated. He has no anxiety over doing so. Should the mother be the one to break eye contact, however, the infant is mortified and is immediately swept into the physiological state of shame.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“At times I have wished that the "experts" and media pundits who deny the existence of attention deficit disorder could meet ony a few of the severely affected adults who have sought my help. These men and women, in their thirties, forties and fifties, have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Some have never been able to read a book from cover to cover, some cannot even sit through a movie.

Their moods fly back and forth from lethargy and dejection to agitation. The creative talents they have been blessed with have not been pursued. They are intensely frustrated at what they perceive as their failures. Their self-esteem is lost in some deep well. Most often they are firm in the conviction that their problems are the result of a basic, incorrigible flaw in their personalities.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Environment does not cause ADD any more than genes cause ADD. What happens is that if certain genetic material meets a certain environment, ADD may result. Without that genetic material, no ADD. Without that environment, no ADD. The formative environment is the family of origin.”
― Gabor Maté MD, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“There is a sense of being cut off from reality, an almost disembodied separation from the physical present. “I feel like I am a human giraffe” is how one man described it, “as if my head is floating in a different world, way above my body.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Too often parents confuse discipline or good parenting with control. They are supported in this misbelief by their relatives and neighbors, or by voices in the media, who say that the only problem with the behavior of ADD children is that parents are too lax with their discipline, too weak to control their son or daughter. If that were true, children treated harshly should be the best behaved and should grow up into the best citizens. As a survey of the population of any foster home or prison would show, the contrary is true. The issue is not how to control the child but how best to promote the child’s development.”
― Gabor Maté MD, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder