Scattered Minds Quotes

“One of its major tasks is inhibition.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“It may seem paradoxical to consider that hyperactivity of mind or body can be caused by an underactivity of the cortex.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The two groups had similarly normal EEGs at rest, but the ADD group showed excessive “slow wave” activity during directed tasks such as reading or drawing.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The hyperactivity may also take the form of excessive talking.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The second nearly ubiquitous characteristic of ADD is impulsiveness of word or deed, with poorly controlled emotional reactivity. The adult or child with ADD can barely restrain himself from interrupting others, finds it a torture waiting his turn in all manner of activities and will often act or speak impulsively as if forethought did not exist.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

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

“Every aspect of my life hurts,”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“My life, like that of many an adult with ADD, resembled a juggling act from the old Ed Sullivan show: a man spins plates, each balanced on a stick. He keeps adding more and more sticks and plates, running back and forth frantically between them as each stick, increasingly unsteady, threatens to topple over. He could keep this up only for so long before the sticks tottered and the plates began to shatter, or he himself collapsed. Something has to give, but the ADD personality has trouble letting go of anything. Unlike the juggler, he cannot stop the performance.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“We must all accept responsibility for our actions, else the world becomes unlivable.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

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

“The strength of synapses is influenced by many factors, including the frequency of their use or disuse, or the composition of body chemistry from one situation to the next. Circuits are also weakened or enhanced by other circuits that may interfere with their functions or assist them. We see this in attention deficit disorder when the same child is able to attend to a subject in one type of environment but is unable to concentrate on the same topic in another. This situationality of ADD reflects the input of emotions, which play a powerful role in attention.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“They raise no uncomfortable questions about how a society and culture might erode the health of its members, or about how life in a family may have affected a person’s physiology or emotional makeup.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The genetic blueprints for the architecture and the workings of the human brain develop in a process of interaction with the environment. ADD does reflect biological malfunctions in certain brain centers, but many of its features—including the underlying biology itself—are also inextricably connected to a person’s physical and emotional experiences in the world.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The world is much more ready to accept someone who is different and comfortable with it than someone desperately seeking to conform by denying himself. It's the self-rejection others react against, much more than the differentness. So the solution for the adult is not to "fit in," but to accept his inability to conform. The child's uniqueness has to first find a welcome in the heart of the parent.
None of this is achieved by an act of will, and it is possible one will not succeed completely. That is not important. What is important is to engage in the process, difficult as that is. Healing is not an event, not a single act. It occurs by a process; it is in the process itself.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Two days after the German occupation, my mother called the pediatrician. "Would you come to see Gabi?" she requested. "He has been crying almost without stop since yesterday morning."
"I'll come, of course," the doctor replied, "but I should tell you: all of my Jewish babies are crying.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Many people with ADD have noticed that a strange drowsiness may come over them in the midst of some emotionally charged situations, as, for example, during a conflict with a spouse. All of a sudden, they start yawning and their eyelids grow heavy. Their partners naturally believe that the drowsiness is a sign of boredom and a lack of caring. Or the emotionally stressed ADD child may suddenly—and genuinely—complain of being “tired,” only to regain energy a few minutes later if the source of anxiety, which may be some homework she feels beyond her capacities to do, is removed. The parent may conclude that the child is malingering. What is really happening is that the right prefrontal cortex is over-inhibiting a network of neurons in the brain stem, known as the reticular_formation-an important part of the circuitry of arousal—because the emotions are too threatening. The reticular formation sends axons (nerve cables) to the cortex, where chemicals are released that make the cortical cells more alert, more responsive to incoming information. The cortex, in turn, projects axons to the reticular formation and can inhibit its arousal function, as in the case of our drowsy individual or the tired child. For the person in emotional distress, drifting off to sleep would permit at least a temporary escape—an unconscious defense closely connected with tuning out.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“A physiological inability to breast-feed does not disqualify one from changing diapers or emotionally nurturing an infant.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“On the other hand, when there is something one wants, neither patience nor procrastination exist. One has to do it, get it, have it, experience it, immediately.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“The world is much more ready to accept someone who is different and comfortable with it than someone desperately seeking to conform by denying himself.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The effects of disrupted family life on mental functioning are magnified by cultural influences. “American society,” Drs. Hallowell and Ratey observe, “tends to create ADD-like symptoms in all of us. We live in an ADD-ogenic culture.” They identify what they call “pseudo ADD,” people living lives in conformity with the frenzied society and culture around them but not impaired in their functioning by the neurophysiological attributes of ADD. It can look like ADD from the outside, but it is not ADD from within. What are some of the hallmarks of American culture that are also typical of ADD? The fast pace. The sound bite. The bottom line. Short takes, quick cuts. The TV remote-control clicker. High stimulation. Restlessness... Speed. Present-centered, no future, no past. Disorganization... Going for the gusto. Making it on the run. The fast track. Whatever works. Hollywood. The stock exchange. Fads...3”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The demeanor of the infants of depressed mothers is one of inactivity and the averted gaze.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“attachment promotes attention, anxiety undermines it. When”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“I’ll come, of course,” the doctor replied, “but I should tell you: all my Jewish babies are crying.” Now, what did Jewish infants know of Nazis, World War II, racism, genocide? What they knew—or rather, absorbed—was their parents’ anxiety.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully.4”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“Were we born with our wiring rigidly fixed by heredity, the frontal lobes would be far more limited in their capacity to learn and to adapt to the many different possible environments that human beings inhabit.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

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

“early interactions with the mother shaped the adult rat’s neurophysiological capacity to respond to stress. In another study, newborn animals reared in isolation had reduced dopamine activity in their prefrontal cortex—but not in other areas of the brain. That is, emotional stress particularly affects the chemistry of the prefrontal cortex, the center for selective attention, motivation and self-regulation. Given the relative complexity of human emotional interactions, the influence of the infant-parent relationship on human neurochemistry is bound to be even stronger. In the human”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

“I can do this with half my brain tied behind my back,” I used to joke. No joke, that. It’s precisely how I have done many things.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It