Knowing the causes of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is critical both for understanding individuals with this problem and for managing attention deficit treatment correctly.
Families often see attention deficit as a willpower problem or reluctance. Because when he wants children, when there are fun activities or when he receives plenty of rewards, he does not have any attention problems. He can use his attention, energy and memory very well during these activities. In other words, he can pay attention to games, TV or computer better than ever before. For example, they can perform very difficult tasks in computer games, notice all the details and reach very high scores in the game.
But the same child changes when it comes to homework, task, responsibility or repetitive routine work. It is as if that child is gone and another child has come. He delays starting homework, gets bored quickly when he starts, is reluctant, careless, finds excuses, forgets quickly. The child, who has just used all his abilities, has serious difficulties in using his abilities and capacity.
Of course, families who evaluate these two different situations from the outside, make evaluations as if they can do it if they want, they do it very well when they feel like it, they don’t like their homework or they don’t do it out of spite. But studies have shown that this is actually very different from what is seen from the outside. To put it very simply, scientific studies have actually determined that attention deficit is caused by the inadequacy of the automatically functioning functions of the brain. These automatic functions (administrative functions) operate outside of our control. These executive functions are extremely complex processes and very few of them are accessible to the consciousness. Therefore, they cannot put it into practice even if they are conscious of what they should do. In other words, in attention deficit, there is a state of ‘not being able to’, not unwillingness. Children with attention deficits know that they need to study and even make promises that they will do it, but when it comes to studying, they have a very difficult time working efficiently. It can be likened to an airplane’s autopilot program malfunctioning. When you put it on autopilot, the plane will go into decline. The captain will have to spend constant effort and attention to fly the plane without an autopilot and it will be very tiring. Also, it will not be as perfect a flight as an automatic program. Automatic systems save us time during our continuous activities, enable us to spend less effort and specialize in the work we do. This process can be compared to the difficulty we experienced when learning the bike for the first time and the ease we experienced afterwards.
Why do these automatic functions that cause attention deficit not work well?
Studies have shown that the most common cause is genetics. In addition, it has been determined that it may cause attention deficit in various diseases experienced during pregnancy or childbirth to a lesser extent.
How is it determined that brain functions do not work efficiently enough in people with attention deficit?
Brain functions of people with attention deficit have been shown to work less in various brain regions compared to healthy individuals, with various imaging techniques. In particular, it has been shown that the frontal region of the brain (frontal region) is less active (not working efficiently). Problems have been identified in the adequate release and production of various substances (such as dopamine and noradrenaline) in these regions.
The photo below is from a study using brain mapping methods. In the photo on the left, healthy functioning brain regions of a normal individual are shown in green, and on the left, poorly functioning parts of the brain with attention deficit are shown in red.
So what does this information show us?
1. Attention Deficit is a neurochemical (related to brain chemistry) disorder that occurs as a result of the brain’s nerve cells not working sufficiently.
2. Since the causes of attention deficit are biological and mostly related to automatic processes, the main treatment is the drug that will regulate these automatic processes. Other attention deficit treatments should be built on this foundation.
3. An effective conversation with an individual with attention deficit does not fix the process permanently, it can only cause short-term recovery, the therapy process is not enough for the person to solve the problem.
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