My instincts move in very distinct, no pun intended, patterns these days. I’ve always felt a problematic relationship with impulse and instinct. I want to jump when the starting gun fires. I always want to run with that impulse.
This obsession is the essence of my attention deficit disorder, and the focus is always either on the most recent thing to come into my periphery or something that has become a central habitual component that is like a broken-record impulse that occurs approximately as often as sex — every seven seconds, or maybe it’s every seven nanoseconds, depending on whom you ask.
I’ve spoken a little bit around the country on the connection between ADD and creativity, and on teaching to multiple intelligences (since I believe ADD is tied into Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory, in a certain sense, de facto). ADD holds within it powerful gifts, but for me, it is a focus-regulation disorder and not really an attention deficit. (Focus-regulation disorder is not a diagnosis or a disorder.)
Let’s get real; this is not even controversial — it’s an extraordinarily poorly named disorder, and a stigmatizing one. ADD would be better called focus-regulation because attention is never lost or at a low level. The attention is simply in a different direction.
Plus, I will point out that the word attention is unnecessarily long, cumbersome, and ridiculous when there is a much shorter word in the English language that means the exact same thing, 100 percent: focus.
I’m getting in the weeds, though. Look at me being all ADD and focus-y-in-the-wrong-direction-y. No, back to the point of focus-regulation. It could be related to focus regulation. It could also be related to view regulation, a shorter version of perspective regulation.
I’m brainstorming in a sense here (on theme, since ADD is a brain-thunderstorm — term coined), but my point is that the brain is poorly regulating these things. I say that because the frontal lobes in an ADD brain are overwhelmed with stimuli and are not able to regulate them very well. Instinct often takes over.
I suggest view regulation as my favorite and final verdict, personally, because I believe it encompasses the real issue: the person is not having trouble regulating focus, if you think about it.
Consider how a film camera works. It focuses on a subject. So that’s not the issue here. The issue is that the camera is pointing the “wrong” way. That’s a view issue. That’s a perspective issue. Again, attention is in a different direction. As a pilot might tell you, the line of sight changes; the view is on one (supposedly “wrong”… assuming God makes mistakes, because didn’t he make these people?) thing rather than another.
