Focus and Ritalin

Further research on Ritalin may help us understand the neural mechanisms of focus. We know empirically that it increases the ability to focus. Note that I left off the usual qualifier “in people with attention deficit disorder.” I have seen reports that it is being widely used by college students with no such diagnosis. So I think the effect is not limited to people for whom it is prescribed.

According to a recent report in the Journal of Neurophysiology, Ritalin raises norepinephrine levels in the brains of rats to help focus attention while suppressing nerve signal transmissions in the sensory pathways to make it easier to block out extraneous stimuli. This combination of effects may help explain the paradox of a stimulant that decreases hyperactive behavior.

The combination may also help describe the difference between Focus and Scan. Both are important to brains. Formal education seems to be mainly concerned with focus, to the neglect of scan. That is reasonable because formal education is socially driven and so seeks to focus a child’s attention on what suits society and the educational system.

Where, I wonder, in the educational system, does the child learn how to manage focus and scan effectively? To choose what to focus on and to choose when to go into scan mode. We can tell children what to focus on. We can even believe that they do what they are told to do. (Ok, it worked for Tinker Bell.)

But teens become increasingly and obviously self-directed. I suspect that self-direction chooses what to focus on by going into the scan mode and scanning over possibilities. I suspect that the skill of effective self-direction is more valuable than the skill of explaining initiative, referendum, and recall.

And I wonder whether children can get that skill from Ritalin.