I found the lecture today very interesting and it got me thinking a lot
about the possibility that I do things without thinking about them, but
then justify the action if asked about it later or if I happen to be
thinking about it later. It also makes me wonder what kinds of cues we see
in the real world that cause us to make a choice one way or another. I can
think of a lot of things where I probably had different motives than the
ones I thought I had, whether it was picking out classes at school, where I
decided to get food for lunch, what way I walked home on a particular day,
deciding to read outside for the day, etc etc. I'm not saying that
everything I do is for some reason besides the one I give, but when I look
back on a lot of choices I've made many of the reasons I can give for why I
did them make perfect sense, but they also probably don't address the
entire reason. In a youtube video I found, there is a guy with his corpus
callosum severed. The two halves of the brain aren't connected, so he isn't
able to communicate what his right brain sees (our speech is in the left
brain), so he is asked to point to a picture instead. He points to the
picture his right brain saw, but since his left brain didn't see it, he
makes up a reason for why he chose it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9u6cQYcOHw&feature=related
trac0106: February 2012 Archives
http://newideas.net/genetic-causes-adhd-cardiff-study
According to this article, a research team believes they have found a genetic link for ADHD. In a genetic study they did, 15% of the kids diagnosed with ADHD had significant differences in their DNA as opposed to 7% of the control group (kids without ADHD). The main problem with this data is that 85% of the kids diagnosed with ADHD do not have a clear difference in their DNA. This would show that the problem could be partially genetic, but there is a clear nurture side to it. The argument given by the article is that the current ADHD screening isn't as thorough as it could be and that many other disorders are being diagnosed as ADHD. While this could be the case, until there is further evidence to back it up, I agree that ADHD is probably caused more by environmental factors than genetic. The rate of kids diagnosed with ADHD without the DNA difference (85%) is just too high to ignore. Until it is clearly shown that many of the kids diagnosed with ADHD do not have the disease, the environment argument seems more scientifically sound than the genetic argument to me.
