d adults have it too and we're going to find out an awful lot more with the expert dr ron stirling welcome dr stone oh thanks for having me i really appreciate being able to talk about this so i thought that eighty day was just a kid's disease but it's  not it's a lifelong essentially genetic based disorder genetic based us and then the environment doesn't cause that chemicals in our diet doesn't cause that they contribute challenges for instance higher data loads in a society where there is a lot of data to be dealt with like what we have today what we have now compared to the one nine hundred fifty s that's a big challenge for the downside of the brain which is a poor working memory so is it an illness or is it a condition or neither one of those it's a brain type i don't really think of it as an illness i mean working memory and that poor working memory is compared to a low ram computer and that poor working memory comes from poor dope i mean function o it is a simple chemical that transfers data between two nerve cells so acts as a bridge between two nerve cells to keep the data moving along so if somebody's got a load up i mean why can't we just inject people with more because it's a very powerful and large concentration of the mean if you were injecting them could be problematic could really cause problems so it's very subtle for instance just fidgeting just fidgeting will increase dope i mean to increase working memory a little bit it's not the greatest treatment but it works  ton of questions and so let's just get to some of them as well when there's lots of things out there there's eighty attention deficit disorder i know what that one is there is eighty eight p t s d i know what that is i think p f c h p a circuit i have absolutely no idea what these are they all related well if we're going to be talking about the i really do use the term an a t g because it's traditional everybody understands the history of that particular there's really no difference in the brain between the downside between a deep diagnosis or an a d h d diagnosis everybody who fits the criteria for a d has a hyper active brain sometimes it gets translated into behavior sometimes it doesn't so it's kind of arbitrary based on observations and now we know a little bit more about it so it's not quite as  relevant in terms of the old impulse the impatience hyperactivity triad the much more to it now you know you you mentioned it just now we know all of that more about it before the show we were talking about a two thousand and eight study that's kind of like the big deal and tell us about that so really since two thousand and eight we know for sure that if you fit the criteria this criteria that was developed for the diagnosis of a d t over the last forty years if you fit those criteria you have a dope i mean dysfunction in other words you have mean functioning if you don't fit the criteria for a t d you don't have a dope i mean problem you might have some other problems but you don't have the can you summarize the criteria and that well just let me tell you about two thousand and eight a little bit so two thousand and eight the first study that had been in the pipeline for quite a while came out from the and i am h they have the biggest budget so they beat everybody to the punch but took them a long time to do it and that's the study that clearly showed what i just said it about the main function and handle much doubt get overwhelmed easily low frustration tolerance temper tantrums and short temper so all of those criteria relate pretty much there's only one thing about those criteria that doesn't relate to a low working memory and now it's the ability to do risky things without feeling too much of fear essentially or illness or aversive you know in other words you can actually go down certain roads with respect to threat that maybe somebody else who doesn't have a don't mean problem could not do because they would start to feel sick doing that because i you know i've known people just like what you describe and i just thought that they just exhibited bad behavior and i didn't say you know what i am play with  right and they're not my friends so what you're saying is that they may indeed have an illness well again illness is a difficult term for me to use as a scientist because you would tend to think the illness would be that the exception in the norm would be something that's not an illness but in a sense this don't mean sub optimal both for me and problems so to speak is widespread and a varies from mild sue severe based on how many of your dopamine genes are problematic so there's ten different dopamine genes and when you've got ten different genes controlling a system of bridges so to speak a scientist know in a sense i was a general psychiatrist i did do a geriatric fellowship on point one nine hundred ninety nine because i wanted to learn more about geriatric psychiatry and then i really didn't get into understanding or investigating eighty d c thoroughly until two thousand and nine and the whole reason i even got into looking at it had nothing to do with my practice it had much more to do with i was trying to figure out what's going on with our culture because our culture the united states culture or some other cultures that fit the criteria too but essentially the united states culture fits the criteria for the diagnosis of a diesel what's that all about is that is what i was trying to figure out and that's what led me down that path is is that because that there are so many different  stimulation points that are coming our way i mean you you're watching television you're on you know a tablet you've got the computer going you've got headphones on and you're listening to music all the same time and you're ten years  that's normal yeah well that would be how our culture has evolved right because that's the dominant sort of behavior in time so the question is why did it go that direction well in a sense i want that direction because there were these technological advances so to speak but is that bad is that bad for my brain but it was the same stand in the same sense so it's al overwhelming for people who have difficulty holding a thought for more than a second or two so poor working memory working memory is the same thing as around and a computer is literally the same thing and working memory in our brains depends on dope i mean in a computer round depends upon electricity you turn off the electricity around goes away if you were writing something to your hard drive when you did make a decision about it and do something with it so it's just streaming data in your in your book there i mean seriously fact book it doesn't read like a you know a book of facts and it reads actually it's readable to me and if i'm sitting here watching this right now i want to know how come you know your stuff oh how core and all this yeah well like i said the thing that got me started even studying when i get into study i can do a little crazy and focus and really go down the road so i was a biology major and did a lot of scientific research when i was under and then went into medicine so as i was researching our culture the impulsivity the patient kind of activities entertainment culture so to speak you know people are saving people are insane sort of long terms mostly short term i started going down the road taking a look at dopamine function and then i ended up reading about twenty thousand pages of primary literature between two thousand and two thousand and eleven and that's what went into this book was that reading i didn't want to read other people's books too much because those are mostly summaries or their take on research i was encourage you if you have any questions at all this thing is going this book is going to allow you to answer a bunch of those questions one of the big questions that people have is about attention deficit disorder is the difference between children and adults i mean out historically with children and children with a focus because that's just time know what people are noticing and as time has gone it's pretty clear that people generally do not grow out of things like forgetfulness and difficulty remembering the beginning of a sentence when they get to the end of us so reading doesn't necessarily get any better certain things can get better so to speak people can grow out of hyperactivity they get more poor working memory in college can bump into the wall so to speak suddenly they can't read as well as and they're noticing they can't read as well or as in high school wasn't so much reading as it was other kinds of activities that challenge put them into a place where they start to recognize that they've got some limits maybe he shouldn't have something that you also talk about in your book as you're concerned about misdiagnosis and when i read that i don't mean under diagnosis i read over diagnosis and then you know the medical profession is sorry to pick on you but as drugging our people like that whole i'm not going to deny that there is a misuse of medications all over the place but the but the issue is in it with respect to aids he is there are us other solutions so to speak to the population of people who are experiencing the downside of the ady brain getting in the way you know success in their particular field might even be getting in the way of them literally using their q as well as they could if they had better working memory in fact that are working memory guarantees academic success better than i q so it that studies been done several times you didn't have a high i q poor working memory you will do as well as somebody with an average i q and better working memory or how do you raise really important and and and there's a lot of work you know problems  so the question is is there a lot of aid yes there is is it problematic only if you get in trouble although i mean is there is there more a dave and our population be and i a developing country such as god which is a country that i tried so in my book i cover some of this in a lot of detail the western hemisphere is particularly got a high population of dopamine problems so the whole westerners are not just united states officially in south america officially they have higher percentage of people with a d diagnosis but  l but on officially if you take a look at all of the different things that dope i mean problems cause sleep disorders smoking tobacco alcohol all of these things are dope and mean enhancers so to speak it's a large number of people that how do you mean problems the question is how do you go about fixing our well if it's if you're getting in trouble as an individual you don't have too many options besides using something to increase your dope and you could get on a treadmill but then you can drive on a treadmill and i just say there are things infused over me but they're not efficient or very useful you can use tobacco to treat your e but it's short acting and it has lots of side effects in the long run right some people learn how to do that they'll take their afternoon break and suddenly they can crunch numbers better so when i'm watching a baseball game and i'm seeing a manager who is chewing gum at nine thousand miles an hour who i think he's got a d d if you're in competitive sports you're going to be much better with a to do that without it really  that so the two parts now we're getting into some some heavy scientific things more or less so in terms of ag there is i talk about a clear up side to the a v brain and most other people including experts in the field are not talking about this particular upside to the brain why they're not talking about it i'm not sure but airplanes competitive sports anything that has a threat element connected to an a d t person will literally get better in that situation not worse because there's a part of the brain that has a little bunch of parts about twenty two parts it's an area of the brain called the threat monitor center the old name for it is emotional brain literally senses bonders all data coming in all the data coming in from all of our senses goes through one of those threat monitor circuits for the purpose of keeping us alive so to speak start monitoring is very important the person who has the best threat monitoring system will survive so this is fascinating to me because i played basketball for years i played in college and at the end of the game you knew which teammate that you wanted to get the ball to because that you're that teammate that player was likely to put the ball in the zone yeah they were in the zone and and that's almost how people who sort of figure this out will describe it is one there in that situation where the threat is high the pressures on emergency situations for instance for sure they're suddenly call focused and they can get the job done better than somebody in my tribe the nonny the tribe who end up being shaky nervous like talk about in athletics is slowing the game down that's what russell wilson talks about you know the seattle seahawks quarterback and here we are in seattle and actually we're recording this a week before the super bowl and as we do that we we look at the plays like what richard sherman made at the end of the n f c championship game where all of a sudden he was able to reach his hand up and yeah i mean not we're not saying that richard sherman has a t d but you know that's all that i have thing if he does here's the thing about the diagnosis right so it's currently considered to be a disorder yet when you name something in such a way to only emphasize it's downside it's a disorder side without looking at its upside then you sort of set people up so not want to have it yeah if there's no advantage to having it why would you want to have it and if you're going to be said to have a disorder or a nose nobody wants the point is there's so much of an upside to the brain they make the best first responders to make the best of it you know don't send people like me to  go up so it sounds like what you're saying is that we can actually predict who's going to react oh yeah through dopamine levels yeah right yeah i think so i think the literature is very clear on it they don't want to say they have a d only because it's currently called disorder and what i'm trying to do actually is help people understand is not just a down sides of a to do print so if i go into upside as if i go in and say information since two thousand and eight the literature hundreds of studies since two thousand and eight thousand was at this point we know so much about dopamine and we don't know much about sarah tona and some of the other neurotransmitters like we do about  mean but it's relatively new if you think about two thousand and eight two thousand and fourteen six years it takes usually the medical community about ten years to catch up with the with the scientific literature on things like this and i think it's going to be happening here and in a very near future we're going to be thinking about really how do we want to deal with this problem in our in our own but you're saying it's not majorly a problem the problem is that we are essentially setting up our culture to innocence challenge  the brain a way beyond its capacity for multitasking paying attention so we have a destructibility quotient in our society at this point based all of the different kinds of technology consumerism you name it activities oriented very activity oriented nation and so mindfulness isn't really taught as being slow or we don't want to do that but essentially we're  challenging a large portion of our population with too much doubt oh well we've got less than two minutes to go and i have about one thousand questions left so we're not going to get it all in that's for sure but but one big question that i do have and the way i had it set up is that is eighty curable and what i'm hearing you say is that that's not really the question sort of it all depends on how much trouble you're getting in right so the high i who has low working memory will tend to stay out of trouble in terms of crime or or going down certain roads a little too far pushing the envelope you know you name it vandalism or or whatever they will tend to not get in trouble because they have a rational safety net they have a higher i q poor memory an average i q a below average those people can get in a lot of trouble because there's no way to sort of appraise their thoughts before they act on it they can't hold the thought long and there's no rational safety you know like i q so if you're getting in trouble you know you you want to try and fix it but if you're not getting in trouble you might only need to use a v meds so to speak to fix your working memory for the tasks that you're not doing so well and then when you go sky for the period of time when you need good work your memory if you don't need eight and like i say you don't want really good dope i mean lowell's if you're if you're used to doing downhill skiing without me and the idea that athletes are using performance if they if they are they're doing it because of a misinformation because they usually degrades performance and with that we've got to go there's a lot more information maybe just maybe we'll see if we can get dr sterling back