A knowledgeable if curiously brief account of ADHD and its mitigation.
Meyers, a physician, offers a brief treatise on the nature and treatment of ADHD.
The author begins his look at attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder by attempting to dispel several persistent myths that surround subject: “The symptom of poor concentration is usually explained as attention deficit disorder, or ADHD. However, a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings ensure that those affected do not always receive an accurate diagnosis and also an optimal therapy.” He flatly contradicts what he sees as canards, including, “if you can’t concentrate, you have ADHD,” “ADHD grows out all by itself,” and, most pertinently, “ADHD is not curable.” Meyers intends for his book to provide clarity and support for readers in more accurately assessing what is and isn’t ADHD as well as advice on how to treat the genuine disorder. “After thirty years of psychiatric work with children, adolescents, and adults, I know: If it really is ADHD and the highest standards of diagnosis and therapy are applied, this disease is curable,” he decisively declares. “Lifelong medication or therapeutic treatment is then no longer necessary.” The author lays out the different subtypes of ADHD, noting that many distractible children are mistakenly diagnosed with the condition, while many adults have no idea that they’re dealing with it in their daily lives. The specific details of these subtypes are illustrated by case studies of the author’s own patients that give personal context to what might otherwise be only lists of symptoms.
Meyers expertly interweaves the human dimensions of the disorder with a vast amount of scientific and clinical information—a surprisingly generous amount given the brevity of the book. Each section contains extensive links and citations for further reading. These attempts to increase the usefulness of the book are, to a certain extent, counteracted by a diagnostic in-the-weeds specificity that may leave even readers familiar with ADHD at a loss (and will certainly make this book opaque to general readers). Much of the discussion in the book’s early pages revolves around “OPATUS-CPT,” which the author refers to as “a proven tool for objective ADHD diagnosis” but neither defines nor explains in detail (it’s a diagnostic app). The text is clear and concise on the possible contributing factors to developing ADHD and the differences between some of its manifestations, and doubtless many readers will find these elements useful. But Meyers is frequently overly concise, almost terse, when discussing elements of his subject that call for more expansive discussions: “We speak of pathologically persistent early childhood reflexes if their activity is still above 25 percent even after four and a half years of life. This is caused by deficits in brain development as a result of life-threatening events shortly before, during or shortly after birth.” This is a fascinating subject, but two pages and two case studies later, the author moves on to something else. Part of this headlong pace is a byproduct of the book’s short length (an impression enhanced by how much of each chapter is bullet-pointed), but it cumulatively produces a hurried impression and will leave many readers wishing for a more comprehensive future edition.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2022
ISBN: 9798404994049
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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