Jane: This is But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids, from Vermont
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions
from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. We get a
lot of questions from you about how our bodies work, and
sometimes the part of your body you're interested in learning
more about is your brain. Several of you have been sending
us a specific kind of brain question lately.
Amir: What is ADHD? My name is Amir. I'm nine years old. I live
in Limerick, Ireland.
Ava: My name is Ava. I live in Cy Austin, New York. I'm eight
years old. What is ADHD?
Tristan: My name is Tristan. I'm eight years old. I live in Apex,
North Carolina, and I want to know what is ADHD.
Felix: My name is Felix. I'm nine years old, and I'm from
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. What is ADHD?
Jane: ADHD is a term used to describe a certain type of brain
and the ways it's similar and different from other types of
brains, we wanted to get someone who knows a lot about ADHD to
help us tackle your questions today.
Dr. Liz Angoff: I'm Dr. Liz, and my job in the world is to help
kids understand their amazing brains.
Jane: Dr. Liz Angoff is a licensed educational
psychologist and the author of a book called Our Brains
Empowering Neurodivergent Minds. If you haven't heard the word
neurodivergent before, here's how Dr. Liz explains it.
Dr. Liz Angoff: There are lots of different types of brains in
the world, and we can talk about all the different types of
brains as neurodiversity. So, there's two parts to that word:
neuro means brain and diversity means all different kinds. So
neurodiversity is all different kinds of brains, and most
brains, even within neurodiversity, they kind of
work alike, and the world is designed to work for those kinds
of brains, because it's most brains, but some brains work
differently in some really cool ways. And when you have a brain
that works differently than most brains, we call it
neurodivergent. You have a neurodivergent brain, or you
might say I'm a neurodivergent person, and that the neuro still
means brain, and divergent just means different, so it means I
have a different kind of brain than most brains.
Jane: Like, if you think about the word divergent, you often
think about a path - something that diverges is something that
goes away from the other path. So, a neurodivergent brain is a
brain that sort of separates a little bit from the maybe the
path that has more footprints on it, but it's still a perfectly
good path, and your path.
Dr. Liz Angoff: Yeah. So it's important that we have all
different paths, because if all brains worked exactly the same,
our world would be very, very boring, and we have all kinds of
different problems that come up that we face every day, and so
we need lots of different types of thinkers to solve these
different kinds of problems, and in fact, some of the people who
have made the biggest difference in our world have been divergent
thinkers who have thought in a different way, who have gone off
the beaten path to go in a different direction, so that we
could be better as humans.
Jane: One type of neurodivergence is ADHD. Now,
you may have been told by doctors or school counselors or
parents that you have ADHD, or maybe you have a friend, a
classmate, or a relative with an ADHD brain, but what is that?
Daniel: My name is Daniel, and I live in Columbus, Ohio, and I'm
10 years old. What is ADHD? Because I have it, and I don't
really understand it.
Dr. Liz Angoff: Yeah, so ADHD is one of those unique types of
brains. It is a really cool kind of brain with a ton of
strengths, and some things that can be a little bit tricky, and
so if you are listening to this and you are an ADHDer, or you
have an ADHD brain, I think it is amazing that you already know
that you have this type of brain, but you are not alone in
being confused about it, even the name is really confusing.
So, ADHD is actually the letters A, D, H, D, and it stands for
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But to be honest with
you, it's actually a really bad name for what's going on. So I
would love to break it down. So the first piece is the attention
piece. So attention deficit means lack of attention, but it
turns out that ADHD brains are actually paying attention to
everything, and a lot of what's really going on is that it's not
a lack of attention, but that it's hard to control what you're
paying attention to, and when. So, in fact, ADHD brains tend to
notice a lot of things that other people don't, or they
might be thinking about things that other people aren't
thinking about, and this can lead to new ideas, it leads to
creative thinking, or unique problem solving, and in fact,
when ADHD brains find something that they love, they can do
something called hyper focus, which is where you put extra
focus into something for an extra long time, and can
sometimes become your area of expertise when you grow up,
which is a really cool feature. On the flip side, it can be hard
to turn on your attention for things that aren't interesting
to you. So, like in class, if the teacher's talking about
something that's not that interesting, or if you have to
remember to do your chores at home, that might be a little bit
trickier for your brain than most brains, so that first part
of ADHD is the controlling attention part.
Jane: I think that hyper fixation, hyper focus part is so
cool, because some kids and some adults are able, as you said, to
really spend a lot of time thinking about one thing and get
so deep into it and become such experts in it, and something
that a non-ADHDer might be like, well, I'm interested, but I
can't focus for that long, that you're like, I just spent three
hours thinking about this one thing, and I know so much about
it, and I didn't even eat! So you know, sometimes you need to
remember to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, but
you've spent all this time focusing on this really cool
thing that you're interested in.
Dr. Liz Angoff: Exactly, exactly, so that is one of the
cool parts of ADHD brains, and the part that can be tricky as
well, so you've got both parts there, I think the second part
of ADHD is the H, which stands for hyperactivity, and
hyperactivity just means that you love to move, and the funny
thing about this part is that not all ADHDers have this part,
but if you do have this part and you're a mover, you might find
that you learn best when you're moving, or that you love
movement activities like sports, or dance or just running around
playing tag, and you may also find that you say and do things
before you think about them, which actually leads a lot of
ADHDers to being very funny and spontaneous. Sometimes this part
may mean that you do things before you think through them,
which can be tricky if you do something you didn't mean to do,
and you have to say you're sorry, so we can think of that
second part of ADHD as the moving and doing part of ADHD.
Jane: And some people who have ADHD have more of a tendency to
have that attention piece of things that you were talking
about it. Some people have more of that hyperactivity, want to
move all the time. Some people have both, but it's all
considered part of the same kind of neurodivergent brain?
Dr. Liz Angoff: Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting because every
ADHDer is a little bit different. They all have things
in common, but it might show up differently for you. So, if you
have an ADHD brain and your friend has an ADHD brain, it
might look really different in both of you. So, for some
people, that moving and doing part of their brain is actually
that they love to talk, and that they might be that they love to
share their ideas, and it might be really hard to keep those
ideas inside for some people. The attention part might mean
that they do like have that hyper focus piece. For some
people, it might look like I have a ton of projects that I
want to do all the time, and I love to start things, but it's
really hard to finish them, so it might look a little different
in every kid that's out there.
Jane: The last part of those letters in ADHD stands for
disorder, but Dr. Liz doesn't like that part of the name
either, because disorder makes it sound like there's something
that needs to be fixed, and she doesn't agree with that.
Dr. Liz Angoff: There is nothing to fix in an ADHD brain. Your
brain is awesome just the way it is. I think that the word
disorder came about because when we didn't know what was going
on, we thought that, or people back in the day thought that,
oh, this is something that's causing a lot of problems; we
should fix it and try and make it go away. We've learned so
much about brains since then, and we've learned how important
neurodiversity is, and how important neurodivergent brains
are to our society, and so we know now that it's a difference,
not a disorder, and so I like the word difference, and the
kids that I work with, we like to talk about our amazingly
dynamic, hyper-focusing, different kind of brain, instead
of the traditional way of defining ADHD.
Jane: What do you think about those words for ADHD instead:
Amazingly Dynamic, Hyper-focusing, Different. ADHD.
Paisley: My name is Paisley. I'm seven years old. I'm from Fort
Collins, Colorado. My question is, why do people get ADHD?
Dr. Liz Angoff: Well, there are a couple of theories about why
people have ADHD. It turns out that ADHD brains are really
important to the world, because we need these innovative or
creative thinkers to get us out of sticky situations to solve
problems that people face every day, and some of our greatest
inventors and entrepreneurs, or people who start businesses,
have ADHD brains, so they're necessary for our world. And if
we think back to the very olden days, when we were hunting and
gathering our food and looking for new places to live, ADHD
brains tended to be constantly looking around to see what's
happening, and this would have been really helpful to find
food. ADHD brains also really like new things, so they tended
to be less scared of investigating new places where
it could be better to live, so we actually think that this kind
of brain was really adaptive or helpful for humans, and it has
been for a really long time, and currently we need these ADHD
brains to help us solve new problems, come up with new
ideas, or even bring energy to friends when they feel down, and
we need all kinds of different brains for our society to
thrive. So ADHD is one of those types of brains that we really
need.
Jane: There's evidence that ADHD has been around for as long as
there have been people around. It just wasn't called ADHD way
back when. And some of the challenges people with ADHD have
today are related to our modern world.
Dr. Liz Angoff: The way that the world is right now is that we go
to school, we have to sit for a very long time. We need to
concentrate on very specific things and get certain things
done, and so the reason that we've come up with a name for
this type of brain is because this type of brain might need
different things to help to be really successful in the world
that we have right now,
Jane: So, what kinds of adaptations or accommodations
might be helpful to people with ADHD brains? Stay tuned, we'll
get into it.
BREAK: BREAK
Jane: This is But Why, A Podcast for Curious Kids. I'm Jane
Lindholm. Today we're talking to Dr. Liz Angoff. She writes books
about neurodivergence and works with kids and families, and
she's helping us understand something called ADHD, one of
the ways some of us have what are thought of as neurodivergent
brains. Here's a question from Zane.
Zane: I'm six years old, I live in Santa Cruz, and my question
is, why do only some people have ADHD instead of all?
Dr. Liz Angoff: I love this question so much. What if we had
a world that was all ADHD brains? I mean, how amazing
would that be? The thing is that the reason that we have, you
know, different types of brains is largely because of genetics,
or what our parents, the traits that our parents have passed
down to us, so different characteristics like how tall
you are, or even some parts of your personality, or why you're
so much like your uncle, is you know, like all these different
things that are are related in families,
Jane: and you're talking just about the biological piece of
families, because there are lots of different ways to have
families that maybe your genes aren't related to the other
family members, but you're talking about the pieces, the
actual genetic material that gets passed on to us from two
biological parents.
Dr. Liz Angoff: Exactly, exactly, yeah, lots of different
ways that families can be, and biologically we have have genes
that are passed down from one person to another, and so
chances are that if you have an ADHD brain, somebody in your
biological family likely had ADHD as well, even if it wasn't
named for them.
Quinn: My name is Quinn. I'm seven years old. I live in
Newton, Massachusetts. My question is, how does ADHD
affect your brain?
Dr. Liz Angoff: What's happening in your brain when you have ADHD
is that the way that the parts of your brain work might be a
little bit different, so our brains have all these different
parts, and each part has a really important job. So,
there's parts of your brain that help you understand what you
see, parts of your brain that help you understand what you
hear, parts of your brain that help you with movement and
coordination parts of your brain that help you know where things
are and where your body is in space, and there's a really
important part of your brain right in front that helps you to
pay attention, it helps you make good decisions, it helps you to
regulate or respond to your emotions when you're having big
feelings, and we call this front part of your brain your frontal
lobe, or your executive lobe, and I love the term executive
lobe, because it's like the executive or the boss of your
brain, it is the boss that's helping you figure out what you
need to do and when you need to do it, so that you can get the
task done, just like the boss of a company.
Jane: When you have ADHD, sometimes that part of your
brain develops a little differently, or more slowly, so
it might make it a little more challenging for you to pay
attention to something you're not super interested in, for
example, or to sit still when you're being told you're
supposed to be quiet, or to pause before doing something
that might not be a great idea, at least not right now.
Sometimes the chemical signals from one part of the brain to
another are also a little different in an ADHD brain, so
you might seek out things that make you feel good right now, as
opposed to feeling like you can be patient.
Jameson: Hi, I'm Jameson. I'm from Virginia. I'm 10 years old,
and I would like to know, what is ADHD, and how do you control
it?
Dr. Liz Angoff: I appreciate this question from Jameson,
because sometimes having an ADHD brain can be really tricky or
just hard and tiring. The world's not necessarily built
for ADHD brains, for example, and so it can be tricky to sit
through the school day, or you might say, or do something that
you haven't totally thought through, and so it makes sense
that you would want to control the ADHD, but I think the key
thing here is to learn how to do things in a way that works with
your brain to help it be at its best, rather than thinking about
trying to change your brain, so for example, if you're having
trouble staying focused at school or on your schoolwork for
a long time, you can break things down into tiny parts, so
that it's easier to get started and to get finished. And so,
instead of saying I'm going to sit down and do all of my
homework, you might say I'm going to do five math problems
and then check in with my adult, so that you have a check-in
point. If your brain is a brain that tends to act before it
finishes thinking, then you might have a phrase that you say
to yourself, like, what's my plan before you start doing
something. So, for example, before you join a group to play,
you might think, what's my plan, and then pause to think how
you're going to go ask that group of kids to join to join
them. And if your body loves to move, we want it to move. We
want to use fidgets and movement to help your brain stay on. So,
in class, you might have a wiggle stool or a standing desk.
You might have a small object that you can have in your hand,
it's called a fidget, or you might get up every so often and
do some wall push-ups while you're listening to the teacher,
so that because that's going to help your brain stay engaged and
stay in learning mode. I'll say exercise is super helpful for
ADHD brains, and some people also take medication to help
with focus and slowing down to think before they act, and so
that's something that would be a decision with your adults and a
doctor to to help you with, if that's something that could be a
tool in your toolbox as you're building your brain.
Jane: How do you know if you have ADHD? Because I think a lot
of us listening now are like, some of this sounds challenging,
and some of it sounds really cool, and some of it sounds
familiar to me, based on my brain, and some of us already
know if we have ADHD or not, because we've worked with a
doctor or a medical professional or a psychologist who's talked
to us about it, but some of us are just like, wait a minute,
How do I even know what kind of brain I have?
Dr. Liz Angoff: Yeah, so most kids are, or learn that they
have ADHD because they work with a doctor, like your
pediatrician, or they might go see somebody like me who's an
educational psychologist or a neuropsychologist. There's that
word neuro again, that means brain, so someone to help you
understand your brain. And you might do a lot of different
activities that help the doctor to understand how your brain
works with different types of information, how you learn, how
you remember things, how you solve problems, and they might
be looking for a pattern to see, oh, do you solve problems in a
way that ADHD brains solve problems, or do you solve
problems in the way that a different type of brain solves
problems, and so you would learn about your brain by working with
one of those people. Now, I will say, if you're listening to this
and you're a kid and you're thinking, I think that my brain
might work like that, then your next step is to talk to your
parent or talk to your adults to say, I wonder what kind of brain
I have, and to start asking them some questions about how do I
learn what is helpful for me. And then you can talk about your
unique type of brain, whether you have an ADHD brain, a
different type of brain, or there's other words that would
describe your type of neurodiversity.
Jane: Is it useful for all of us to think about what kind of
brains we have? I mean, often we only go to a doctor or we go to
somebody who can help us, who's called a specialist, if there's
a problem or a challenge we need to overcome, but is there a
benefit to all of us thinking about, oh, let me think about
the best ways I learn, let me think about the best ways that I
talk to people and enjoy things or have feelings?
Dr. Liz Angoff: Yeah, well, a fun way to think about your
brain is that all those different parts that I talked
about are communicating with each other with special cells
called neurons, there's that neuro term again, and they make
connections in your brain like billions of tiny roads, and so
we can think of our brains as under construction, which means
that we all have highways, or the things that we've built
those roads that we've built, where things, the messages are
going super fast, and we do them really easily. And there are
construction projects that we all have, the things that we are
still building. So maybe that's something that you're working on
in class, like you're learning fractions for the first time,
and so it's a new construction project, and maybe that
construction is going smoothly, or maybe it's a tricky
construction project, and you need some help, and you need
some new tools to help build that part of your brain, and so
for yourself and with your adult, you might make a list of
all the things that are highways in your brain, you know what you
love to do what you've worked really hard at, what roads
you've built over time, and you might start to think about
what's under construction right now. What are my construction
projects, and what tools are going to be most helpful for me?
So, not everybody, not everybody might have a specific name for
their type of brain, but I know that you know things that might
be helpful for, for my child, or even for me. As I'm talking to
you guys, I am on a wiggle stool, because I love to move,
and I know that's helpful for my brain. And so we don't need a
specific name to know that a tool is helpful for our brain to
be at its best.
Jane: I really like that idea of all of us thinking about what
our brains need to be best. Maybe that's good homework to
think about how we learn best, what tools we need to be
successful in school, in sports, at home. If there's something
that you need help with, talk to the adults around you, they can
help you figure out what your brain needs and how to get it.
And I'd really love to hear from you, what you already know about
the best ways you learn and stay focused. Do you have tips or
suggestions for us, like always putting your stuff in the same
place, so you don't forget where it is, or breaking up your
homework or chores into smaller chunks, so you don't get
overwhelmed and not even know where to start. That's a
challenge I really have. Sometimes a task feels so big
that I don't even know how to begin, and then I don't. I do
what's called procrastinating, not starting and not starting,
but usually if I think of a small piece that I can handle to
start with, the rest of the project is easier to get into.
It just takes that one small thing to be able to help me get
started, but you may have lots of other tricks, just like you
do with questions. You can send us a voice memo sharing your
best strategies that work for your brain, and that you think
might help other kids work with their brains, and if we get
enough, we'll share them. Dr. Liz had one more thing she
wanted to mention to you.
Dr. Liz Angoff: I think that, regardless of what type of brain
that you have, there's something really important, especially if
you have a neurodivergent brain called self compassion, and as
you understand your brain, I think it's really important to
remember that we're all human and we're all going to make
mistakes, and we're all working on those construction projects,
and they can be tricky at times, and learning how to recognize
and repair when you've made a mistake is just such an
important skill, and learning how to talk about the things
that are hard is something that even a lot of adults are still
learning how to do. It's under construction for them too.
Jane: That's the truth. Whether we have ADHD brains or not, we
can all benefit from learning to repair our mistakes and being as
kind to ourselves as we are to other people. Thanks so much to
Dr. Liz Angoff for being our guest today. One of her books is
called The Brain Building Book, and another one is called Our
Brains Empowering Neurodivergent Minds. That's it for today. If
you have a question about anything, you can send it to us.
Have an adult help you record yourself asking a question using
an app like Voice Memos on a smartphone. Then have them email
the file to questions@butwhykids.org But Why
is produced by Sarah Baik, Melody Bodette, and me, Jane
Lindholm, at Vermont Public, and distributed by PRX. Our video
producer is Joey Palumbo, and our theme music is by Luke
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We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then,
stay curious!