Mr Self Executive

Today, me and my friend Ashley, chaperoned her little brother, Liam, to the Science Museum, along with our friend Joe. As one would expect, it was a real learning curve, but the thing I learned most was actually about myself. Now, I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and I understand the symptoms well - Over-thinking, over-activity and consequent over-sleeping, are all too common amongst other symptoms in my day to day life. Yet I've never really understood why I have the disorder, what makes me think and behave abnormally. Well, as I learned today from Ashley and the visual imagery photographed*, it all boils down to my Executive Function not working properly.

It's weird to think that every aspect of the outside world exists within a part of our internal minds. There's a section for individuality, eventuality, time, location, weight - The list goes on and on. Essentially, our world, our individual worlds shared in common between us, are actually constructed in our minds by the collaboration of parts of the brain that process data. This constructed world, is built up as neurons form connections and the brain develops; ours - those with ADHD - just develops a little more slowly. We're not any less intelligent or don't think as much, which most people believe. In fact we're quite the opposite, we're often the most intelligent and often thinking about a million things at once, which is why we have such short attention spans.

This slow development of the brain, most commonly affects the prefrontal cortex, or our "executive function" - the part of the brain that orchestrates thought into action in accordance with internal goals, which is why we always have such great ideas but are never very good at putting them into practise. If you imagine every constitutional part of the brain being it's own little department of people, working to make you function - much like the Beano's numskulls comic** - then all of mine are working well and hard, apart from Mr Self Executive.


*I rely heavily on visual imagery to understand things

** Image: http://www.beano.com/media/1371128/93numskullslogo_500x399.jpg