Another chapter from Thom Hartmann (2 of 3)

[Joe Parsons]

This is part ONE of a THREE PART posting. If you have not been
able to get all three, please wait a while to see if it shows up
on your server, or, as a last resort, ask me and I'll e-mail it to
you.

Joe Parsons

Copyright 1996, by Thom Hartmann and Mythical Intelligence, Inc.

Reposted by permission.

"BEYOND ADD"

A human basic need: to experience our own "aliveness"

Psychologist Abraham Maslow gave us a remarkable look into
human behavior when he outlined his hierarchy of needs. Maslow
pointed out that, "The human being is a wanting animal and rarely
reaches a state of complete satisfaction except for a short time"
(Personality and Motivation, 1954,1987, Harper & Row, New York).

Similarly, one of the basic tenants of Buddhist thought is
that humans are always wanting something. Buddha's four noble
truths are: (1) All life is suffering. (2) The cause of suffering
is desire. (3) Give up desire and you end suffering. (4) The
eight-fold path to end desire (right thought, action, livelihood,
remembrance, mediation, belief, speech, and exertion).

This is such a basic and universal tenant of human nature
that we find it in virtually all philosophies and religions.
Jesus said, "Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust doth
corrupt." Rabbi Isaac Luria in Ten Luminous Emanations talks
about the importance of separating self from desire for
experience. In Hinduism, part of the Bodhisattva vow is to give
up even the desire to give up desire. And, of course, Freud,
Adler, Skinner, and others have pointed out that many of those
behaviors we define as neurotic are really misdirected attempts to
satisfy basic needs, or the result of unfulfilled basic needs.

Maslow wrote that our most basic need is for biological
stasis. We need water, food, appropriate nutrition, to excrete,
and to maintain our body at a constant temperature.

The second level he identified as the need for safety.

Once these basic physical needs are met, then we go off in
search of our third need, which he identified as the need for love
and belonging. When that's met, well start seeking self-esteem
and status. And, finally, when all these physical and emotional
needs are satisfied, a person will turn to what some might call
spiritual needs, and which Maslow called the need for
self-actualization.

Maslow's insight into this hierarchy or pyramid of needs
had a revolutionary impact on the field of psychology, creating a
whole new school of psychological thought (called Humanistic
Psychology), and was profoundly insightful. He shows us why a
person who is starving will not care much about his social status
(as I saw in northern Uganda when, in 1980, I went into a famine
area to help set up a feeding center and hospital for starving
refugees: not only did they not worry about their lipstick, many
didn't even care if they were wearing clothes).

And Maslow points out some misconceptions many people
have: for example, what we describe in western society as hunger,
he calls appetite. Few of us have ever experienced
life-threatening hunger, which is at the foundation of the pyramid
of needs; most of us simply crave a specific taste or flavor, or
want that pleasant feeling of fullness in our stomach. This isn't
a stasis or survival need, it's more likely a self-esteem or some
other need.

Extending this concept, I believe an understanding of the
thalamus and RAS, and the study of ADD, have revealed to us
another basic human need, which Maslow didn't include in his
hierarchy. I define this as, "The need to experience aliveness:
the need to feel that one is alive."

Cogito, ergo sum, Rene Descartes wrote in 1637: I think,
therefore I am. Yet merely thinking is not enough to create, in
many people, the reality -- the down-in-the-gut knowledge -- that
therefore I am.

To validate that therefore I am, we must also experience
the fact of our aliveness. Ugo Betti wrote in 1944 (in The
Inquiry): "At any given moment I open my eyes and exist. And
before that, during all eternity, what was there? Nothing."

We see that in different people, there are different
thresholds of sensation that they must have in order to experience
gratification of this basic human need to experience aliveness.

Rabindranath Tagore, for example, had a life devoted to
quiet meditation and contemplation. He enjoyed sitting quietly
and pondering the nature of things, living within his mind (so to
speak), presumably because his need for sensory input was
adequately satisfied. The faucet of his thalamus and RAS was
probably wide open, and life came in at him full-force. So we
read writings he left us which say things such as, "That I exist
is a perpetual surprise which is life" (Stray Birds, 1916, p22).
Similar descriptions of the naturalness of aliveness, the
fulfillment of that "need to experience aliveness" simply from
being alive, can be found in the writings of many others, from
Thomas Merton to George Santayana.

These people had their "need to feel alive" satisfied from
birth: their thalamus and RAS were open wide enough that they
experienced the world constantly, in full Technicolor, and, like a
person after a perpetual Thanksgiving dinner, felt full all their
lives.

People with a thalamic faucet that's less wide-open,
however, need to periodically leap up through the baseline set by
their thalamus to gasp in a full breath of aliveness. Their lives
are characterized by a constant search for stimulation, and many
are tortured by this basic need to feel alive on a daily basis.

Pascal, in 1670, wrote: "There is a pleasure in being in a
ship beaten about by a storm, when we are sure that it will not
founder." Would Tagore have said the same? Probably not. Pascal
would have probably enjoyed The Scream Machine at Six Flags Over
Georgia; Tagore would have probably dismissed it as crude and
overly stimulating.

So we have here now a final "basic human need," one which
Freud first came close to nailing down in 1933 when he wrote about
the Id: "We can come nearer to the Id with images, and call it a
chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement.... These instincts fill
it with energy, but it has no organization and no unified will,
only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual
needs, in accordance with the pleasure principle."

This is not to say that the "basic human need to
experience aliveness" is the same as what Freud called the Id, but
I do believe that Freud was close to touching this need when he
embarked on an exploration of those driving and motivating forces
which lie below our normal levels of waking consciousness. After
all, consider how few people are sufficiently self-aware to say,
for example, "I like to drive fast because it makes me feel more
alive."

Yet how else to explain this sort of behavior, unless we
leap to the conclusion (as Freud and others sometimes have) that
such behavior must demonstrate an unconscious death wish? The
idea of an unconscious death wish is interesting (and, no doubt,
occasionally true), but it doesn't explain the liking of spicy
foods, loud music, vivid colors, wild sex, and other types of
sensation-seeking behavior that are often associated with the
types of people who also drive like maniacs. They can't all be
trying to kill themselves.

So if these folks aren't trying to kill themselves with
all this sensation-seeking, what is their goal?

Perhaps it's a Life Wish: To wake up, even if just for an
instant a day, and viscerally know that they are alive.

Understanding this previously-undefined human need as the
basis of these behaviors then gives us a whole new key to
understanding both healthy high-stim activities as well as
destructive and self-destructive stimulation-seeking behaviors.
In both cases, the person is seeking the experience of aliveness:
in the former case, they've found appropriate ways to get it
(skydiving, public speaking, sales, politics, substitute teaching,
being an emergency room physician), whereas in the latter case
they've stumbled into -- often by life circumstances which shut
out the appropriate routes -- destructive ways to get stimulation
(mugging people, taking drugs, having frequent sex with a wide
variety of people, starting fights, gambling).

And how does this help us understand ADD and other
variations from the norm?
ADD and trout

Anybody who's ever gone fly-fishing is familiar with the
behavior of those fish who eat insects off the surface of the
water. The pond or stream is perfectly still, then the surface is
disturbed as a small bug touches the water and can't fly off
because its wings are wet. A small ripple emanates from the
insect, as it struggles to use surface tension as a lever to free
and dry a wing. Suddenly the waters surface is shattered as a
fish comes surging up from below, snaps the bug and a big gulp of
air into its open mouth, and then crashes back through the surface
to vanish into the waters depths.

Similarly, people with ADD often appear hyperactive
because they're periodically leaping up through the surface of
stimulus -- a surface defined by the set-point of their thalamus
and RAS -- to try to grab a little bit of aliveness.

Little Howie is sitting in class, and the teacher is
droning on about long division, a subject which Howie either has
already mastered or doesn't care about. Howie's thalamus and RAS
aren't letting much information in, and the world is starting to
seem rather gray and distant. The thinking cortex, the therefore,
I am part of his brain, is gasping for air and wants to leap at
that bug: "Give me sensation," it's saying, "so I'll know that I'm
still alive."

The urge is overwhelming: a basic human need is
unfulfilled. Something has to happen. The brain is screaming:
"Break through the surface!!"

So Howie leans forward and pulls Sally's pony tail, or
lets out a loud burp, or flips a spitball at Billy.

Bang! The classroom erupts and now the world is back in
vivid color.

This simple action has penetrated that thin membranous
surface of sensation that, like the ponds surface, the thalamus
had inserted between Howie's mind and his experience of the world.

As an adult, Howie may tell an off-color joke, or cut
someone off in traffic, or start his own business: anything to
propel the brain up through the surface to gasp that breath (or
snatch that bug) of aliveness.

If we look at the three basic behaviors associated with
ADD, for example, we can reframe each of them in this context.
They are: distractibility, impulsivity, and sensation-seeking or
risk-taking. ADD-H (hyperactive) adds the four of hyperactivity,
which we just covered. Distractibility

The scanning behavior of distractibility, viewed in this
light, is the brains way of opening itself up to the experience of
aliveness. The boring teacher is droning on and on, but little
Howie has already become distractible, looking around him to see
that Sally is very concerned with how neatly her pony tail is cut,
that Billy is carefully listening to the teacher, and that nobody
else is paying attention to him.

If he's learned some physical self-control and has an
active imagination, Howie may drift off into daydreaming instead
of acting out. He's creating internally a vivid world that
stimulates him. The Calvin And Hobbes cartoons virtually define
this behavior, as we see Calvin's internal world for several
panels, only then to have that world shattered as Calvin is
brought back to reality by Miss Wormwood standing over him with a
ruler asking him to answer the question. Similarly, psychiatrist
John Ratey of the Harvard Medical School points out that girls
more often fit into this category of "internal distractibility"
than do boys, both because of social conditioning and because of
actual differences in male and female brains.

But whether Howie drifts into daydreaming, or moves into
action, he starts out with distractibility: his brain is seeking
out new sources of incoming sensory information, in order to wake
it back up.

Impulsivity

Since we're talking about a basic human need here, all
those erudite discussions you've heard about cognitive processes,
disinhibition, and frontal lobes you can toss out the back door.

A truly hungry person will grab for food, often regardless
of the consequences, as I learned in 1980. When my companion and
I opened the trunk of the car wed used to bring supplies from
Kenya into the old Namalu Prison Farm (then turned into a refugee
center) I was nearly trampled in the stampede of previously-docile
teenagers and old women. People barely able to move because of
disease or malnutrition were suddenly screaming, kicking, biting,
and climbing over the tops of each other.

So, just as the unmet basic human need for biological
stasis (food, in that example) will drive people to otherwise
unthinkable behaviors, so will the basic human need to experience
aliveness when it's not met.

The brain is yelling, "Now, now, I need it now to be sure
I'm still alive," and it's small wonder that Howie doesn't take
the time to consider the long-term consequences of cutting a loud
fart. Or that Johnny and Sue don't stop their progressively
intense kissing to drive down to the drugstore for a condom. Or
that Ralph tells his boss what he really thinks of him. Or that
Bill leans over and tells Ruth what he heard about Ruth's husband
and that woman down in accounting.

Get a reaction. Get a response. Shake up the world.
Make a decision and act...NOW. Wake up!

Restlessness or Risk-Taking

While most authorities cite the third primary symptom of
ADD as restlessness, many are now including risk-taking, or "the
restive search for high stimulation."

In this context, however, the conventional symptom of
restlessness is actually just stimulation-seeking -- and
risk-taking also fills precisely the same need. In fact if you
combine stimulation-seeking with impulsivity, what you get is a
virtually perfect definition of risk-taking.

The equation here is simple: the more risk, the more
adrenaline. And, as you may have just guessed, adrenaline and its
close relatives are the neurotransmitters to which the thalamus
and RAS are most sensitive.

Some of us look at those people who are perpetual
risk-takers and shake our head in amazement: How could Bill
Clinton have put up with all that abuse in the primaries and
during the election campaign, particularly after being accused of
things such as marital infidelity and drug-use which had so
recently sunk the presidential aspiration of Gary Hart and the
Supreme Court aspiration of Judge Ginsberg? How could Lewis and
Clark have persisted in their long voyage to map the interior of
this wild nation despite hostile natives, disease, wild animals,
and the combined threats of winter and starvation? How could the
early settlers of America been willing to take the boat ride
across the Atlantic in the 16th and 17th centuries when, on
average, ten percent of the people who left Europe died during the
trip here? How could a nurse or physician continue to work in an
emergency room when every day, every hour, it's one crisis after
another? Or a police officer? Or a combat pilot? How could
somebody engage in an extramarital affair, or in unprotected sex?
How can they eat that lethally hot chili?

The answer, of course, is that people do these things
because it satisfies a basic need in them. The experience of
taking chances jolts them with sensation, and thus wakes up in
them that feeling of aliveness -- a need more basic and visceral
than virtually any other except biological stasis. As Andre Gide
wrote in his Journals in 1924, "It is only in adventure that some
people succeed in knowing themselves, in finding themselves."

This also explains why a compulsive gambler, sexually
promiscuous person, or compulsive criminal will often continue to
take those risks, even when they experience the negative
consequences of them. The entrepreneur and the break-in artist
are running off the same brain biochemistry.

"Everything is sweetened by risk," said Alexander Smith in
1863. And John F. Kennedy, who took the nuclear-annihilation risk
of staring down Kruschev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the
risk of sleeping with a variety of women during his presidency,
said in a 1961 speech, "Any danger spot is tenable if men -- brave
men -- will make it so." The "Paradoxical Effect" explained

It's been known for years that if you give stimulant drugs
to hyperactive kids, they settle down. But no textbook on
pharmacology or psychiatry can tell you why. Therefore, this
oddity has been referred to in the literature as the "paradoxical
effect."

But, if this thalamic/RAS model is correct, the
hyperactive kids are the ones whose brains are the most starved
for stimulation. Their thalamus and RAS are closed down more than
the average person, thus letting less stimulus into their brains.
Their brains are begging to be awakened, to be stimulated, and so
they incite stimulation by jumping out of the chair or speaking
out of turn. They have a basic human need which is not being met
by the boring classrooms or comfortable life of modern society.

Stimulant drugs, from Ritalin to amphetamine to caffeine
to cocaine, open the faucet of the thalamus. They make the RAS
more active, and more aggressive in sending wake-up signals to the
cortex. In other words -- to use the fish and water metaphor --
they lift the persons consciousness above the water level, into a
place where it's constantly bright and interesting, and the person
then no longer experiences the need to leap up and crash through
the surface.

Now that his basic human need of aliveness is satisfied,
little Howie doesn't need to scan his environment for interesting
things. He's no longer distractible, because the level of light,
sound, touch, and taste around him have all jumped up a notch or
two. This increasing flow of stimulus satisfies his need to
experience aliveness, and, now that this basic need is met, he can
now sit quietly in the chair and attend to the teachers
instructions.

Similarly, when medicated with stimulants, he's not
feeling that underlying drivenness that comes from having a basic
human need unfulfilled. Since he's not feeling driven to fill a
need any longer, it's easy now to toss thoughts about actions over
to the frontal lobes for deliberate and careful
consideration...and no longer be impulsive. Thinking things
through is not boring any more, simply because Howie himself --
his baseline, his therefore, I am -- is no longer experiencing an
unfilled need. In other words, Howie is no longer bored...so
things around him cease to be boring.

And Howie's less likely to engage in risk taking, such as
grabbing Sally's pony tail, because he now has enough sensation in
his world. In fact, hell soon discover that, when medicated, if
he does things that increase the sensation level, hell experience
discomfort, perhaps even panic. Those things that used to make
him feel good, that once fulfilled his need for aliveness, now
overwhelm him. And so he stops the risk-taking and settles down
into becoming a "normal" citizen of his school or family or world.

This view of ADD also explains things like procrastination
and overcommittment: both are simply ways of creating a crisis,
thus bringing up the adrenaline levels so the sense of aliveness
is more acute.

(Continued in part 3 of 3)