多动症，也许根本不是“注意力”的问题

Finding it hard to concentrate, often forgetting things, always late, leaving everything to the last minute: do you have these troubles?

Psychiatrist Awais Aftab says more and more people come to see a doctor with these troubles, thinking they have ADHD.

ADHD's full name is "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," so many people assume it's simply a lack of attention.

After taking stimulant drugs like Ritalin, many people really are better able to focus.

But Aftab thinks "attention" may not be the best way to understand ADHD.

Last year, a major study published in the journal Cell looked at how these drugs affect children's brains.

Researchers found the drugs affect parts of the brain related to reward and arousal.

But the parts of the brain in charge of attention showed no clear change, whether or not the children had ADHD.

Aftab says people with ADHD often drift off halfway through a task, can't keep up in conversations, and instantly forget what others have asked them to do.

Aftab says these problems look more like problems of "sustained engagement": whether you can keep doing something.

Whether you can keep doing it depends largely on whether your brain thinks the task is worth doing.

So what stimulant drugs actually do is make boring things like homework and laundry seem more worthwhile to the brain.

That can also explain why these drugs calm down children who can't sit still.

If a child can't sit still because the task at hand is too boring, then once the task becomes interesting, the child doesn't need to go looking for stimulation elsewhere.

In 1992, a psychologist did an experiment that let children choose: take a small reward right away, or wait and take a big one.

It turned out the children chose the small reward mainly to end the experiment sooner; they really hated waiting.

Aftab says the word "attention" in the name is easy to misunderstand.

Some people who are often late, easily bored or emotionally up and down may never have seen a doctor, because their problems don't sound like "attention."

Still, the consensus among psychiatrists is that ADHD is real, and there are effective treatments.

Work today asks people to do many things at once, and phones and social media make it even easier to get distracted, which makes life harder for people with ADHD.

Do you think phones are making it harder and harder for us to focus on one thing?