[From Richard Kennaway (971209.1311 GMT)]
Bill Powers (971205.1942 MST):
Good idea. Or, as Tim Carey suggested, try giving the children with
attention deficits a video game to play. In those ADHD children who show
close attention, persistence toward a goal, organized progression through
the game, and good spatial control, you could conclude that the diagnosis
was incorrect and look for the real reason for the inattention and such.
I have seen people come to the opposite conclusion: the fact that the child
so easily becomes engrossed in a video game is but further proof that the
child has a problem. The problem just gets redefined as being, not
inability to pay attention, but inability to pay appropriate attention (by
someone else's definition of appropriate).
This looks very like controlling for locating the problem in the child.
-- Richard Kennaway, jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk, http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
School of Information Systems, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
