There are some supplements everyone can agree to recommend: a multivitamin; vitamin D; magnesium; B complex; vitamin C (ascorbic acid, as well as Connect!); calcium; zinc.

The massive behavioral conditioning we’ve all been undergoing since the advent of ubiquitous electronic communications technology has changed us radically. But this dramatic, if not epochal, change is underappreciated. It’s underappreciated because we’re living in it as it happens, like frogs in cold water that slowly gets heated up without the

As for brooding, this is the special blessing and the bitter curse of ADHD. You have a vision. Maybe you’ve come up with a novel technology for making an unbeatable knife sharpener. Or maybe you think you have the plot to the perfect novel. Whatever your vision, you go at it like you never have before.

But then, what you’ve created…disappoints. It’s

ADHD as a complex set of contradictory or paradoxical tendencies: a lack of focus combined with an ability to superfocus; a lack of direction combined with highly directed entrepreneurialism; a tendency to procrastinate combined with a knack for getting a week’s worth of work done in two hours; impulsive, wrongheaded decision making combined with

To compound the problem, people with ADHD or VAST tendencies usually reject help. Of course, there is an upside to this trait—it’s called nonconformity. Another, less polite way of saying it: People with attention issues tend to have acute bullshit detectors. We hate hypocrisy maybe more than any other human failing, and we can spot it a mile away.

The blessing and the curse vie for top billing, for attention. When the DMN brings lovely images, it is our golden tool. But when it jumps track into the TPN and hijacks consciousness, then the DMN becomes the Demon, the seat of misery, the disease of the imagination. Trapped in the past or future in the DMN, you’re likely to abandon projects you

While complicated in its anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and synaptic flow, the DMN is easy to understand for the layman, if spelled out in plain English. So, as we recap, we’ll keep it simple:

Don’t feed the Demon.

Shut off its oxygen by denying it your attention.

Do something else that engages your mind.

Stay in action!

“If there is one takeaway in distilling down the complexity of the DMN and the TPN, it boils down to the fact that the toggle switches between them are off in those with ADHD.”

In other words, in most people the DMN does not slip so easily into the TPN; the gears mesh well and are not glitchy. But in people who have ADHD, the gears get stripped, so

You might say that stimulants stimulate the brain’s brakes, thus giving you more control.

An increase in dopamine helps our nerve cells pass on information more “cleanly” from one to another. It helps to reduce the noise, quiet the chatterbox, and tune your brain to the right channel. If the signals aren’t clear, it’s easy to fall into confusion and