Yeah, I was surprised that Scott didn’t mention the fact that they were teaching classes half-full of unmedicated ADHD kids. That has to change the dynamic.
Aye, teaching something really is the best way to learn it, as you end up having to examine it from a lot of different angles to get the ideas to stick in someone else's mind.
When Scott Young branded his method the “Feynman Technique” he was thinking of “A Different Box of Tools” from Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman. Yet that story doesn’t have much of anything to do with the technique.
I guess it worked though, because I can't Google "Feynman" without seeing "Feynman Technique" everywhere.
It's not surprising if differences in personality, intelligence, and memory specifically mean that different people might have very different steady states. This is why those handwavy anti-intelligence arguments of "well, we could teach those kids calculus if we just tried really hard and for long enough!" don't work, because they require ignoring the existence of forgetting.
Yes, I think retention is the important part here. If Scott took a vocabulary test and didn't get 100% on it, it seems safe to presume that he _understood_ all of the words and simply _forgot_ some.
The "Why Do Test Scores Plateau" mentions this (including the research around spaced repetition), but in it Scott states he remains confused about the role of intelligence, noting that neither 'intelligent people are more intellectually curious and get reminded of things more' nor 'intelligent people have better memories' seems sufficient to explain the difference. I suggest intelligence—the ability to identify patterns and integrate knowledge into a coherent whole—serves not merely as a "network effect", but as _compression_. If you understand chess well, you are better at memorizing game configurations (because you can chunk them into underlying structure); if you understand math well, you are better at retaining formulae (because in a pinch you can just re-derive them); if you understand chemistry well, you are better at memorizing reactions (because you can be guided by general principles); if you understand etymology well, you are better at understanding words (because you can often deduce their meanings from their roots), and so on. The greater the intelligence, the fewer bits of knowledge have to be independently retained, and the greater the performance at equilibrium forgetting.
If this is so, increasing attention might help learning a _little_, since it increases the number of repetitions you're likely to catch and be reminded by, but not much, since if it doesn't also increase intelligence it doesn't improve compression.
> if you understand math well, you are better at retaining formulae (because in a pinch you can just re-derive them)
This clicked for me--especially in the context of the vocabulary test discussion. I'm a terrible math student--in that I rarely get the right answer. But I'm considered "really good" at math--I understand the underlying structure and can re-derive equations, *which doesn't solve the problem of basic addition and subtraction errors.* Tests that merely check for the right answer don't catch that people like me know what we're doing, because those are about guessing the password rather than demonstrating actual knowledge.
> If this is so, increasing attention might help learning a _little_, since it increases the number of repetitions you're likely to catch and be reminded by, but not much, since if it doesn't also increase intelligence it doesn't improve compression.
Yes! We have yet to come up with good techniques for teaching compression and pattern identification/integration. We kind of just rely, as a species, on students' native software and hardware being up to snuff.
Personally, I think the closest we can currently get is figuring out a reliable method to teach curiosity. People seem to get better at compression when they seek out and synthesize information for themselves.
Yes, I don't see how not disrupting the class is fairly described as paying attention. They're clearly not the same thing at all. I wonder if Ritalin isn't helping kids pay attention, it's just helping them to sit still better.
Or d) these classes were disrupted and interrupted constantly by the students, and as a result, everyone's learning was significantly impaired, resulting in the drug not appearing to have a large effect on the student's learning when in fact the constant interruptions made it very difficult for anyone to learn.
IIRC there have been studies that suggested that a single disruptive student could impair everyone in the class's learning, so having a class full of them is likely an enormous cofounding variable.
Also, it's likely that the more other students act out, the more borderline students also act out; that is to say, if no one else acts out, the odds of you acting out in particular are much lower.
I've noticed this in group meetings at work (though I'm not sure if "disruption" is the right word for it (though it is sometimes), but certainly participation); when no one speaks up, the odds of one person speaking up are very low. If at least one person speaks up, the odds of multiple speaking up skyrocket. If a lot of people are speaking up, people will speak up far, far more.
Stimulants impact two distinct factors; focus and impulsivity. People with primarily inattentive symptoms really notice the impact on focus. People with both inattentive and hyperactive symptoms see both improvements. People around either notice the same things the person taking the meds does.
While focus becomes more important as school/work tasks become more complex and detailed, don’t underestimate the value for a kid of behaving better in class. No one likes feeling like they are disturbing others, but can’t stop themselves.
Which is another problem here as well; given how disruptive these classes sound like they were, it's possible that the sheer number of interruptions made everyone's classes much less useful just because they were constantly getting interrupted.
These are opposite sides of the same coin. A kid who can't focus on the class is bored to tears. The disruption is an attempt to get out of the boring situation.
As a child psychiatrist, I think this is important to keep in mind when we prescribe stimulants. At the same time, we're mostly focused on function and actual learning is probably more of a secondary or tertiary goal by the time we're seeing them.
There was a Chinese study trying this but it had to be scrapped because the kids kept looking up the more exciting Russian history pages written by Zhemao.
About 12 hours after a dose the Concerta should be wearing off for the day. Lower performance wouldn't be surprising.
About the following days: from my own experience as someone with ADHD and having tried a few of the different medication options, including Ritalin and Concerta, the days after medication are usually still much better than the unmedicated condition.
Especially in the first month or two after starting treatment, taking meds on one days often provided ADHD relief for two days afterwards. I don't know what the mechanism is. Perhaps something about enabling better sleep by helping the circardian rhythm along?
Do you mean stimulants given at very low doses and either slow-release or repeat low low doses, as for ADHD? Or is there a class of non-addictive stimulants that I should know more about?
I mean stimulants given at the doses used for ADHD. According to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines, doses used in drug abuse are around 25x the dose prescribed for ADHD (and furthermore abuse often involves snorting or injecting the drug).
In my experience as a teacher, paying attention to the content is good, but thinking deeply about something sparked by the content is even better. Surface level knowledge often doesn't get beyond the flash-card recall level. But deeply mulling over facts or drifting between them in a semiconscious search for patterns can create lasting updates to one's mental models even once the facts are forgotten. From the outside that can look like spacing out. I may or may not be able to ask the right questions to see if anything interesting happened on the inside.
On the other side of the desk, the dullest teacher trainings I get to sit through are often the best, as I can't help but think about how much better I could have taught it... which means I end up thinking quite deeply about that topic and experiencing various micro-epiphanies.
Also a teacher - definitely all of this. Getting a kid to hold still and play the part of focusing is good for the class because it's less disruptive and can generally help the student Get It Done, but medicating a whole class of kids won't make the lesson or the topic interesting enough for them to retain it.
That's at least part of the mechanism behind the effect of stimulants on concentration, though, in my experience. Maybe there's some sort of "short-term interest" vs "long-term ['actual'?] interest" difference — the former being what makes it possible to spend hours looking at ass pics, when on amphetamine, and the latter what makes assology ultimately less appealing than Bronze-Age history as an avocation.*
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*example may be, uh, somewhat idiosyncratic to Himaldr
There's a very strong relationship (I'm not going to back this up with studies or whatever) between 'play', 'creativity', and more importantly 'learning'. Gell-mann has that famous method for discovery where you (after doing all the necessary research and failing over and over to break through a wall) read the last word of the daily newspaper page and try to solve it with that-- Taleb has also spoken about how the introduction of uncertainty is basically mandatory for discovery. I would guess personally that however dopamine works, it has very long 'hangover' effects i.e. something you repetitively experienced as pleasurable from a while ago can dominate future interests in some low-level way. The kind of intense focus involved with ADHD medication doesn't appear in any 'discovery' i.e. perception of novelty, and I think that having both deep concentration/lateral thought are important. --This may be pseudo-science, however, since I'm sure that it's the kind of thinking that 'dopamine-fasts' and that sort of thing are built upon & I'm suspicious of people promotive about it.
Regardless, I do think there's something fundamental in something like 'how one grew up using/typically used their dopamine' -- the people I know with the strongest interests in highly intellectual and complicated fields are all relatively distant from internet/tv, even with a slight natural distaste for sugary things... Again this is extremely anecdotal and probably a pseudo-science (I don't even personally think the sugar stuff matters). But I just wanted to say that, even in these cases, I can think of examples where they are both effective/interested in a deep/complicated domain, but also --by their own testimony-- get distracted and procrastinate. Actually seeing them in 3rd person makes me doubt their self-diagnosis of laziness a lot, because (a) much of what they do when they are avoiding work is still research in their field, requiring reading of quite deep texts, (b) even when not doing more such (unrelated) research, their activities away from work require a baseline of concentration and interest unique to most people-- and especially unique to someone their age (young 20s). But this is someone who grew up without access to internet/tv until much later, and I think that the access to those things during formative years _does_ affect one.
So to summarize, I think you are correct that there is a distinction between short-term long-term aims, but that the long-term aims tend to be formed over years (& more strongly formed in youth), and that certain kinds of environments favour certain kind of 'searching' behaviours (since we seem to get a hit out of novelty itself, changing domains often is the naturally favoured direction when technology gives us freedom to do so, rather than remaining in one domain). It must be a cliche by now, or a 'boomer'-esque stereotype (I'm thinking of those awful newspaper strips), but I think there _is_ something significant in how environmental changes due to technology are very formative in one's ability to sustain interest. (One problem is that even thinking of this as an 'ability' is fairly sketchy (in a philosophical sense), and that might matter in our capacity to understand and 'treat' problems with this ability.)
Final thing, since this got way too long and Idk if any of it is interesting at all:
People often bring up the marshmallow test to try and argue the importance of class differences (I know the creator claimed he controlled for class later) on self-control, and typically argue like this:
-The children are from more stressful environments (lower class), and therefore gather resources immediately whilst they are still around, rather than wait.
To me this is a coherent view of how one adapts certain behaviours according to their environment , and it matters if this view is correct/neurologically feasible, because it entails that environment (especially stressful environments) are _coherently_ addressed by our biology, and it's only _later_ that this 'lack of self-control' becomes an issue; by then the habits may be strongly ingrained. I remember that in terms of brain structure people with ADHD are loosely similar to those who have dealt with addictions, or those who have been exposed to repeated stressors, etc... I think more specifically in terms of frontal lobe development.
My final addition to this conception would be that I _do_ think that certain technologies (internet especially, tv a little less, streaming services/high optionality tv a little more) can prevent people from developing better habits. I don't really think they can be causative in themselves without very very long-term usage, from a young age, and that itself would usually signify some underlying stressor one is trying to escape. We think about dopamine-associations with substances and how this leads to harmful 'addictions': I think this is an interesting time in history because (as a continuation of things like gambling) we are seeing a mass example of an 'activity' [cluster of possible activities] which in itself is addictive i.e. behaviourally degrading, that is --simply by allowing us certain powers-- it teaches us to favour superficial and high variability (I think Kissinger recently wrote about this, not that his 'take' is especially unique; as I say it's a cliche by now).
Perhaps it just the apology at the end, but I felt compelled to state that this was an excellent comment, and broadly matches a lot of perceptions and ideas I've had. So, thanks for that.
I think it could be further extended by thinking about what causes the dopamine hits in different people. I suspect that getting slightly more out of the "searching" behaviors involved in say, learning to play an instrument, than in doing math problems in early age helps explain why one person devotes more of their time to music than quantitative stuff.
Thank you for writing this, it's helpful and encouraging to hear. I'm also not putting things out there because I'm totally certain of what I say, so the intention is to have people counter me or improve upon what I was saying-- that said it's great to hear that you found it helpful! I like the direction you indicate for extending it, although I expect that at some point 'aptitude' becomes a dominating factor in one's continuation of an activity. I.e. at some point we probably get a conflict between something (close to?) 'innate' and something more flexible (dopamine/motivation/self-control... the fact that these things are more 'flexible' is probably why they are the centre of so many moral issues-- although many morally based arguments reject that they are as flexible as we think).
In high school I could read a book cover to cover in a day, sometimes two, stopping just for meals. It wasn't anything high-brow, usually, just some random sci-fi/fantasy from the library - but the books drew me in so much I had no trouble focusing.
Right now, after the mass assault on my attention from internet clickbait, always-on IMs / discord / slack, etc - I struggle to read 50 pages in a sitting.
I'm slowly recovering that capacity through reducing information overload, but I don't think it's even about the formative years, the capacity for attention is adjusted in an ongoing process.
Although I still suspect that the formative years are more important for these kinds of effects-- that the consequences in development will be long term-- you're absolutely right that one can feel these negative affects at any point in one's life.
I have also been surprised a few times about the apparent ability of the brain to recover after degeneration (in anorexia, which is very severe in its affects upon brain structure, the observed affects are much less apparent on the road to recovery https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/largest-study-to-date-reveals-stark-changes-in-brain-structure-for-people-with-anorexia/), so I think that the most important thing is to remove the underlying stressors, and at that point the brain can recover with adequate nutrition.
In that vein, I have read many encouraging anecdotes about people quickly regaining (over the course of a couple weeks to a month) much of their focusing capacity (there was a good article about it which I cannot find right now); but the main problem was that in all of the accounts the people were physically incapable of accessing the internet, and that as soon as they could access it once again the problems returned. I personally have a hard time imagining a good measure to emulate this in modern life (excluding things like abandoning modern life & 'moving to the wild', I mean). I suppose blockers can work? Or perhaps exclusively using the internet at work?
[aside: It's probably simplistic to think of it straightforwardly as an addiction, since it has a lot to do with the fact that we tend to favour a number of very attention-superficial sites (twitter & other social media), whereas probably reading long articles would be fine. The optionality is the main aspect here; it represents something similar about addictive activities as gambling, where the 'hit' comes from a kind of emergent novelty.]
I'm reading a book about this right now, actually, called "Deep Work" by Cal Newport and it's really resonating with me. About attention and concentration and distraction.
Meth is actually a highly effective and legal medication for ADHD (very low doses, compared to recreational use, as you can imagine). The problem is, no one wants to be the doctor who prescribed meth for an 8 year old! Or even for a 38 year old.
As a user of ADHD meds I can say no medication will make content interesting. I find i'll only use it when I really need to get through something, and usually best if the content is familiar but uninteresting. Also very helpful when work is tedious, ie. coding or spreadsheet crunching. That's where the chemical boost really helps, since the mind easily wanders. When the subject is inherently interesting or novel, ADHD meds almost hinder learning ability since the brain is somewhat 'in a rut' of concentration. The new neural connections are made less easily in a medicated state. This may vary for different/younger folks, i'm 31 now and started using ADHD meds at the age of 22 where I did find it useful in learning new things. I'm still of the view that giving kids ADHD meds (say below 20 y.o) is not appropriate unless very dire circumstances (dangerous or delinquent hyperactivity).
Definitely case by case, but in my experience (largely elementary sped situations, also diagnosed/on Adderall starting at 23), giving kids meds like this on the regular at a very young age can prevent them from learning to deal with their own nature. The medication replaces adapting to themselves and their environment. Me and my brother (very ADHD, teachers *begged* my parents to diagnose and medicate, they refused) both had to learn how to succeed in the school environment without the focus pull and it made success all the more rewarding. I have a better understanding of my meds as a *tool* than as something I *need,* a distinction I would not have been able to make if I'd been placed on them early.
That said, I've certainly seen cases where it seems like a good choice to medicate. Case by case, but I think it's important to err on the side of "teach kid to deal with it" over "give focus drug."
I take some issue with comparing ADHD etc to things like cancer and broken legs, which are only problems. But point taken.
Personally, I've seen a lot of kids who were *over* medicated. This makes me wary of medication in general and I think of it as a last resort. I recently worked with a student (8 years old) who talked *constantly* as you describe your son - he's also incredibly gifted, but exasperating to the adults around him who don't care about eg Roblox. School is difficult for him, so I'm glad things are going well for your son!
Coming from the school system I feel strongly that many cases of medicated kids could be UNmedicated with changes to the environment - kids don't have enough recess (45 minutes in 6.5 hours!), schoolwork is increasingly completed on computers, and very rarely are there the kinds of hands-on, constructive projects that would help more students care about and focus on the work (ie, a third grade castle project I witnessed this year was just a drawing, whereas I distinctly remember having to build a model in my own elementary school experience).
The incentives for the school system are so poorly aligned and disconnected from each other that I have a hard time coming up with solutions to this that could actually be implemented. There's a lot of hard problems wrapped up together and ultimately everyone needs to make the decisions that work best for them, I just wish the world were better set up for the students for whom school is not a healthy environment.
You're one of the good ones. I was prescribed ritalin in the 90s because a teacher pressed that I didn't pay enough attention. Treatment was stopped after some years when parents didn't notice a difference.
Today, I would not describe myself as having ADHD/ADD. My experience informs my bias which is that less rigid attention in children does not necessitate that they experience life-long ADHD; in part there is a symptom of simply being a child, or being of the day-dreaming persuasion. Not only is it over-prescribed, if we're to believe this research it barely provides value. Whether or not they actually have ADHD might be a moot point.
I had trouble focusing for the entire duration of school, for two reasons: a) insomnia, b) boredom. At the time, sleeplessness was not seen as a genuine concern and no one was equipped to help me deal with it. That mostly remains true of GPs today (everyone's first line of defense), but they can refer you to specialists or therapists who know somewhat better. Fortunately there is plenty of helpful material out there if you seek it out and take the time to learn by yourself.
In Artificial Neural Networks, there's literally a variable called 'Learning Rate'. This is a number, you can set it to anything you want. And indeed, the higher you set it, the faster the ANN learns, all else being equal! But also, the higher you set it, the lower the maximum skill level the ANN can attain before it reaches it's limit and plateaus.
I had the same thought, but I think we have to be careful here because it'll be easy to conflate concepts. When we talk about a student's learning rate I think we're likely to be referring to how much information we expect them to retain or how hard/fast we push them to demonstrate knowledge.
But AI learning rate is essentially how closely the machine learning function traces the curve it's following. A high-learning rate AI will make massive jumps, mapping huge regions of the learning space, but at very low detail. A low-learning rate AI will make smaller jumps, mapping more slowly, but also more precisely.
It's not the difference between covering one chapter and two chapters in a textbook, it's the difference between reading and retaining the same amount of content in a survey-level course and a graduate level one. The survey course will give me a much better high-level mapping, while the graduate course will give me a lot of info on one particular part of the map. If I've already got a good survey-level understanding of a subject, taking another survey course is unlikely to provide me with much value. I'll spend much of my time going "yeah, I know this." Meanwhile if I take a graduate level course on quantum physics, I'll converge towards understanding very slowly, because I don't have that high-level mapping.
I'm not sure if there's a brain chemistry/intelligence interpretation of all this or not. As an ADHD person, my best interpretation would be that I don't have a lot of control over my learning rate, sometimes going very deep on poorly understood topics (and then failing to retain anything), and usually going very broad because deep understanding is hard with low dopamine payoff. I suspect that the bottleneck Scott refers to is more analogous to an AI's computational resources or architecture than to learning rate.
No I'm aware - ANN learning rate is about update speed, AKA 'How Much You Change The Numbers Each Step', not the actual learning that results from these updates. I still think it's a relevant comparison, however. For myself, I feel like my learning rate is set rather low, so I learn slowly, but can eventually build up lots of detail, if I stick at it.
I've taught 4th grade for almost twenty years, and I've had students who I would have sworn were not paying the least attention and were not getting a thing I said...but who, it turns out, were getting a hell of a lot more than I thought they were and who wound up doing pretty well. It's not always easy to judge such things by the obvious, superficial indicators.
I have a memory from 2nd grade where everyone was at their desks learning cursive, and I was in the corner reading a book. Occasionally I'd glance up and memorize the pattern of the new letter the teacher was drawing on the board. I'm sure I also did some practicing (the kinesthetic stuff is important too), but... yeah, it usually would have looked like I wasn't paying attention at all.
AI was brought up at the end, but maybe not the most relevant example. Many neural nets employ "dropout", where 30% or so of the neurons are turned off at random. This seems to help the network develop resiliency, and not depend too much on any particular set of neurons. To extend the metaphor to its speculative extreme, one could imagine that with all neurons paying perfect attention to the task at hand, you would be better behaved for sure (no neurons to misbehave with), and you might even perform better on immediate tests, but you might not "learn" in a resilient way.
Dropout in NNs is mostly there to prevent overfitting the model; the closest analogy in teaching actual humans is probably rote learning (as opposed to conceptual or deep learning (I just love how the terminology gets mixed up when talking about humans and NNs))
I don't think the implied premise of attention in class = learn more material is rock solid to begin with. We don't know what makes kids actually learn better, or at least we don't apply it in schools; instead they get an overworked 27 year old's heuristic approach to what they think teaching is supposed to be.
By the time they are in this study I think the boys have just developed learning styles that fit their strengths and weaknesses, ability to catch random detail but short attention spans. Having been in that situation (and been on and off Ritalin) I am unsurprised that the boys who continued to use the learning style they were experienced in kept up with those who were medically given different strengths they weren't used to.
I'm curious what would happen if you tried this with non adhd students. I would expect a stronger pro Ritalin effect as you'd be strengthening a preexisting strength rather than a weakness.
I suspect you're right in the extreme case: there are certainly people you couldn't teach quantum mechanics to even given 20 years.
But that type of extreme case shadows a *lot*. In practice, we don't really care if we can teach someone something over truly long periods -- if someone can't understand a fairly wide topic in 1 year of poorly focused instruction (a classroom of 20+ students as compared to, say, a private tutor), we have no interest in teaching it to them. Given how long it took me to understand (for example) partial differential equations, I'm confident we lose a lot of potential this way. In other words, we rarely make anything like a serious effort to optimize training our meat computers in any task or subject area. Not sure that's relevant to stimulant function in the classroom, but if we ever work out an educational method that *isn't* inefficiently (human) labor intensive, it means we could see fairly dramatic gains.
More on topic, to echo other people here: attention is not a substitute for interest. I have paid attention to a lot of classroom instruction that I knew I had no interest in and was going to forget immediately because nothing had flipped the switch in my brain saying "this is actually worth knowing". My impression is that there are chemicals that might have something similar to that effect (among others), but they're mostly illegal drugs.
Intuitively, I feel like the analogue of training data for a vocabulary word would be something like how many examples you've seen of the word being used. I don't think the *primary* way humans learn language is by memorizing formal definitions.
"a little more quantum physics every day for twenty years, and eventually expect them to know as much as a smart person would after getting a four-year degree."
I think this would work (and does work - relatively poorer learners in schools at the moment still learn a lot of stuff by the end of school). But there's a condition. I teach English to children, and one of the problems I find that some seem to have run into is coping strategies. We get kids coming in at about age 10, who have been having English classes for four years (they start in 1st grade) and have at some points performed reasonably well on school tests, but they can't identify English words like "I" or "and". They seem to have developed (highly sophisticated!) strategies for giving correct answers on tests and in class, despite not knowing any of the stuff that we call "English".
Those strategies sometimes block any further learning. The student's goal is usually nothing more or less than to pass the test; if they have a strategy that sometimes/consistently enables them to do this, they will actively resist taking on new information that might disrupt their strategy.
I guess that means I agree with Scott that school is badly aligned, i.e. for a large number of kids, it never becomes obvious that getting good at the school subjects is the best way to get through the day; and they aren't given compelling other reasons to want to get good at school subjects. And a little bit of concentration probably doesn't make a big difference
But I feel like it should make a big difference over the longer term, because the kids will build up marginally more experience of having paid attention in class, heard something, used it in a test later, and gotten through the day a little easier.
What are some of these highly-sophisticated strategies? Unless the tests are very regular in a way that I should think it would be a goal to avoid (e.g. "C is usually the answer"), I can't really imagine what they could be.
Sure, it's a bit mind-boggling. They include things like: in class, swift mirror-repetition of the last two words the teacher says, which apparently in their large-class situation in public school is enough to make the teacher think they've answered the question and move onto the next kid, but can be achieved without any mental processing or understanding at all! Use of muttering, finely tuned to the ears of their English teachers, so they produce a sound-sludge that seems enough like an answer to get the teacher to move on. Waiting for and imitating classmates' whispered answers. Verbal parroting, so that sometimes, if you give the prompt "spring," they can respond with "summerautumnwinter," without necessarily knowing what they mean, or even that they are three words.
In writing, they sometimes learn to write whole lists of words in a particular order rather than learn what each word means. (The exams are indeed quite poorly designed, so this strategy gains marks.) Words may be learned in relation to specific prompt images, so a child may reproduce "summer" next to an image of the sun, without knowing or caring that the word means summer. And they may learn to reproduce quite long passages, several sentences long, without knowing what they mean (much like a list of words). These passages can be inserted into the writing part of an English test, and will still get you 4/6 or 6/8 marks, even if they're not on-topic, because these are primary school exams, and marked generously.
It's bad teaching and bad exams that allow these practices to flourish - but that's hardly uncommon!
Fascinating. Initially I assumed for some reason that the students you teach are mainly Spanish or Creole speakers. However, I've heard anecdotes about something similar in the context of standardized test prep, so now I'm wondering, are the students who employ the strategies you describe predominantly Asian?
As it happens, yeah. I live and work in southern China, so they're all Chinese students. I should stress, though, that talking about who the students are seems unfair, because these are so obviously inculcated by the school system. It's not because of who the students are, it's because of the system they're in. English teaching in Chinese public schools is uniquely bad because so many of the teachers can't speak English at all (some literally refuse to speak English in the classroom), and the textbooks they use are conversational English textbooks. (I actually quite like the public school textbooks, but they're wildly unsuitable for large classes with non-native teachers.)
Well, the reason I focused on who the students are is that about a decade ago I heard from a teacher in California that Chinese students getting test prep in hagwons were "gaming" standardized tests via some method that sounded really improbable, but that lines up with what you described.
At the time, I thought that if kids (and adults) really were pulling that off, then they must have some intellectual advantage others (and certainly I) don't, even if they're just learning and employing a successful stratagem. Calling it "gaming" seemed sort of, well, biased.
But the details you describe paint a fuller picture and make me reconsider.
Good test design can defeat these sorts of tactics.
I have noticed that some people write test questions in a particular way that is highly susceptible to gaming the answers, resulting in you being able to correctly answer questions even when you don't actually know the answer.
You can also defeat this in other ways, like asking more open-ended questions or making people do projects which require them to show comprehension.
Of course, people start complaining when you do this and half the students fail.
Thanks for writing this. I have seen similar behavior in college students, and never really knew what to make of it. Getting essay answers that I would now say read like they were written by an AI via "this word and that word usually go together, so I will do that." I had often wondered if they were just throwing together word salad in panic from half remembered information, or just really bad at writing. The notion that it is a perhaps unconsciously learned strategy makes a lot of sense, and starts to suggest solutions for working around it.
Yep, for us it's pretty much always the same thing: you have to go back and teach things that are much more basic than you think. For example, in my language learning context, when students struggle to learn vocab, it's because they don't know the speech sounds. I hear them spelling the word "but" by saying, "b-a-t - no, not that a, the other a." It doesn't matter how much work you put into the teaching of vocabulary when the students literally can't hear the difference between one vocabulary item and another. You have to regress the extra step.
I don't teach anyone of college age, but with middle school students, I've recently been noticing how difficult the language of questions can be. Sometimes they may know the material, but not be able to understand the question at all - and are unable to recognise that failure of understanding in themselves, or unable to admit it. So you have to do a bunch of diagnostic investigation before you can even get started.
Why am I reminded of when Feynman tried to teach in a Brazilian university and discovered that the students had only ever memorized passwords and didn't understand anything?
Yeah, I assume this is a universal phenomenon. I'm guilty of all of these shortcut approaches sometimes (watching me trying to copy-paste learn coding off the internet would make a grown man cry)! But what was surprising to me was to find that a whole chunk of a (reasonably "successful") education system could be run so as to be, for a significant number of kids, nothing more than a mechanism for forcing kids into intellectual bad habits. I'm still not fully on board with Scott's anti-school thing, but this is the kind of phenomenon that could push me that way.
One of my classes was 240 students, I was the only one involved on the staff side, and the administration wanted the marks back within 3 days of the test at the absolute latest, no excuses. That is why it was multiple choice. I conjecture that teachers would drop multiple choice in favour of intelligent questions all by themselves if the circumstances made it possible.
Very interesting! Thank you for taking to the time to provide these examples.
I imagine these types of strategies take place much more than generally acknowledged, across all ages and domains. I saw similar things taking place even at university level CS courses: students would attempt (and often succeed) to "game" the compiler / homework problems, and still get credit without understand the syntax or semantics of what code they were submitting.
As a father of two currently homeschooled kids, I'm noticing a very similar phenomenon. The kids seem to treat learning tasks as some overly-complicated game, and view their main optimization task as making as much progress in it as possible while using as few mental resources as possible. Like, when using a language-learning app, they would skip listening to the instruction and try to guess the answer. That's despite the fact that I actively try to downplay the importance of getting results (in the form of correct answers); there's no score in the app, no penalty for wrong answers, etc. It's just that actively learning is harder then guessing, and when there's no internal incentive to learn (or the benefits are too distant to really register), the mind starts optimizing ruthlessly. The solution seems to be to try to align the most immediate incentives somehow, and hope that the more beneficial time preferences develop eventually as the child matures.
I'm just in the middle of making a homeschooling decision. Mine have been in school up till now, and seem to be a bit zombified by it, and would love to pull them out and let them relax and develop a bit. But that kind of thing could make my relationship with them very tense, so I'm worried about it. Thanks for the salutary thought!
I agree that you could probably teach almost anyone quantum mechanics given enough time. I think the main obstacle is most likely low academic self-concept / self-sabotage.
The reason I think this is that I don't really think the variation in human intelligence is that large on an absolute scale, I think it's more like temperature (we feel a huge variation between 0C and 40C but temperature can go a lot lower). If you look at AI performance in domains where it's superintelligent (eg Go) you'll see average human intelligence is a pretty narrow band that AIs quickly fly through. I can't see any compelling reason why the threshold for being able to learn QM is neatly inside this narrow band.
To me a much more plausible explanation is low academic self-concept. I hypothesise that if I went to school in a class where people learned 2x as fast as me and I always fell short, I would become convinced I couldn't learn as much as them, so any attempt to teach me would result in negative thought spirals causing me to fail to learn. I saw this pattern often when I did private tutoring - I've found it's actually not hard to tutor people with these deeply ingrained insecurities difficult concepts 1-on-1, but they find it psychologically difficult to be persistent and follow through (CBT might help?)
Could the answer lie in something like the lessons these kids were taking having been the same (i.e. using the same plan and resources, with teachers using the same strategies) and basically optimised for kids with ADHD? If so, perhaps the results just mean that Ritalin works *and* SEND teaching works (I've spent this year doing teacher training, and we keep being told that the ideal goal is for a kid with ADHD in your lesson to be able to learn as much as a neurotypical one, and it sounds like these lessons might just have reached that standard).
Re the Ritalin study, which showed that attention improved but learning not so much when ADHD kids got Ritalin, how about the idea that engagement is necessary? When talking a test, students are usually trying to succeed, so they’re engaged. Typically, classwork is boring, so they’re not. I recently read of a study that showed that 1:1 tutoring gave better learning results than either of two classroom paradigms. Could it just be that 1:1 interaction is so much more engaging than being in a classroom? Perhaps in a 1:1 situation, Ritalin would help ADHD kids learn better. Or in other engaging situations, like, say, chess or video games or something.
1:1 tutoring famously outperforms just about every educational intervention ever, offering about 2 s.d. improvement in outcomes, but it also obviously is extremely expensive to scale up so it remains underutilised.
I think there are many factors that make 1:1 tutoring better, having done a bit of it as a student. Firstly, yes, it's much easier to keep 1 kid engaged than a class - there is often no framing that all 30 kids in a class would find interesting, so teachers have to settle for getting most of the kids at best, but with only 1 you can tailor your approach precisely *and in real time* - with only one student, you can watch their face to see what's clear and what's not, what's interesting and where precisely you lost them.
Secondly, you can repeat things exactly as much as needed - instead of, say, three repetitions for everything, you can do one or two for the things that the kid gets easily, and have enough time saved as a result to afford to spend 6 or 7 on the one thing they're truly stuck on.
You can also ask exactly what they do not understand and pinpoint the error they make, understand where their logic/understanding break and try to correct it using counter-examples, alternative ways to do it correctly, analogies with something they like, can already and so on.
It require one-to-one interraction because, unlike a class, it's a real conversation. It also require the teacher to really be proficient in the matter he teach, not only be able to follow the program and pass the exams himself (which is often the case).
That's my experience teaching math to friends that were much less gifted/interested in math than I was (it usually go hand in hand, it's rare to be interrested in something you are not doing better than most, and vice-versa).
And there is also a peer effect: getting teached by your peer is a different psychological experience than being teached by an authority. Some students like it better, others needs/crave the authority, and a class setting is authoritarian.
Now doing that helped them pass the exam and really improved their math skills, for this particular year. But from what those friends told me, it has no lasting effect. Probably because the only way to keep the skills is to use them, by obligation or interest. They had neither one or the other...
What you're pointing to is this: design instruction that mimics what a tutor does. For example, the students need to make active responses quite often; and the instruction needs to respond to the students' demonstrated understanding, or lack thereof; and the students need to have opportunities to ask questions that actually shape the direction of the instruction that follows. These kinds of things can be managed.
I don't think so. Not in a class of 15+ students. Maybe with 3-5, but more than that and the ambiance drastictly changes, nothing ressembling a conversation takes placd anymore....At least that's what I get from my very informal teachnig attempts when in school (One or 2 friends), and teaching assistant during Phd. Teaching 2 friends or a group of 3 students for a project is a very different experience (a much more pleassant one for me) than teaching a group of 15. This was awful, and the only way I made it bearable was to split those in an ex-cataedra part (awfully close to being on scene, which I despise, an probbaly sucked hard for this part) and back to informal one-to-one with me moving around. But it means that instead of 2h one-to-one tutoring, it was 1h online pre-recorded course (only less smooth) + 10 minute tutoring. I am far from a good teacher (although I apparently am a good tutor, at least if I do not loose patience), but having experienced good ones (I think), I see no way to replicate one-to-one (or one-to-a-very few) tutoring in a class of 20+ students. Except with the very time-inefficient tutoring each student successively...
It's quite possible to do what I said. I do it. I think you're missing the point. Tutoring doesn't work because it "resembles a conversation." It works because it elicits frequent active responses from students, because the tutor responds to the input from those responses, and so on. A group can get a lot closer to the relevant features than it does. For example, you can give students individual whiteboards and have them all write questions for the teacher at once; you can pair up students and have them explain things to each other; and you can actually observe what they are doing and then shape your instruction accordingly. No one said it was easy, but it's possible.
Solving math problems is one thing. Following rules is another, related, thing. Learning is another, and doesn't really seem all that closely related to either. You treat it as strange that improving the first two doesn't seem to affect the third. But really, why should it?
You say "Concerta's clearly doing something". And you're right. But why jump to the conclusion that the thing it's doing is "making kids pay attention"? There are other things that could explain better student performance.
I am a math tutor, and I often find myself wishing that my students could become dumber at will. That when the time came to do arithmetic, they could shut off most of their brains and execute rules mechanically. Because frankly, most thoughts are simply obstacles or distractions when you're trying to do kid-level math. That's why a simple computer can out-calculate a brain that has vastly greater processing power.
My first thought, when I heard about the effects of Concerta, was that it might be doing something like that. Inflicting useful stupidity, desirable narrow-mindedness. Which might actually make people worse at learning, not better. A wandering mind is a problem when you're doing arithmetic, but I think it's a good quality in a student overall.
Your point seems very relevant for the kind of learning that enriches a person, but less so for the "learning the teacher's password" that this study examined, which I *would* naively expect to benefit from the kind of narrow-mindedness that you're thinking of
Possible, but learning math is often a much more intellectual process than doing it. It really does help to understand what you're doing and why, even if the actual task is just following memorized steps.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why it helps. But the students who "get it" always outperform the students who don't.
> My first thought, when I heard about the effects of Concerta, was that it might be doing something like that. Inflicting useful stupidity, desirable narrow-mindedness. Which might actually make people worse at learning, not better.
The experience of stimulant medications for me is very much this. In normal everyday ADHD life, the senses are wide open. I'm absorbing many things at a time. Lack of stimulus is unnerving. The key point here, though, is that I am actually absorbing those things. My brain is taking it all in and retaining what it feels is important.
Add stimulant medications and it's like looking through a telescope by comparison. Much, much less "wide open" than usual, and much more focused on one thing. That is VERY helpful for DOING. It's not especially helpful for LEARNING except where learning takes the form of doing, as in the case of doing homework.
I have very much not had that experience. Learning is much easier when you can focus on something long enough to actually learn about it. Or when other things your brain feels are important but which aren't actually are not intruding.
This is entirely anecdotal evidence, but as a "gifted" child who got diagnosed with ADHD at age 27, I've always completely separated my ability to learn (processing+analyzing information) from my attention issues. I take an off-brand Concerta, and what it allows me to do is exert less effort to do things I otherwise get paralyzing executive dysfunction for. I.e. just about everything in my life that I'm not really interested in on a whim. Concerta is a tool that allows me to direct my attention better, and most importantly it helps massively with time regulation: so less "oh I can finish this task in 20 minutes because I couldn't make myself do it earlier" and more "ok I want to do this, I can do it at X hour, and allocate Y duration to it." This process is near impossible without the medication. As a child this translated to setting my alarm at 5am in the morning to fail to complete homework and ending up scribbling it in class before it was due.
As stated at the end of this piece, I feel like the major hurdle in these types of studies is defining significant variables that first qualify the ability to learn, separate from overall attention. But you very quickly get into extremely murky territory (and I'll admit I'm not super well read on this topic because I find filtering out my personal bias/experience extremely draining, a poor show of rationalism at work).
I share much of your experience. I was always a distractable kid, but I was never diagnosed with ADHD, due to a combination of success despite distraction, my parents' attitudes towards education and medication, and going to elementary school before Ritalin became the rage in my family's social cohort. My executive function was bad (probably not as bad as yours), but that weakness never caught up with me because while it might have taken me four hours to master an algebra concept that should have taken one hour, I had four hours to spend on it. College and law school were tough, but it was only as a young attorney, expected to work through tedious documents quickly, that the volume of work exceeded the available time. I got on stimulants at that point.
I don't take stimulants every day. When I do, I can't perceive a difference in the quality of my work. Some of that is surely that a legal brief cannot be measured the way that a page of twenty long-division problems can. But the biggest difference is simply time. On stimulants, I sit down and do the work. I don't take three bathroom and two coffee breaks every hour. For what I do, getting the writing done is what matters. There could be differences in the quality of my writing on and off stimulants, but the crucial thing is that the brief get finished and filed. A so-so brief can still win; a brief that never gets filed because I was writing on SlateStarCodex is a professional disaster.
> Something like this must be true if we assume that it takes a certain intelligence level to learn surgery - or quantum physics, or whatever. Otherwise you could get a very dumb person, keep teaching them a little more quantum physics every day for twenty years, and eventually expect them to know as much as a smart person would after getting a four-year degree. I’ve never heard of someone formally trying this, but I predict it wouldn’t work.
... Don't we all start off as very dumb people, and we keep learning a little more every day for many years until we can do the complicated stuff?
Kids with low IQ hit the same milestones as kids with high IQ, just slower. Why would this be different in adult life?
When I tutored in college and HS, and now train (“capacity build”) as an adult I do not find the last graph true at all. Basic algebra is just literally beyond some people. And more and more things as you move up the intellectual hierarchy. Now how much of that is focus/interest versus raw intellect is maybe hard to say.
Could you torture the non algebra understanders into understanding algebra with the right negative stimulus? Maybe? But copious positive stimulus definitely has no effect for some people, once you start getting into mid level HS work. And these are not people who are “morons” or whatever medicalized term you want to use. Just on the low end of the distribution.
Given how hard it is for some adults to uptake certain skills/concepts even with the literal gun of “you will be fired if you don’t perform better” pointed at their head, I don’t think the “just slower” model is correct.
> Basic algebra is just literally beyond some people. And more and more things as you move up the intellectual hierarchy. Now how much of that is focus/interest versus raw intellect is maybe hard to say.
Set theory is beyond most set theorists, which is why Skolem's Paradox is simply swept under the rug.
Surely there's a threshold IQ for mathematics and abstract conceptualization. The more complex and logically fraught, the higher the threshold. Algebra, which is minimally troublesome and merely involves using letters to stand in for variables, has a low threshold -- but a threshold nevertheless -- whereas quantum mechanics and set theory have very high thresholds. With enough guidance, rote memorization, and mechanical problem solving, people below the threshold might be able to "fake it" -- but they won't be able to develop a comprehensive understanding or apply the abstract concepts they're "learning" to their daily life.
“ Kids with low IQ hit the same milestones as kids with high IQ, just slower.”
That’s simply not true. One issue with low IQ is poor working memory and poor long term recall. In some cases they simply don’t have enough RAM to hold all the information they need to complete the task. In others their ability to write to disk reliably is poor so they can’t recall the facts they need to complete the task. Part of having a low IQ would be both of those at the same time.
in regard to surgery students, maybe your brain just gets numb. at first you're excited - your brain is titillated. new, fun stuff is gobbled up. after four years it's just another serving of cottage pie.
to bring it to the classroom, not paying attention is an act to keep from getting bored. which is to say when you are paying attention you're paying attention.
As a language teacher, I can confirm from long experience that not all words, even those considered at the same 'level' are equally difficult to retain. Nor can you predict with much confidence whether a given student will retain a given word based on how other students do.
From a language research perspective, I do not put much faith in results from vocabulary teaching unless those words are guaranteed to be unknown to the subject. This was obviously not possible here, but the fact that these words were part of the standard curriculum and were relatively common English words means there will be significant exposure effects.
(Another possible explanation as a former student and teacher trainer: many teachers are just not very effective, for various reasons.)
I'm not sure if it's relevant at all, and this is just my personal experience so only anecdotal. I knew just a little German as my third language (2 hours per week between 6th and 10th grades). When I moved to Netherlands and started learning Dutch it replaced my German instead of becoming a separate language that I know. When I try to learn other languages they don't replace anything else, but since German and Dutch are more or less cousin languages my brain is only able to keep one among them. Now I still remember some German when I push myself, but it's a bit locked behind Dutch.
I took four years of Latin in HS, then minored in Russian. While I can still "read" (i.e., reconstruct the sounds of) Cyrillic text, I can only recall a few random words of Russian and can't string together a sentence. That was the case at little as a year out of undergrad, but I've retained probably 70% of my Latin decades later.
Nowhere near similar etymologically, but both are conjugated declined languages. Your experience makes me wonder whether I was leaning too heavily on their structural natures when learning each language, but only have one mental "slot" for such a framework and, since Latin has (bizarrely for a dead language) been much more useful in my adult life, it kept hold of the slot.
So your primary language is something else, English is second, Latin is third and Russian is fourth? While not the exact same circumstance, it's still similar enough to think of having "mental slots" especially for languages not repeatedly used. Also English has enough Latin in it to keep Latin fresh.
Although, if you started learning, let's say Italian, would it wipe the similar Latin? I have no idea how much similarity Latin has to any one of the Romance languages.
I've picked up a fair amount of Spanish later in life in passing, certainly know more of it now than I remember Russian (low bar). But since I haven't studied it formally I couldn't tell you how to conjugate a verb in it (while I still remember multiple Latin declensions & conjugations). It *feels* very different than when I learned Latin & Russian.
FWIW, at least among the written forms, Portuguese seems to me to be the most similar Romance language to Latin. My pet theory is that in the time period when they were diverging from Latin (i.e., before Brazil was colonized), there was a much smaller pool of speakers along that strip of the Iberian peninsula so fewer opportunities for "mutations" to arise than in the other regions. Or maybe it was just more sheltered from neighboring languages like Arabic (Spanish) or German (French).
The obvious answer is that learning requires more than just paying attention.
Going a bit deeper, I suspect that learning - or at least learning in a useful way - is more about patterns and linking each new bit of information to existing bits you already know. That might be innate, or it might be possible to teach this. Rather than simply force someone to rewrite the laws of quantum physics ten thousand times while on Concerta, it probably makes more sense to figure out the underlying patterns and ideas, and focus on teaching them that.
For certain subjects, I believe that homework matters a great deal. Because this is contrary to everything that the primary-education establishment has been saying for a while, I am fairly confident that I am correct. From my elementary school days learning multiplication tables to my undergraduate days learning organic chemistry, there was no substitute for simple drill: doing problems over and over until the concept stuck. You could show me the Friedel–Crafts acylation on the blackboard as much as you want, but I didn't fully get it until I went to the library and drew the arrow-pushing diagrams myself.
Prospective lawyers have two months between graduation and the bar exam. Generally they spend several weeks of that time attending bar prep courses. (This is because law school does little to prepare you for the bar exam; what this says about legal education, licensing, and testing is a separate debate). The most well-known courses have live instruction and charge $2,000-$3,000. From experience of two decades of education, I knew that the important thing for me was to do the thing that I would be tested on. And I didn't need to spend $2,499 to do that; I just needed to buy used practice tests from eBay and work through the multiple-choice questions.
So I'm inclined to believe that homework is where learning takes place. This seems consistent with the objectively poor results (50-75%) on these summer-school tests; I think it's a safe assumption that they were not assigned homework.
I agree. I think one can do homework wrong, and make it so that it has little benefit, but actually using the ideas you are supposed to learn, and doing it over time so you keep thinking about them, really helps. Practice, and reminding your brain how things work later, seem to be the key.
Half agree: I think it's important to distinguish between drill-type assignments as an activity and homework as an implementation. Drill in class where the teacher is around to help and the environment is reliably conducive to learning is likely better for many/most students than their home & parents.
Slight pushback against this: I'm very experienced in not understanding a topic at first, and then many months (or years) later, suddenly getting it because my method of inference has changed for the better. Although the effects of "raw ability" are real, they're not the full explanation I think
Re vocabulary: I'd definitely expect that some words will be easier than others *for a given person*: words you can connect to things you regularly think about will be easier to remember.
(Btw cramming lists of words must be the most boring way to learn a language, and I suspect one of the least effective ways.)
Re: surgeon residents: An explanation is that they regularly use some of the things that are on the test, and by the second year they'll remember those. Other things they rarely or never use, and among that they'll only know whatever they remember from their earlier education (and, if the test has stakes, whatever they can cram shortly before the test, which they'll forget shortly afterwards).
Cramming several thousand words using spaced repetition does wonders to jump-start your understanding of the language, nothing comes close in terms of efficiency. But it might feel demotivating because the app will keep showing you the words you find hard to remember, as though mocking your slow progress with those.
Your comment assumes learning is binary - you've taken a fact on board, or not. But both fact-learning and process-learning are probably more complicated than that. Educators talk about the process of assimilating learning in stages, though, sometimes described as acquisition, competence, mastery. Do you know it only in the first context? Can you do it easily and automatically? Can you apply it in a new context if someone calls it up? How about it you have to think yourself of calling it up from among all the facts or processes in your head (Homer!)? It seems likely to me that kids (learners) might be better at getting started by taking on stage one with better attention, but that they will still need similar hours or repetitions or opportunities to move up the ladder to mastery.
One parallel I would draw to AI is that learning and intelligence are functions of compression: We don't remember all the facts we learned but hopefully they fed into a deeper more generalised understanding of the subject area. So forgetting specifics is part of the same process that also synthesises a more general understanding.
If I read lots of medieval history books soon enough I will forget the names of most people involved, the dates and many more specifics. But I suppose the more facts I learned and forgot the more nuanced the retained understanding of the general structure of the thing would become - I would become closer to grok the era. But this kind of understanding is much harder to evaluate based on taking a test so it might not bear out in an average study.
For language learning, obviously you do need to remember the words. But presumably a summer camp is too short to allow the brain to create the internal compressed language model necessary in order to speak a language. But only once such a model is in place learning vocabulary becomes something other than rote learning of random unconnected facts?
Very rarely I use a small dose of Ritalin (apparently 1/4th of what some people in the US give to children, wtf is wrong with you) to get a lot of boring things done. The key is to create an environment in which there is a continuous stream of things to do and enter a flow state. It's best to close IMs and slack, unless you want to end up writing an essay of your thoughts to an unsuspecting friend.
On the other hand, I can't think of a _less_ flow inducing environment than a classroom, where there's some kind of boring lecture, no research materials other than maybe a textbook - if you don't understand, where are you supposed to find information that will help you understand? Talking with your classmate or drawing or doing literally anything else is more absorbing for a mind that wants to do something, anything, ASAP.
The bottom line is, modern education sucks, drugs won't fix it, go full autodidact and leave humanity behind.
I totally understand the reasoning, but that seems like a path to becoming an addled and isolated eccentric (polite for "wierdo")
If you can choose, the best path is to surround yourself with smart/healthy/priviledged people so you aren't slowed down by normals/poors. This applies especially to primary and even preschool I think
Yeah, realistically you want to reform education so it doesn't suck, but if I had a gifted child I'd tell them to do spend the minimum required time in school and learn cool stuff on their own. This is roughly what I did, but I fully figured the system out around high school, earlier I assumed grades have some kind of use (they don't).
I’m one of those kids who was diagnosed with ADD in the 90s, but whose parents looked at her good grades and decided not to medicate. I always did great on tests, but I feel like test taking is not a great way to determine if these drugs are useful. I often wonder if I could have gone through childhood and adolescence NOT constantly forgetting things.
I’d write a great book report, then leave it at home and turn it in late. My mother was constantly dropping off things I’d left behind. She didn’t really connect this to ADD, or see it as something Ritalin could have helped. By high school, being scatterbrained had become part of my identity, and my nickname was “Airhead”. I had great test scores the whole time, but I felt helpless and incompetent. I’m concerned that leaning too hard on test scores might make people miss the big picture for their own kids.
Not that any of this has dinged me too hard in life; I have an interesting career and a wonderful partner and kids. Whatever coping strategies or mental hacks I’ve developed in 30 years are mostly doing the job. But sometimes I wonder if I’ve been rolling the ball uphill this whole time, and if a little Ritalin might still be a good idea. But “on paper” I’m doing well, and I can’t make up my mind whether or not trying medication would be a good idea. I’d like to see more research that looks at general well-being, since measurable performance isn’t where I’d expect to see an improvement.
Similar situation here. Teachers wanted me to take Ritalin, but test scores were good so parents didn’t want to medicate me.
I’m grateful I wasn’t medicated as a child, as I am nervous about how that would have impacted brain development (based on absolutely zero evidence / mostly superstition), but wish I had access to it after undergrad.
So much of early analyst jobs is incredibly boring. You don’t get to the good stuff until you get promoted. I never made it there!
I find, as some others have noted, that there’s a narrowing of the mind on meds. That doesn’t mean it’s bad for creativity, but it does mean I don’t want to always be on it. I want regular access to the full spectrum
There are definitely tasks where it’s less productive to be on meds. Ie anything I’m really interested in.
I do imagine a world when I won’t need to take meds. Useful to have access until then!
Speaking as someone with a not-dissimilar experience of life to you pre-medication: you have been doing things the hard way.
This doesn't mean you have to stop doing so, but you definitely have been.
The way I find medication is that it turns my brain from a noisy house into a quiet one. This is a marked improvement for getting things done, not losing things, etc. But, of course, one does get somewhat used to them, so unmedicated days can certainly be trickier than they once were.
Has anyone tested whether or not if you have huge cash prizes for success in school, kids would do better? It’s not hard to imagine that what’s happening is this stuff just doesn’t seem that important to them.
It seems like in almost any field, you need increasing amounts of money to power experiments.
I had the unexpected experience of teaching high school math for about 8 years, with at least 99.9% math ability myself. During that period I also realized I am high on the spectrum.
This is how it seemed to me. I describe most people as learning in parallel columns. They did not seem to automatically mentally search for connections between new information and everything they already knew that could possibly relate to it. That would be an untidy node network. But it greatly reduces the amount of separate information one has to store. Information has meaning. It is not a set of facts. This is consistent with studies I have read that people who are good at math use less mental effort, not more, to accomplish more than people who are weak at math.
People who establish a new mental category for every topic and master or fail to master it do not seem to be able to think the other way, and that other way can not be taught IMO.
This is totally black box, inferential, anecdotal observation. I doubt I have more neurons. But I seem to have a different method of connecting them.
It was intriguing to attempt to work out ways to motivate students, and figure out what they were failing to see that seemed self-evident. How to unsee. I try to use analogous strategies for my own social blindness, with mixed success. (I did get some feedback that I was a caring teacher, encouraging, and students' test scores were higher than my colleagues'.)
At a first reading, I want to challenge the entire model these researchers are using. I think it misunderstands what ADHD is actually like and what the actual issues are.
I've been on and off (currently off) stimulant meds for ADHD over the years. I was *constantly* accused of "not paying attention" in school, but that was simply untrue. I was hearing everything the teacher said and learning it just fine, even if I was also shredding paper with my fingers or literally reading a book during instruction. In fact, I absorbed the material *better* if I was fidgeting or reading a book during instruction, because having a second stimulus helps me focus. I was considered an underachiever due to constantly forgetting homework and seeming inattentive, despite also acing nearly all tests and getting perfect scores on standardized tests like the PSAT.
If I did struggle, it was always with forgetting to do things (did this study allow the kids to simply forget to do their homework?) or with an ADHD trait that non-ADHD people rarely understand; the "brain not available" effect. Having a stimulant to overcome "brain not available" - the frequent times when no amount of staring at the paper and willing myself to do the problem would work - would be very helpful for i.e. test-taking and especially helpful for homework. (Test-taking is exigent, ADHD brains love exigence, homework is not exigent.)
Great info here, but slides off the rails a little around rote memorization of vocabulary words from flashcards. Surely this is not (except for people with eidetic memories) a meaningful test of greater than short term vocabulary retention?
Memorizing definitions doesn't, IME, convey meaning adequately to spark retention. Like, if you have no familiarity with the sport in question, so no visual or domain knowledge to fit your understanding into, how will you conceptualize a flashcard definition of the word "regatta"? Why would you hang on to that knowledge once you had committed it to memory for purposes of taking a quiz?
Human Scaling Hypothesis: Human learning capacity are largely determined by three factors in order of importance: mental capacity, diversity of experience, and time.
My understanding of learning based on a *very* superficial review of the literature and my experience is that there are four kinds of memory: working verbal memory, working non-verbal memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
Working verbal memory is the most straightforward: Someone gives you a phone number and you rehearse it mentally until you get to the phone. You can hold a single-digit number of "pieces of information" this way, but can improve this by "chunking" multiple items into a single "piece of information." Once you hit your limit, new items will replace old items, but it's neither FIFO or FILO. Instead items tend to come off the list based on what your brain decides is most important according to some algorithm I don't understand.
Working non-verbal memory is basically just visual recall. I'm mostly aphantasiac, and my working non-verbal memory is essentially non-existent so it's very hard for me to understand this one. I know how intelligence assessments test it though: you'll be shown a picture, the picture will be taken away, and about 30 seconds later you'll be asked to describe it in as much detail as possible. Apparently some folks just refer to a mental image that is held in their brains. At any rate, nonverbal working memory also is limited in some way (I assume to a few "scenes") and items also get replaced.
Short-term memory I know very little about but it's essentially what lets you remember what you had for breakfast two or three days ago but not on May 23, 2003.
If your brain finds an item important, it will move it from short-term or working memory to long-term memory. I'm speculating here but for me that *only* works if there's a way to link it to something I already know and care about. This is how I have always learned new vocabulary: "legislative" and "legal" clearly have the same root, and both deal with laws, for instance. If I needed to learn Mandarin, I'd be in a lot of trouble initially, because there isn't a lot of verbal similarity so not a lot of nodes on my mind map to hang new language. Studies would seem to back me up here: When young your brain creates new long-term memory super easily, but with time it gets harder to add stuff as neuroplasticity decreases. And that's credited as the reason *most* folks struggle to learn new languages.
Anyway, based on that model of learning and literature on stimulants, I'd expect that Concerta would improve working memory but would not necessarily have any impact at all on converting working memory to long-term memory. This seems extremely consistent with that hypothesis.
I'm not...sure this means that putting students on Concerta is meaningless. It just means that school teaches different skills than long-term recall. It's very very clear that most students, even those that are bright and do well, don't come out of school with a life-long understanding of physics *and* history. It's also not clear what giving bright adults a long-term understanding of physics *and* history would accomplish. Instead, school seems to be focused on 1) exposing students to topics that they might find interesting enough to dedicate long-term memory space to, and 2) teaching students to do boring stuff they don't care about. I'll mention again that "doing boring stuff you don't care about" is an underrated skill, and one folks with ADHD struggle with in particular. That said, it might also kill their spirits so *shrug* who knows.
The ability to do boring things so as to thrive in a boring world is hugely important, and many teens with ADHD add their lack of it to the list of "why life really doesn't seem to be worth living." The suffering appears to be very real.
In general, though, how important is the actual learning k-12? My own recollection is that I never learned anything in school because I'd already learned it at home. Would I have learned these same things a few years later if my own father hadn't been such an aggressive tutor? Perhaps, perhaps not. Were there whole hosts of things I could have learned at school but which I did not then notice and cannot now recall because they were invisible to me (i.e. because I hadn't already learned them)? Perhaps, but not according to the standardized testing.
Good point about the boring thing there. Haven't been diagnosed with anything (yet) but I feel it is a gargantuan task to do just basic things every day. Quite validating to hear the first paragraph.
With vocabulary in particular, I would expect the learning has almost nothing to do with what is in the classroom and everything to do with how much the kids are hearing and using the words outside. After all, unless a word really nails a concept you use a lot but don't have a word for, words just fall into that category of "noise that can be safely ignored". I know I have a lot of trouble remembering names of people unless I hear others use the name a lot, because the noise itself doesn't tell me much about the person in a useful way, nor is it often necessary unless I need to call them by name. Only when other people use the name and I need to connect it to the particular person to understand does it stick.
Anecdotally, I know I lost a lot of used vocabulary when I went to college, simply because the lexicon that got used at home was much broader than 18-22 year olds, and most professors, used. Likewise with jargon; stop being around people who use it and you rapidly forget, although it is easier to remember what it means than come up with the word yourself.
I think the best metaphor for schools is playing team sports. Working out and practicing shooting or fielding obsessively is a necessary part of success. Structure and discipline are a huge part of the equation, but in the end, talent rules. Actual knowledge builds and fades like fitness and sports skills.
I have taught students who were on Ritalin, went on Ritalin, went off Ritalin, etc. It doesn't do much long term for most students. It also dulls the emotions. It's a powerful drug. It's mostly "needed" because teachers and classrooms are boring and have weak classroom management.
What happens if a kid who doesn't have ADHD takes Ritalin? Does it still help increase their grades and focus? It's widely reported that ADHD is overdiagnosed in kids, so you have to assume that many of them taking Ritalin don't actually have ADHD.
It goes into a bit more detail on the Homer Simpson effect, but also the testing effect, interleaving effect, and spaced repetition.
An interesting take away: the intuitions people have about how well they learned material are usually wrong. Learning techniques that are objectively the most effective, are seen by students as less effective—even after using them successfully.
People with ADHD can often focus quite well on things they are interested in. Of course school is standardized and boring as hell, so no surprise they have a hard time tuning in to the tedium.
Interesting study but my intuition is that stimulants could still increase the amount that was learned by allowing the teacher to lead the class through more material in the same amount of time.
Teachers might do this fairly naturally if more kids, especially more disruptive or lower performers, were on stimulants?
What effect would that have on how much is learned?
What if teachers pace of instruction was varied experimentally?
As a person with ADHD, these results make sense to me. I feel like the challenges associated with it are greatly misunderstood. I can concentrate for short bursts, and my innate intelligence always carried me on tests. My impulsivity often got in the way and i would slip up when I didn’t read something carefully, but by and large I don’t think my ADHD effected my test taking too much. Where stimulants make a huge difference is in managing the day-to-day minutiae of life that for most people is second nature. For example, keeping your house clean, getting small chores done, paying bills on time, etc. To the extent that stimulants positively effect grades I expect it to be because students are showing up to class and turning their assignments in on time.
Absolutely agree - the skills that stimulants would help with have nothing to do with long-term memory and retrieval. Had my grade been based solely on long learning window testing (i.e. final exams and such) I'd have been a 4.0 student despite serious attention problems.
But I think the underlying assumption that school is for learning how to take derivatives and whose assassination sparked WWI is flawed. The skills improved by stimulants in this study are important skills: working memory, moment-to-moment concentration, and completion of tasks all come up in my adult life much more regularly than being told something and needing to recall it 12 weeks later.
Same here. There was a class I failed simply because I kept forgetting to do the weekly online pop quiz, even though I got nearly perfect scores on all 3 exams. It was around this time I got my official diagnosis in spite of being aware I had adhd since I was very young.
But yes, things have gotten difficult for me in early adulthood thus far. ADHD wreaks infinitely more havoc on adult functioning than on a child in school, and the stakes are usually much higher.
In your 2017 post on adderall you cited a study where kids on stimulant medication, after 8 years, performed the same on all metrics as kids on CBT. I was a bit excited reading this post thinking "maybe it's just that school sucks," though it looks like the study also looked at factors beyond grades like arrests and psychiatric hospitalizations/
There's a common observation made by nurses, I don't know if they have a name for it. Where a patient has long term disability [some blocked resource] later in life, they make a dramatic recovery, only to quickly die.
In the 80s, I trained as an EMT. I was required to spend a shift in the emergency room. I came back to volunteer often. EMTs brought in an elderly man, his wife said, in the previous weeks, he'd made a dramatic recovery from WWII head injury, and had been quite talkative up until that evening. Apparently, he'd been all but non-communicative for 35 years.
When we had a moment, the nurse explained this is a common occurrence, typically followed by death.
I find it plausible that some mental channel was blocked creating a backup, and this backup prevented other traffic. Perhaps some transient ischemic event either blocked, or released the blocking agent resulting in restored traffic.
I've noticed Pelham etc. in a couple of the studies you've cited recently (or maybe I've been reading through archives and I'm conflating past and present). Are these quality researchers or something?
The idea of hitting the wall in learning based on personal limitations is experimentally accurate. I hit one when trying to study more complicated math than my brain would be able to cope with, despite being fine with the uni-level basics. As mentioned in previous posts, some people can't grasp hypotheticals and counter-factuals. Others can't learn to sing well. No growth mindset will help you beyond some personal limit. Once you hit it, learning progress stops being efficient (as in, polynomial in effort) and becomes exponential, or even super-exponential. There is a tiny bit of plasticity if one starts learning the skills early, but once you are an adult, you are hooped. Often you can compensate by getting at the same ideas from a different direction, where your brain has different limits, but simply scaling the mountain of knowledge that you see others walking up effortlessly is a fools errand.
Personal experience—I've been taking Adderall for ADHD off and on recently. It does seem like it has an effect on my focus and motivation; I very rarely feel like just staying in bed and doing nothing when I've taken a recent Adderall dose. But, that extra motivation never seems to go into focusing more on work or prioritizing household chores more highly. Instead, I just spend that time highly focused on whatever new retro game hacking idea my brain spontaneously generated that day.
So I'd speculate that Adderall (and probably Ritalin as well?) is capable of giving people additional focus and motivation, but it's not going to make them *care* about tasks that they don't already care about. If mowing the lawn or paying attention to a school lecture isn't inherently interesting to you, then it's probably not going to become any more interesting to you after you start a focus-enhancing drug. And so you're not likely to prioritize it any more highly than you would otherwise, for so long as your focus-enhanced brain is capable of generating something more interesting to focus on.
I started taking Adderall for ADD as an adult. I hadn't considered that I might have it previously because I got very good grades in school. During the process of getting diagnosed, I slowly realized how little I was paying attention in school. If a class was "boring" (which most of them were) I often brought a book with me and would read while the teacher lectured. If I didn't have a book. the teacher wouldn't let me read mine (most teachers left me alone because I didn't cause trouble and was smart, others were sticklers) then I would often read ahead in the textbook, doodle, or daydream. The only class I ever really took notes on were math classes, and only that because I couldn't memorize a formula just by listening to it. I usually wasn't paying close attention: if I tried to listen I often drifted off into other thoughts, would realize I hadn't been listening, listen for two minutes, and then drift off again.
So why did I get good grades? I dunno, I'm smart and I wanted good grades so I actually tried. I have good reading comprehension. I ended up something like 14th in my High School class, but I could have been in the top 5 if I wanted to be. Getting anything beyond an A average was just not interesting to me, I'd rather read my books.
I don't know where this ties in, but the over-under is that I think if I was on stimulants during High School I would have paid much better attention, but I doubt my grades would have gone up all that much.
I’ve been on ADHD medication since a very young age. I scored very high on reading comprehension as well. However, I can not even read if I am off my medication.
I read a lot, but I only generally only read things that were interesting to me. If I wasn't interested, or if something was moving too slowly, I couldn't focus on it. Are you a very fast reader? I read faster than average, which I think helped. I definitely read faster than people talk, and I often wished my teachers could move more quickly when giving lectures. In a book, I can move at my own pace.
As long as I’m not tired I can read anything pretty quick. However I’m a very slow writer, so any advantages I have from my reading abilities were largely offset. I found it especially painful when my teachers didn’t teach from the text.
> The biochemical mechanisms of action of MP have been well characterized: it increases extracellular levels of dopamine and norepinephrine by blocking the respective monoamine transporters[5]. It is unclear how these actions relate to its effects in attention and performance. Since dopamine and norepinephrine decrease background firing rates of neuronal cells increasing signal-to-noise ratio[6], [7], we hypothesized that in humans MP's dopaminergic and noradrenergic effects by decreasing non-task related activity should reduce the amount of glucose utilized by the brain while performing a cognitive task.
> There were no differences in money made (surrogate marker of performance) when the cognitive task was done with placebo ($47.60±4) versus when it was done with MP ($48.80±3).
My interpretation: All Ritalin does is *reducing* brain activity in non-task-related brain regions.
2) The study is far from representative (173 children (77% male, 86% Hispanic, 10% African–American) with ADHD between the ages of 7 and 12 years (M = 9.2, SD = 1.4))
3) The study doesn't evaluate socioeconomic factors
4) The study doesn't evaluate language factors
5) The study has a highly male and minority sample, that is (generally speaking) more prone to socioeconomic concerns, linguistic barriers, undiagnosed trauma that affect academic performance
For reason 5, I am not surprised that the medication used had a negligible impact in this study. My personal and professional academic and mental health experience all suggests that ADHD medications can move the needle in some cases, but are (generally speaking) misprescribed, overused, and deliver little return. When they are used appropriately, they can have a transformative impact. I'm still waiting for a great study that quantifies the appropriateness of ADHD prescriptions.
1 Brown N, Brown S, Briggs R, et al. Associations Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and ADHD Diagnosis and Severity. Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Children’s Hospital at Montefiore. Accepted August 29, 2016.
Let's not forget that a "summer camp" type situation is very different from a school. I would expect students to spend most of their mental energy on more social "stuff". Learning names, affinities, making friends, maybe establishing some kind of social ladder. Usually these things are simply more important to a teenager than learning vocabulary, but they tend to stabilize over a school year, and not over a month of attention training.
> These students must be bottlenecked by some other resource.
I think the bottleneck for almost all school-related things student's interest in the task being measured. Most of the things kids are made to do in school don't have much bearing at all on the things they care about working on. Not-giving-a-shit can be a really strong component in the multi-factor equation leading to someone learning something (or not).
Most "good students" have had their motivation adequately hacked by teachers and parents who praise them for good performance, internalizing that extrinsic motivation. Most kids don't buy it. They'd much rather go build a fort, chat with their friends, etc.
Jumping through hoops to get gold stars is obviously a waste of time to many kids, so we have to find ways to allow them to pursue actually-interesting, actually-challenging, actually-useful work. Real, useful work creates opportunities for them to bolster reading/math skills to accomplish something that matters. It's the antidote to the not-giving-a-shit bottleneck.
These scores are incredibly low, especially given that the tests were multiple-choice questions with only four choices and that kids with IQ below 80 were excluded from the study. To get only 50% correct on the subject area on average, it seems like a significant fraction of the class was guessing no better than chance both before and after the intervention. (If 1/3 of the class got perfect scores, the other 2/3 did no better than chance in the post-test for the subject areas test.)
The study mentions that the test-givers read the questions aloud because they weren't confident the students were literate in English; but I don't think it mentioned anything they did to offset any lack of confidence that the students were verbally fluent in English.
Also note, the decision to test students by reading questions allowed (1) is a very unusual test-giving procedure, and (2) greatly amplifies the effects of concentration relative to learning in the results. And the combination of those two facts seems like evidence to me that that this experiment was trying to obtain the headline result it obtained. i.e. "medication doesn't help students learn."
Significant lack of fluency in English would also explain why the improvement on vocabulary was much better than the improvement in the subject areas (i.e. science and social studies). It's way easier to learn vocabulary in a language that you barely understand than it is to follow a history lesson in that language. (And is most of what you do in a learning-a-second-language class.)
The pre-test baseline of students scoring 40% on average on a multiple choice test of grade-appropriate vocabulary with only four choices also seems like pretty significant evidence that a sizeable percent of the students were not fluent in English. (That's what would happen if 20% of the class answered perfectly and the other 80% answered no better than chance, which is equivalent to saying that the class as a whole was able to recognize the correct answer [though not necessarily supply it] 20% of the time and randomly guessing the other 80% of the time! Recognizing the definition of only 1/5th of grade-appropriate vocabulary is not fluency when the grades in question are kindergarten through fourth grade.)
If you start with the assumption many of the students weren't fluent in English, "Maybe classroom instruction is redundant? That is, teachers say everything a few times, so if you miss it once, it doesn’t matter?" becomes a much more plausible explanation. For many of the kids it didn't matter because they weren't going to understand it no matter how many times they heard it. And for the rest, it didn't matter because they understood it the first time.
But my default interpretation of this study would be:
A third of the students were fluent in English. In the post-test, they knew all the answers to both the vocab tests and the subject area tests, so no impact of learning could be detected in them, only effects of concentration.
A third of the students knew enough English to understand English-to-English definitions. In the post-test, they knew all of the answers to the vocab tests, and guessed randomly on the subject tests, so no impact of learning could be detected in them, only effects of concentration during the vocab test.
A third of the students didn't know enough English to be able to learn English-to-English definitions, so they guessed randomly on all the questions, and the post-tests were not able to detect evidence of either concentration or learning in them.
No matter how real and significant an effect is, it is possible to design a study that is sufficiently bad that it can fail to find the effect. I suspect this is much more common than studies finding an effect that isn't real because it's much easier to do by accident. But I've rarely encountered an example full of nice round numbers that reeks of experimenters trying to hack a no-effect result as strongly as this one does to me.
I think the prescriptions for ADHD to kids are more about "get them to sit down and be quiet in class" more than anything else. Some kids really have it very bad, with muscular spasms, facial tics, and involuntary noises so they do need something. But if it's "Johnny fidgets and talks and distracts the other kids in class", it's not so much about learning or even paying attention; I've daydreamed in class while sitting there quietly and looking as if I'm paying attention.
A lot of this is because teachers have to wrangle a class full of kids and it's easier to medicate the distracted ones into good behaviour. If they then do well on tests, that looks like "the medication is helping them learn". As everyone is pointing out, learning and paying attention is not the same thing as 'can finally focus and concentrate long enough to do a test'.
It is too bad that the authors did not design the experiment (or at least analyze the data) with an interaction for IQ. It would be interesting to see whether it was possible to tease apart whether the medicine had a differential effect for smarter children, which would be a reasonable a priori hypothesis.
Does learning plateau or are exams just bad at capturing learning beyond a certain point?
I don't know anything about surgery, but I'm reasonably confident that an experienced surgeon knows a lot more than an inexperienced surgeon. But the things he knows are difficult to test on a written exam, he probably knows things like "What to do if things start going wrong in this particular way", and "How to pick up the subtle signs that you might need to do X rather than Y in this procedure" and "Here's the exact amount of pressure and the correct angle that you need to cleanly cut this thing under these conditions". These things are incredibly important but won't make it into a textbook. Meanwhile he's probably slowly forgetting all sorts of stuff that was in his textbook but is irrelevant in practice.
I've been a private tutor/classroom instructor for 12 years. My own experience suggests the following things:
- Ability to concentrate has a substantial effect on test performance regardless of the level of understanding of the material, so we should expect ADHD medication to improve test performance EVEN IF they did not learn more in a classroom experience
- I have taught "large" classes (20-30 students), small classes (3-5 students) and of course 1 on 1 tutoring. In my experience ~15-50% of students do not learn very much in classes larger than ~4-5. The issue in my experience is you need back and forth to make sure they're getting it. In a class of 4 there are still tons of opportunities for 1 on 1 attention. Not so in a class of 20-30. My hunch is that the classroom is having no effect for this reason.
If Concerta helped (significantly) with test scores, then most college kids would be taking it. I doubt kids on Concerta are really paying attention more. Staring at the teacher, does not necessarily translate to paying attention.
When you consider that Concerta can lead to wild swings in appetite, sleep disruptions, and delays or reductions in growth and development, the idea of putting a child on Concerta for such minimal gain is absurd.
Fascinating, but, the question not asked is why school in the first place?
From Monty Roberts, an internationally famous horse trainer and the first "Horse Whisperer,": As I have often said, there is no teaching, only learning. If you are a teacher, you have to create an environment in which your student can learn. You can't take knowledge and push it into a brain. The brain has to pull it in.
I don't follow. How do we know Ritalin doesn't improve learning? In my classes I can only measure student performance by tests and assignments; if those are better, how do we know learning isn't? Do they give em another test while not on Ritalin? Considering it 4 my ADD kid, but not if it doesn't really help.
Just as a personal experience addy doesn't really make a difference to me for HS style activities, even ones I'm bad at like writing. Those tasks just don't seem very attention limited.
OTOH trying to keep a math proof of an unsolved question in my mind is definitely helped.
Anecdotally when I got on meds in university my grades improved - in units where a self-guided assignment made up most of the grade.
I did the same in most exams, which was already okay. Maybe a tiny bit better for stuff I wasn't super interested in. But the single biggest thing I got out of it was reducing complex assignments from this incredibly emotionally fraught ordeal to manageable.
I guess it also helps with random things like not losing count of things, but that's a pretty niche case.
I have two sons that are eighteen months apart and rising 3rd and 2nd graders. They are both high functioning ASD and ADHD but present very differently. My older son has serious non compliance behavior issues and went on amphetamines early in his 2nd grade year. It really did nothing for him which wasn't a huge surprise to me because I truly see his behavior as substantially a maturity/emotional issue rather than impulsive disruption. He has no desire to appease adults and simply gets tired of things when they are no longer novel. We took him off the medication.
My younger son is definitely more of a "good boy" that wants to do well in school but cannot control his hyperactivity. He doesn't pay attention to the rules, etc. and then gets upset when he does something wrong. I actually think he would be a great candidate for amphetamine type medication as his inability to pay attention is really impacting what he gets out of school, sports, etc. My biggest reservation is really the philosophical objection to giving a seven year old boy drugs to make them more compliant for an institution and better participation in organized activities and balancing the reality that he needs help.
I realize this is mostly venting with little to the specific discussion but it seemed somewhat appropriate and this comment section is much better versed in this area than my own intuition.
Not to tell you how to parent, but you might wanna consider what other difficulties the younger one has. If he can't pay attention to formal rules, chances are he can't pay attention to informal social rules either. How's he doing socially? Does he have friends? Is he well liked?
For me personally, the single biggest impact earlier medication could have had for me is improving my social skills. I went several years with zero peers that I considered my friend, and no one was deliberately ostracising me (I think), I was purely just really bad at making friends because I couldn't pay attention and constantly slighted people without noticing.
7 is probably a bit young, but high school/middle school is already bad enough without being unable to make friends. So I'd keep that in mind.
(Amphetamines might also make the kid too irritable to make friends, which is something else to consider! Maybe try starting in summer if you go that route)
He actually does ok with peers, he is very sweet/nice and funny but can be a little intense with trying to be funny so some kids aren't quite sure what to make of him. He has friends although I don't know how deep the relationships are.
Funny timing on your comment. We had his check in yesterday and he was prescribed 5mg of time release that we might try over the summer when he has an organized activity like hockey to see how it works for him. I'm very conflicted about doing this because it feels very unnatural but he also needs help. We'll see.
Interestingly, golf is one sport where this sort of ‘plateau effect’ is evident for all skill levels. A common comment from golfers of every skill level is ‘forgetting how to play’ and/or having to ‘relearn’ some aspect of the game. Greats like Jack Nicklaus and Bobby Jones to the worst hackers comment on this frustration. I expect that non-golfers just assume that once you master the game (or some aspect of the game) you’ll always ‘have it’, like riding a bike. But it doesn’t work that way. Could it be a brain limitation, where the various ‘swing thoughts’ can’t be properly categorized and then written into permanent memory?
The closer you are to your ability cap, the harder it is to progress. As people approach their personal ability cap, they will have an increasingly more difficult time getting higher, resulting in progressively smaller gains. The better you are, the harder it becomes to progress even higher - something we see in a lot of things in technology as well. I suspect this is because you learn the easiest things, then have to work harder to learn increasingly harder things, and while it is not always the case that you learn all the easiest things first, it is common that you will master more easier things than harder things.
This is why the SAT has questions of different ability levels, and you'll find that the top students miss far more hard questions than they do easy ones, and some people may well miss nothing BUT the hardest ones.
I think, however, there is a secondary problem here, which is that we are measuring against a standard of perfection, when in reality ability levels don't really work that way.
Say we took some artists and had them draw stuff. They might screw up a few easier things but do things that are way harder than other artists do. These things might not be on the "test", but are more advanced skills.
As such, what we are really measuring with these things where we are measuring against a fixed, perfect data set may not be "overall skill level" but "error rate".
I have noticed that some people seem to innately have higher error rates than other people - they simply make more mistakes. I am not sure if this applies to every task, or just some limited subset of tasks, but no amount of repetition will ever cause them to be perfect at a task. While this seems like it might be related to intelligence, I'm not sure that it is; some intelligent people seem to have issues with this as well.
Everyone makes typos no matter how skilled a typist they are, for instance; I make far fewer typos than most amateur typists and type at a very, very high rate of speed, but I still make typos.
I have the suspicion that if you are measuring against some standard of perfection, at some point this innate error rate will dominate over all other factors.
I think it would be interesting to see if these medications cause people to "plateau" in their agility earlier, and/or if it lowers innate error rate on random other tasks.
Yeah, I was surprised that Scott didn’t mention the fact that they were teaching classes half-full of unmedicated ADHD kids. That has to change the dynamic.
Aye, teaching something really is the best way to learn it, as you end up having to examine it from a lot of different angles to get the ideas to stick in someone else's mind.
A more formalized technique of what you've mentioned you were taught is the Feynman technique.
https://fs.blog/feynman-technique/
I thought the Feynman technique was (according to Gell-Mann)
1) write down the problem
2) think very hard
3) write down the answer
That's the Feynman's Algorithm used for problem solving.
When Scott Young branded his method the “Feynman Technique” he was thinking of “A Different Box of Tools” from Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman. Yet that story doesn’t have much of anything to do with the technique.
I guess it worked though, because I can't Google "Feynman" without seeing "Feynman Technique" everywhere.
TIL! thanks for sharing
FWIW, Wozniak even tries to use the forgetting curve to extrapolate an average 'total possible retention': https://supermemo.guru/wiki/How_much_knowledge_can_human_brain_hold It's not very high, well under a million. At that point, you're forgetting as much as you learn. (Fictionalized in Scott's story https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ )
It's not surprising if differences in personality, intelligence, and memory specifically mean that different people might have very different steady states. This is why those handwavy anti-intelligence arguments of "well, we could teach those kids calculus if we just tried really hard and for long enough!" don't work, because they require ignoring the existence of forgetting.
Yes, I think retention is the important part here. If Scott took a vocabulary test and didn't get 100% on it, it seems safe to presume that he _understood_ all of the words and simply _forgot_ some.
The "Why Do Test Scores Plateau" mentions this (including the research around spaced repetition), but in it Scott states he remains confused about the role of intelligence, noting that neither 'intelligent people are more intellectually curious and get reminded of things more' nor 'intelligent people have better memories' seems sufficient to explain the difference. I suggest intelligence—the ability to identify patterns and integrate knowledge into a coherent whole—serves not merely as a "network effect", but as _compression_. If you understand chess well, you are better at memorizing game configurations (because you can chunk them into underlying structure); if you understand math well, you are better at retaining formulae (because in a pinch you can just re-derive them); if you understand chemistry well, you are better at memorizing reactions (because you can be guided by general principles); if you understand etymology well, you are better at understanding words (because you can often deduce their meanings from their roots), and so on. The greater the intelligence, the fewer bits of knowledge have to be independently retained, and the greater the performance at equilibrium forgetting.
If this is so, increasing attention might help learning a _little_, since it increases the number of repetitions you're likely to catch and be reminded by, but not much, since if it doesn't also increase intelligence it doesn't improve compression.
I think you are very much onto something here.
> if you understand math well, you are better at retaining formulae (because in a pinch you can just re-derive them)
This clicked for me--especially in the context of the vocabulary test discussion. I'm a terrible math student--in that I rarely get the right answer. But I'm considered "really good" at math--I understand the underlying structure and can re-derive equations, *which doesn't solve the problem of basic addition and subtraction errors.* Tests that merely check for the right answer don't catch that people like me know what we're doing, because those are about guessing the password rather than demonstrating actual knowledge.
> If this is so, increasing attention might help learning a _little_, since it increases the number of repetitions you're likely to catch and be reminded by, but not much, since if it doesn't also increase intelligence it doesn't improve compression.
Yes! We have yet to come up with good techniques for teaching compression and pattern identification/integration. We kind of just rely, as a species, on students' native software and hardware being up to snuff.
Personally, I think the closest we can currently get is figuring out a reliable method to teach curiosity. People seem to get better at compression when they seek out and synthesize information for themselves.
"as fairly describe as" seems a mistake?
Yes, I don't see how not disrupting the class is fairly described as paying attention. They're clearly not the same thing at all. I wonder if Ritalin isn't helping kids pay attention, it's just helping them to sit still better.
Or d) these classes were disrupted and interrupted constantly by the students, and as a result, everyone's learning was significantly impaired, resulting in the drug not appearing to have a large effect on the student's learning when in fact the constant interruptions made it very difficult for anyone to learn.
IIRC there have been studies that suggested that a single disruptive student could impair everyone in the class's learning, so having a class full of them is likely an enormous cofounding variable.
Also, it's likely that the more other students act out, the more borderline students also act out; that is to say, if no one else acts out, the odds of you acting out in particular are much lower.
I've noticed this in group meetings at work (though I'm not sure if "disruption" is the right word for it (though it is sometimes), but certainly participation); when no one speaks up, the odds of one person speaking up are very low. If at least one person speaks up, the odds of multiple speaking up skyrocket. If a lot of people are speaking up, people will speak up far, far more.
Stimulants impact two distinct factors; focus and impulsivity. People with primarily inattentive symptoms really notice the impact on focus. People with both inattentive and hyperactive symptoms see both improvements. People around either notice the same things the person taking the meds does.
While focus becomes more important as school/work tasks become more complex and detailed, don’t underestimate the value for a kid of behaving better in class. No one likes feeling like they are disturbing others, but can’t stop themselves.
Which is another problem here as well; given how disruptive these classes sound like they were, it's possible that the sheer number of interruptions made everyone's classes much less useful just because they were constantly getting interrupted.
These are opposite sides of the same coin. A kid who can't focus on the class is bored to tears. The disruption is an attempt to get out of the boring situation.
I meant that it was a typo.
As a child psychiatrist, I think this is important to keep in mind when we prescribe stimulants. At the same time, we're mostly focused on function and actual learning is probably more of a secondary or tertiary goal by the time we're seeing them.
What does function mean in this context?
Usually it's in the context of being able to function in school and home behaviorally and/or scholastically if they're meeting the criteria for ADHD.
They should’ve let the kids loose on Wikipedia instead and found a way to measure which group learned more
There was a Chinese study trying this but it had to be scrapped because the kids kept looking up the more exciting Russian history pages written by Zhemao.
Source? This sounds hilarious.
Didn’t find the Chinese study yet, but here’s one about the Zhemao thing: https://futurism.com/the-byte/fake-articles-wikipedia
This just seems weird. I would expect the dopamine spike from the medication to improve immediate recall in everyone.
I would also expect the kids to perform below baseline following the removal of the stimulant.
Immediately after? Or in the following days?
12-18 hours after final dose and following days.
About 12 hours after a dose the Concerta should be wearing off for the day. Lower performance wouldn't be surprising.
About the following days: from my own experience as someone with ADHD and having tried a few of the different medication options, including Ritalin and Concerta, the days after medication are usually still much better than the unmedicated condition.
Especially in the first month or two after starting treatment, taking meds on one days often provided ADHD relief for two days afterwards. I don't know what the mechanism is. Perhaps something about enabling better sleep by helping the circardian rhythm along?
Non-addictive stimulants don't give sharp stimuli-dependent dopamine spikes, they increase the amount of dopamine available overall.
Do you mean stimulants given at very low doses and either slow-release or repeat low low doses, as for ADHD? Or is there a class of non-addictive stimulants that I should know more about?
I mean stimulants given at the doses used for ADHD. According to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines, doses used in drug abuse are around 25x the dose prescribed for ADHD (and furthermore abuse often involves snorting or injecting the drug).
Cocaine, Ritalin and Amphetamines all increase tonic dopamine levels.
They’re all great nasal decongestants as well.
Selective attention for the win!
In my experience as a teacher, paying attention to the content is good, but thinking deeply about something sparked by the content is even better. Surface level knowledge often doesn't get beyond the flash-card recall level. But deeply mulling over facts or drifting between them in a semiconscious search for patterns can create lasting updates to one's mental models even once the facts are forgotten. From the outside that can look like spacing out. I may or may not be able to ask the right questions to see if anything interesting happened on the inside.
On the other side of the desk, the dullest teacher trainings I get to sit through are often the best, as I can't help but think about how much better I could have taught it... which means I end up thinking quite deeply about that topic and experiencing various micro-epiphanies.
Also a teacher - definitely all of this. Getting a kid to hold still and play the part of focusing is good for the class because it's less disruptive and can generally help the student Get It Done, but medicating a whole class of kids won't make the lesson or the topic interesting enough for them to retain it.
Sounds like we need a new set of medication, capable of making people find things *interesting* and not just force them to pay attention.
Education has been trying to hack this for years (ever?) from the teacher side of things. It's certainly a hard problem.
Unfortunately, making grade schoolers smoke weed is generally frowned upon.
Ritalin in the morning, marijuana in the afternoon.
That's at least part of the mechanism behind the effect of stimulants on concentration, though, in my experience. Maybe there's some sort of "short-term interest" vs "long-term ['actual'?] interest" difference — the former being what makes it possible to spend hours looking at ass pics, when on amphetamine, and the latter what makes assology ultimately less appealing than Bronze-Age history as an avocation.*
------------
*example may be, uh, somewhat idiosyncratic to Himaldr
Bronze Age history is awesome. They should teach more of it in school!
Agree
There's a very strong relationship (I'm not going to back this up with studies or whatever) between 'play', 'creativity', and more importantly 'learning'. Gell-mann has that famous method for discovery where you (after doing all the necessary research and failing over and over to break through a wall) read the last word of the daily newspaper page and try to solve it with that-- Taleb has also spoken about how the introduction of uncertainty is basically mandatory for discovery. I would guess personally that however dopamine works, it has very long 'hangover' effects i.e. something you repetitively experienced as pleasurable from a while ago can dominate future interests in some low-level way. The kind of intense focus involved with ADHD medication doesn't appear in any 'discovery' i.e. perception of novelty, and I think that having both deep concentration/lateral thought are important. --This may be pseudo-science, however, since I'm sure that it's the kind of thinking that 'dopamine-fasts' and that sort of thing are built upon & I'm suspicious of people promotive about it.
Regardless, I do think there's something fundamental in something like 'how one grew up using/typically used their dopamine' -- the people I know with the strongest interests in highly intellectual and complicated fields are all relatively distant from internet/tv, even with a slight natural distaste for sugary things... Again this is extremely anecdotal and probably a pseudo-science (I don't even personally think the sugar stuff matters). But I just wanted to say that, even in these cases, I can think of examples where they are both effective/interested in a deep/complicated domain, but also --by their own testimony-- get distracted and procrastinate. Actually seeing them in 3rd person makes me doubt their self-diagnosis of laziness a lot, because (a) much of what they do when they are avoiding work is still research in their field, requiring reading of quite deep texts, (b) even when not doing more such (unrelated) research, their activities away from work require a baseline of concentration and interest unique to most people-- and especially unique to someone their age (young 20s). But this is someone who grew up without access to internet/tv until much later, and I think that the access to those things during formative years _does_ affect one.
So to summarize, I think you are correct that there is a distinction between short-term long-term aims, but that the long-term aims tend to be formed over years (& more strongly formed in youth), and that certain kinds of environments favour certain kind of 'searching' behaviours (since we seem to get a hit out of novelty itself, changing domains often is the naturally favoured direction when technology gives us freedom to do so, rather than remaining in one domain). It must be a cliche by now, or a 'boomer'-esque stereotype (I'm thinking of those awful newspaper strips), but I think there _is_ something significant in how environmental changes due to technology are very formative in one's ability to sustain interest. (One problem is that even thinking of this as an 'ability' is fairly sketchy (in a philosophical sense), and that might matter in our capacity to understand and 'treat' problems with this ability.)
Final thing, since this got way too long and Idk if any of it is interesting at all:
People often bring up the marshmallow test to try and argue the importance of class differences (I know the creator claimed he controlled for class later) on self-control, and typically argue like this:
-The children are from more stressful environments (lower class), and therefore gather resources immediately whilst they are still around, rather than wait.
To me this is a coherent view of how one adapts certain behaviours according to their environment , and it matters if this view is correct/neurologically feasible, because it entails that environment (especially stressful environments) are _coherently_ addressed by our biology, and it's only _later_ that this 'lack of self-control' becomes an issue; by then the habits may be strongly ingrained. I remember that in terms of brain structure people with ADHD are loosely similar to those who have dealt with addictions, or those who have been exposed to repeated stressors, etc... I think more specifically in terms of frontal lobe development.
My final addition to this conception would be that I _do_ think that certain technologies (internet especially, tv a little less, streaming services/high optionality tv a little more) can prevent people from developing better habits. I don't really think they can be causative in themselves without very very long-term usage, from a young age, and that itself would usually signify some underlying stressor one is trying to escape. We think about dopamine-associations with substances and how this leads to harmful 'addictions': I think this is an interesting time in history because (as a continuation of things like gambling) we are seeing a mass example of an 'activity' [cluster of possible activities] which in itself is addictive i.e. behaviourally degrading, that is --simply by allowing us certain powers-- it teaches us to favour superficial and high variability (I think Kissinger recently wrote about this, not that his 'take' is especially unique; as I say it's a cliche by now).
Ok thanks sorry that got so long
Perhaps it just the apology at the end, but I felt compelled to state that this was an excellent comment, and broadly matches a lot of perceptions and ideas I've had. So, thanks for that.
I think it could be further extended by thinking about what causes the dopamine hits in different people. I suspect that getting slightly more out of the "searching" behaviors involved in say, learning to play an instrument, than in doing math problems in early age helps explain why one person devotes more of their time to music than quantitative stuff.
Thank you for writing this, it's helpful and encouraging to hear. I'm also not putting things out there because I'm totally certain of what I say, so the intention is to have people counter me or improve upon what I was saying-- that said it's great to hear that you found it helpful! I like the direction you indicate for extending it, although I expect that at some point 'aptitude' becomes a dominating factor in one's continuation of an activity. I.e. at some point we probably get a conflict between something (close to?) 'innate' and something more flexible (dopamine/motivation/self-control... the fact that these things are more 'flexible' is probably why they are the centre of so many moral issues-- although many morally based arguments reject that they are as flexible as we think).
In high school I could read a book cover to cover in a day, sometimes two, stopping just for meals. It wasn't anything high-brow, usually, just some random sci-fi/fantasy from the library - but the books drew me in so much I had no trouble focusing.
Right now, after the mass assault on my attention from internet clickbait, always-on IMs / discord / slack, etc - I struggle to read 50 pages in a sitting.
I'm slowly recovering that capacity through reducing information overload, but I don't think it's even about the formative years, the capacity for attention is adjusted in an ongoing process.
Yeah, I have similar experiences.
Although I still suspect that the formative years are more important for these kinds of effects-- that the consequences in development will be long term-- you're absolutely right that one can feel these negative affects at any point in one's life.
I have also been surprised a few times about the apparent ability of the brain to recover after degeneration (in anorexia, which is very severe in its affects upon brain structure, the observed affects are much less apparent on the road to recovery https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/largest-study-to-date-reveals-stark-changes-in-brain-structure-for-people-with-anorexia/), so I think that the most important thing is to remove the underlying stressors, and at that point the brain can recover with adequate nutrition.
In that vein, I have read many encouraging anecdotes about people quickly regaining (over the course of a couple weeks to a month) much of their focusing capacity (there was a good article about it which I cannot find right now); but the main problem was that in all of the accounts the people were physically incapable of accessing the internet, and that as soon as they could access it once again the problems returned. I personally have a hard time imagining a good measure to emulate this in modern life (excluding things like abandoning modern life & 'moving to the wild', I mean). I suppose blockers can work? Or perhaps exclusively using the internet at work?
[aside: It's probably simplistic to think of it straightforwardly as an addiction, since it has a lot to do with the fact that we tend to favour a number of very attention-superficial sites (twitter & other social media), whereas probably reading long articles would be fine. The optionality is the main aspect here; it represents something similar about addictive activities as gambling, where the 'hit' comes from a kind of emergent novelty.]
I'm reading a book about this right now, actually, called "Deep Work" by Cal Newport and it's really resonating with me. About attention and concentration and distraction.
Well, there's always meth.
Meth is actually a highly effective and legal medication for ADHD (very low doses, compared to recreational use, as you can imagine). The problem is, no one wants to be the doctor who prescribed meth for an 8 year old! Or even for a 38 year old.
Legal in the US??
As Desoxyn®, yes.
That's called LSD
As a user of ADHD meds I can say no medication will make content interesting. I find i'll only use it when I really need to get through something, and usually best if the content is familiar but uninteresting. Also very helpful when work is tedious, ie. coding or spreadsheet crunching. That's where the chemical boost really helps, since the mind easily wanders. When the subject is inherently interesting or novel, ADHD meds almost hinder learning ability since the brain is somewhat 'in a rut' of concentration. The new neural connections are made less easily in a medicated state. This may vary for different/younger folks, i'm 31 now and started using ADHD meds at the age of 22 where I did find it useful in learning new things. I'm still of the view that giving kids ADHD meds (say below 20 y.o) is not appropriate unless very dire circumstances (dangerous or delinquent hyperactivity).
Definitely case by case, but in my experience (largely elementary sped situations, also diagnosed/on Adderall starting at 23), giving kids meds like this on the regular at a very young age can prevent them from learning to deal with their own nature. The medication replaces adapting to themselves and their environment. Me and my brother (very ADHD, teachers *begged* my parents to diagnose and medicate, they refused) both had to learn how to succeed in the school environment without the focus pull and it made success all the more rewarding. I have a better understanding of my meds as a *tool* than as something I *need,* a distinction I would not have been able to make if I'd been placed on them early.
That said, I've certainly seen cases where it seems like a good choice to medicate. Case by case, but I think it's important to err on the side of "teach kid to deal with it" over "give focus drug."
I take some issue with comparing ADHD etc to things like cancer and broken legs, which are only problems. But point taken.
Personally, I've seen a lot of kids who were *over* medicated. This makes me wary of medication in general and I think of it as a last resort. I recently worked with a student (8 years old) who talked *constantly* as you describe your son - he's also incredibly gifted, but exasperating to the adults around him who don't care about eg Roblox. School is difficult for him, so I'm glad things are going well for your son!
Coming from the school system I feel strongly that many cases of medicated kids could be UNmedicated with changes to the environment - kids don't have enough recess (45 minutes in 6.5 hours!), schoolwork is increasingly completed on computers, and very rarely are there the kinds of hands-on, constructive projects that would help more students care about and focus on the work (ie, a third grade castle project I witnessed this year was just a drawing, whereas I distinctly remember having to build a model in my own elementary school experience).
The incentives for the school system are so poorly aligned and disconnected from each other that I have a hard time coming up with solutions to this that could actually be implemented. There's a lot of hard problems wrapped up together and ultimately everyone needs to make the decisions that work best for them, I just wish the world were better set up for the students for whom school is not a healthy environment.
This makes absolute sense.
You're one of the good ones. I was prescribed ritalin in the 90s because a teacher pressed that I didn't pay enough attention. Treatment was stopped after some years when parents didn't notice a difference.
Today, I would not describe myself as having ADHD/ADD. My experience informs my bias which is that less rigid attention in children does not necessitate that they experience life-long ADHD; in part there is a symptom of simply being a child, or being of the day-dreaming persuasion. Not only is it over-prescribed, if we're to believe this research it barely provides value. Whether or not they actually have ADHD might be a moot point.
I had trouble focusing for the entire duration of school, for two reasons: a) insomnia, b) boredom. At the time, sleeplessness was not seen as a genuine concern and no one was equipped to help me deal with it. That mostly remains true of GPs today (everyone's first line of defense), but they can refer you to specialists or therapists who know somewhat better. Fortunately there is plenty of helpful material out there if you seek it out and take the time to learn by yourself.
In Artificial Neural Networks, there's literally a variable called 'Learning Rate'. This is a number, you can set it to anything you want. And indeed, the higher you set it, the faster the ANN learns, all else being equal! But also, the higher you set it, the lower the maximum skill level the ANN can attain before it reaches it's limit and plateaus.
And then there are learning rate schedules, too.
I had the same thought, but I think we have to be careful here because it'll be easy to conflate concepts. When we talk about a student's learning rate I think we're likely to be referring to how much information we expect them to retain or how hard/fast we push them to demonstrate knowledge.
But AI learning rate is essentially how closely the machine learning function traces the curve it's following. A high-learning rate AI will make massive jumps, mapping huge regions of the learning space, but at very low detail. A low-learning rate AI will make smaller jumps, mapping more slowly, but also more precisely.
It's not the difference between covering one chapter and two chapters in a textbook, it's the difference between reading and retaining the same amount of content in a survey-level course and a graduate level one. The survey course will give me a much better high-level mapping, while the graduate course will give me a lot of info on one particular part of the map. If I've already got a good survey-level understanding of a subject, taking another survey course is unlikely to provide me with much value. I'll spend much of my time going "yeah, I know this." Meanwhile if I take a graduate level course on quantum physics, I'll converge towards understanding very slowly, because I don't have that high-level mapping.
I'm not sure if there's a brain chemistry/intelligence interpretation of all this or not. As an ADHD person, my best interpretation would be that I don't have a lot of control over my learning rate, sometimes going very deep on poorly understood topics (and then failing to retain anything), and usually going very broad because deep understanding is hard with low dopamine payoff. I suspect that the bottleneck Scott refers to is more analogous to an AI's computational resources or architecture than to learning rate.
No I'm aware - ANN learning rate is about update speed, AKA 'How Much You Change The Numbers Each Step', not the actual learning that results from these updates. I still think it's a relevant comparison, however. For myself, I feel like my learning rate is set rather low, so I learn slowly, but can eventually build up lots of detail, if I stick at it.
I've taught 4th grade for almost twenty years, and I've had students who I would have sworn were not paying the least attention and were not getting a thing I said...but who, it turns out, were getting a hell of a lot more than I thought they were and who wound up doing pretty well. It's not always easy to judge such things by the obvious, superficial indicators.
Maybe those were just the smarter kids?
I have a memory from 2nd grade where everyone was at their desks learning cursive, and I was in the corner reading a book. Occasionally I'd glance up and memorize the pattern of the new letter the teacher was drawing on the board. I'm sure I also did some practicing (the kinesthetic stuff is important too), but... yeah, it usually would have looked like I wasn't paying attention at all.
There were lots of times I'd look like I was sleeping but was actually listening carefully. (Other times I actually was sleeping.)
AI was brought up at the end, but maybe not the most relevant example. Many neural nets employ "dropout", where 30% or so of the neurons are turned off at random. This seems to help the network develop resiliency, and not depend too much on any particular set of neurons. To extend the metaphor to its speculative extreme, one could imagine that with all neurons paying perfect attention to the task at hand, you would be better behaved for sure (no neurons to misbehave with), and you might even perform better on immediate tests, but you might not "learn" in a resilient way.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fg9fXrHpeaDD6pEPL/truly-part-of-you
Relevant.
Dropout in NNs is mostly there to prevent overfitting the model; the closest analogy in teaching actual humans is probably rote learning (as opposed to conceptual or deep learning (I just love how the terminology gets mixed up when talking about humans and NNs))
I don't think the implied premise of attention in class = learn more material is rock solid to begin with. We don't know what makes kids actually learn better, or at least we don't apply it in schools; instead they get an overworked 27 year old's heuristic approach to what they think teaching is supposed to be.
By the time they are in this study I think the boys have just developed learning styles that fit their strengths and weaknesses, ability to catch random detail but short attention spans. Having been in that situation (and been on and off Ritalin) I am unsurprised that the boys who continued to use the learning style they were experienced in kept up with those who were medically given different strengths they weren't used to.
I'm curious what would happen if you tried this with non adhd students. I would expect a stronger pro Ritalin effect as you'd be strengthening a preexisting strength rather than a weakness.
Right. As an ADHD person, this study simply seems to be asking the wrong question.
For me as a kid, the problem was *never* being able to hear, understand, and retain what the teacher was saying.
I suspect you're right in the extreme case: there are certainly people you couldn't teach quantum mechanics to even given 20 years.
But that type of extreme case shadows a *lot*. In practice, we don't really care if we can teach someone something over truly long periods -- if someone can't understand a fairly wide topic in 1 year of poorly focused instruction (a classroom of 20+ students as compared to, say, a private tutor), we have no interest in teaching it to them. Given how long it took me to understand (for example) partial differential equations, I'm confident we lose a lot of potential this way. In other words, we rarely make anything like a serious effort to optimize training our meat computers in any task or subject area. Not sure that's relevant to stimulant function in the classroom, but if we ever work out an educational method that *isn't* inefficiently (human) labor intensive, it means we could see fairly dramatic gains.
More on topic, to echo other people here: attention is not a substitute for interest. I have paid attention to a lot of classroom instruction that I knew I had no interest in and was going to forget immediately because nothing had flipped the switch in my brain saying "this is actually worth knowing". My impression is that there are chemicals that might have something similar to that effect (among others), but they're mostly illegal drugs.
Intuitively, I feel like the analogue of training data for a vocabulary word would be something like how many examples you've seen of the word being used. I don't think the *primary* way humans learn language is by memorizing formal definitions.
"a little more quantum physics every day for twenty years, and eventually expect them to know as much as a smart person would after getting a four-year degree."
I think this would work (and does work - relatively poorer learners in schools at the moment still learn a lot of stuff by the end of school). But there's a condition. I teach English to children, and one of the problems I find that some seem to have run into is coping strategies. We get kids coming in at about age 10, who have been having English classes for four years (they start in 1st grade) and have at some points performed reasonably well on school tests, but they can't identify English words like "I" or "and". They seem to have developed (highly sophisticated!) strategies for giving correct answers on tests and in class, despite not knowing any of the stuff that we call "English".
Those strategies sometimes block any further learning. The student's goal is usually nothing more or less than to pass the test; if they have a strategy that sometimes/consistently enables them to do this, they will actively resist taking on new information that might disrupt their strategy.
I guess that means I agree with Scott that school is badly aligned, i.e. for a large number of kids, it never becomes obvious that getting good at the school subjects is the best way to get through the day; and they aren't given compelling other reasons to want to get good at school subjects. And a little bit of concentration probably doesn't make a big difference
But I feel like it should make a big difference over the longer term, because the kids will build up marginally more experience of having paid attention in class, heard something, used it in a test later, and gotten through the day a little easier.
What are some of these highly-sophisticated strategies? Unless the tests are very regular in a way that I should think it would be a goal to avoid (e.g. "C is usually the answer"), I can't really imagine what they could be.
Sure, it's a bit mind-boggling. They include things like: in class, swift mirror-repetition of the last two words the teacher says, which apparently in their large-class situation in public school is enough to make the teacher think they've answered the question and move onto the next kid, but can be achieved without any mental processing or understanding at all! Use of muttering, finely tuned to the ears of their English teachers, so they produce a sound-sludge that seems enough like an answer to get the teacher to move on. Waiting for and imitating classmates' whispered answers. Verbal parroting, so that sometimes, if you give the prompt "spring," they can respond with "summerautumnwinter," without necessarily knowing what they mean, or even that they are three words.
In writing, they sometimes learn to write whole lists of words in a particular order rather than learn what each word means. (The exams are indeed quite poorly designed, so this strategy gains marks.) Words may be learned in relation to specific prompt images, so a child may reproduce "summer" next to an image of the sun, without knowing or caring that the word means summer. And they may learn to reproduce quite long passages, several sentences long, without knowing what they mean (much like a list of words). These passages can be inserted into the writing part of an English test, and will still get you 4/6 or 6/8 marks, even if they're not on-topic, because these are primary school exams, and marked generously.
It's bad teaching and bad exams that allow these practices to flourish - but that's hardly uncommon!
Fascinating. Initially I assumed for some reason that the students you teach are mainly Spanish or Creole speakers. However, I've heard anecdotes about something similar in the context of standardized test prep, so now I'm wondering, are the students who employ the strategies you describe predominantly Asian?
As it happens, yeah. I live and work in southern China, so they're all Chinese students. I should stress, though, that talking about who the students are seems unfair, because these are so obviously inculcated by the school system. It's not because of who the students are, it's because of the system they're in. English teaching in Chinese public schools is uniquely bad because so many of the teachers can't speak English at all (some literally refuse to speak English in the classroom), and the textbooks they use are conversational English textbooks. (I actually quite like the public school textbooks, but they're wildly unsuitable for large classes with non-native teachers.)
Well, the reason I focused on who the students are is that about a decade ago I heard from a teacher in California that Chinese students getting test prep in hagwons were "gaming" standardized tests via some method that sounded really improbable, but that lines up with what you described.
At the time, I thought that if kids (and adults) really were pulling that off, then they must have some intellectual advantage others (and certainly I) don't, even if they're just learning and employing a successful stratagem. Calling it "gaming" seemed sort of, well, biased.
But the details you describe paint a fuller picture and make me reconsider.
Yeah, that kinda makes sense. Perhaps techniques that are survival skills in the Chinese system are like superpowers in other systems.
Good test design can defeat these sorts of tactics.
I have noticed that some people write test questions in a particular way that is highly susceptible to gaming the answers, resulting in you being able to correctly answer questions even when you don't actually know the answer.
You can also defeat this in other ways, like asking more open-ended questions or making people do projects which require them to show comprehension.
Of course, people start complaining when you do this and half the students fail.
Thanks for writing this. I have seen similar behavior in college students, and never really knew what to make of it. Getting essay answers that I would now say read like they were written by an AI via "this word and that word usually go together, so I will do that." I had often wondered if they were just throwing together word salad in panic from half remembered information, or just really bad at writing. The notion that it is a perhaps unconsciously learned strategy makes a lot of sense, and starts to suggest solutions for working around it.
Yep, for us it's pretty much always the same thing: you have to go back and teach things that are much more basic than you think. For example, in my language learning context, when students struggle to learn vocab, it's because they don't know the speech sounds. I hear them spelling the word "but" by saying, "b-a-t - no, not that a, the other a." It doesn't matter how much work you put into the teaching of vocabulary when the students literally can't hear the difference between one vocabulary item and another. You have to regress the extra step.
I don't teach anyone of college age, but with middle school students, I've recently been noticing how difficult the language of questions can be. Sometimes they may know the material, but not be able to understand the question at all - and are unable to recognise that failure of understanding in themselves, or unable to admit it. So you have to do a bunch of diagnostic investigation before you can even get started.
Why am I reminded of when Feynman tried to teach in a Brazilian university and discovered that the students had only ever memorized passwords and didn't understand anything?
Yeah, I assume this is a universal phenomenon. I'm guilty of all of these shortcut approaches sometimes (watching me trying to copy-paste learn coding off the internet would make a grown man cry)! But what was surprising to me was to find that a whole chunk of a (reasonably "successful") education system could be run so as to be, for a significant number of kids, nothing more than a mechanism for forcing kids into intellectual bad habits. I'm still not fully on board with Scott's anti-school thing, but this is the kind of phenomenon that could push me that way.
If the whole multiple-choice exam method were thrown out and replaced with intelligent questions, that kind of thing would tend to disappear.
One of my classes was 240 students, I was the only one involved on the staff side, and the administration wanted the marks back within 3 days of the test at the absolute latest, no excuses. That is why it was multiple choice. I conjecture that teachers would drop multiple choice in favour of intelligent questions all by themselves if the circumstances made it possible.
Very interesting! Thank you for taking to the time to provide these examples.
I imagine these types of strategies take place much more than generally acknowledged, across all ages and domains. I saw similar things taking place even at university level CS courses: students would attempt (and often succeed) to "game" the compiler / homework problems, and still get credit without understand the syntax or semantics of what code they were submitting.
As a father of two currently homeschooled kids, I'm noticing a very similar phenomenon. The kids seem to treat learning tasks as some overly-complicated game, and view their main optimization task as making as much progress in it as possible while using as few mental resources as possible. Like, when using a language-learning app, they would skip listening to the instruction and try to guess the answer. That's despite the fact that I actively try to downplay the importance of getting results (in the form of correct answers); there's no score in the app, no penalty for wrong answers, etc. It's just that actively learning is harder then guessing, and when there's no internal incentive to learn (or the benefits are too distant to really register), the mind starts optimizing ruthlessly. The solution seems to be to try to align the most immediate incentives somehow, and hope that the more beneficial time preferences develop eventually as the child matures.
I'm just in the middle of making a homeschooling decision. Mine have been in school up till now, and seem to be a bit zombified by it, and would love to pull them out and let them relax and develop a bit. But that kind of thing could make my relationship with them very tense, so I'm worried about it. Thanks for the salutary thought!
I agree that you could probably teach almost anyone quantum mechanics given enough time. I think the main obstacle is most likely low academic self-concept / self-sabotage.
The reason I think this is that I don't really think the variation in human intelligence is that large on an absolute scale, I think it's more like temperature (we feel a huge variation between 0C and 40C but temperature can go a lot lower). If you look at AI performance in domains where it's superintelligent (eg Go) you'll see average human intelligence is a pretty narrow band that AIs quickly fly through. I can't see any compelling reason why the threshold for being able to learn QM is neatly inside this narrow band.
To me a much more plausible explanation is low academic self-concept. I hypothesise that if I went to school in a class where people learned 2x as fast as me and I always fell short, I would become convinced I couldn't learn as much as them, so any attempt to teach me would result in negative thought spirals causing me to fail to learn. I saw this pattern often when I did private tutoring - I've found it's actually not hard to tutor people with these deeply ingrained insecurities difficult concepts 1-on-1, but they find it psychologically difficult to be persistent and follow through (CBT might help?)
Could the answer lie in something like the lessons these kids were taking having been the same (i.e. using the same plan and resources, with teachers using the same strategies) and basically optimised for kids with ADHD? If so, perhaps the results just mean that Ritalin works *and* SEND teaching works (I've spent this year doing teacher training, and we keep being told that the ideal goal is for a kid with ADHD in your lesson to be able to learn as much as a neurotypical one, and it sounds like these lessons might just have reached that standard).
Re the Ritalin study, which showed that attention improved but learning not so much when ADHD kids got Ritalin, how about the idea that engagement is necessary? When talking a test, students are usually trying to succeed, so they’re engaged. Typically, classwork is boring, so they’re not. I recently read of a study that showed that 1:1 tutoring gave better learning results than either of two classroom paradigms. Could it just be that 1:1 interaction is so much more engaging than being in a classroom? Perhaps in a 1:1 situation, Ritalin would help ADHD kids learn better. Or in other engaging situations, like, say, chess or video games or something.
1:1 tutoring famously outperforms just about every educational intervention ever, offering about 2 s.d. improvement in outcomes, but it also obviously is extremely expensive to scale up so it remains underutilised.
I think there are many factors that make 1:1 tutoring better, having done a bit of it as a student. Firstly, yes, it's much easier to keep 1 kid engaged than a class - there is often no framing that all 30 kids in a class would find interesting, so teachers have to settle for getting most of the kids at best, but with only 1 you can tailor your approach precisely *and in real time* - with only one student, you can watch their face to see what's clear and what's not, what's interesting and where precisely you lost them.
Secondly, you can repeat things exactly as much as needed - instead of, say, three repetitions for everything, you can do one or two for the things that the kid gets easily, and have enough time saved as a result to afford to spend 6 or 7 on the one thing they're truly stuck on.
Yup. But then the question I was trying to ask was whether Ritalin would help ADHD kids learn more in a 1:1 learning situation.
You can also ask exactly what they do not understand and pinpoint the error they make, understand where their logic/understanding break and try to correct it using counter-examples, alternative ways to do it correctly, analogies with something they like, can already and so on.
It require one-to-one interraction because, unlike a class, it's a real conversation. It also require the teacher to really be proficient in the matter he teach, not only be able to follow the program and pass the exams himself (which is often the case).
That's my experience teaching math to friends that were much less gifted/interested in math than I was (it usually go hand in hand, it's rare to be interrested in something you are not doing better than most, and vice-versa).
And there is also a peer effect: getting teached by your peer is a different psychological experience than being teached by an authority. Some students like it better, others needs/crave the authority, and a class setting is authoritarian.
Now doing that helped them pass the exam and really improved their math skills, for this particular year. But from what those friends told me, it has no lasting effect. Probably because the only way to keep the skills is to use them, by obligation or interest. They had neither one or the other...
What you're pointing to is this: design instruction that mimics what a tutor does. For example, the students need to make active responses quite often; and the instruction needs to respond to the students' demonstrated understanding, or lack thereof; and the students need to have opportunities to ask questions that actually shape the direction of the instruction that follows. These kinds of things can be managed.
I don't think so. Not in a class of 15+ students. Maybe with 3-5, but more than that and the ambiance drastictly changes, nothing ressembling a conversation takes placd anymore....At least that's what I get from my very informal teachnig attempts when in school (One or 2 friends), and teaching assistant during Phd. Teaching 2 friends or a group of 3 students for a project is a very different experience (a much more pleassant one for me) than teaching a group of 15. This was awful, and the only way I made it bearable was to split those in an ex-cataedra part (awfully close to being on scene, which I despise, an probbaly sucked hard for this part) and back to informal one-to-one with me moving around. But it means that instead of 2h one-to-one tutoring, it was 1h online pre-recorded course (only less smooth) + 10 minute tutoring. I am far from a good teacher (although I apparently am a good tutor, at least if I do not loose patience), but having experienced good ones (I think), I see no way to replicate one-to-one (or one-to-a-very few) tutoring in a class of 20+ students. Except with the very time-inefficient tutoring each student successively...
It's quite possible to do what I said. I do it. I think you're missing the point. Tutoring doesn't work because it "resembles a conversation." It works because it elicits frequent active responses from students, because the tutor responds to the input from those responses, and so on. A group can get a lot closer to the relevant features than it does. For example, you can give students individual whiteboards and have them all write questions for the teacher at once; you can pair up students and have them explain things to each other; and you can actually observe what they are doing and then shape your instruction accordingly. No one said it was easy, but it's possible.
My high school physics class used the whiteboard thing.
He considered it shameful if any of his students got a 4 on the AP test. You were supposed to get a 5.
Most of us did.
You could do this even more easily with modern digital tools.
That explains a lot. Seriously.
Hang on, I'm not following the logic here.
Solving math problems is one thing. Following rules is another, related, thing. Learning is another, and doesn't really seem all that closely related to either. You treat it as strange that improving the first two doesn't seem to affect the third. But really, why should it?
You say "Concerta's clearly doing something". And you're right. But why jump to the conclusion that the thing it's doing is "making kids pay attention"? There are other things that could explain better student performance.
I am a math tutor, and I often find myself wishing that my students could become dumber at will. That when the time came to do arithmetic, they could shut off most of their brains and execute rules mechanically. Because frankly, most thoughts are simply obstacles or distractions when you're trying to do kid-level math. That's why a simple computer can out-calculate a brain that has vastly greater processing power.
My first thought, when I heard about the effects of Concerta, was that it might be doing something like that. Inflicting useful stupidity, desirable narrow-mindedness. Which might actually make people worse at learning, not better. A wandering mind is a problem when you're doing arithmetic, but I think it's a good quality in a student overall.
Your point seems very relevant for the kind of learning that enriches a person, but less so for the "learning the teacher's password" that this study examined, which I *would* naively expect to benefit from the kind of narrow-mindedness that you're thinking of
Possible, but learning math is often a much more intellectual process than doing it. It really does help to understand what you're doing and why, even if the actual task is just following memorized steps.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why it helps. But the students who "get it" always outperform the students who don't.
Wouldn't this show up on the study's metrics just fine?
> My first thought, when I heard about the effects of Concerta, was that it might be doing something like that. Inflicting useful stupidity, desirable narrow-mindedness. Which might actually make people worse at learning, not better.
The experience of stimulant medications for me is very much this. In normal everyday ADHD life, the senses are wide open. I'm absorbing many things at a time. Lack of stimulus is unnerving. The key point here, though, is that I am actually absorbing those things. My brain is taking it all in and retaining what it feels is important.
Add stimulant medications and it's like looking through a telescope by comparison. Much, much less "wide open" than usual, and much more focused on one thing. That is VERY helpful for DOING. It's not especially helpful for LEARNING except where learning takes the form of doing, as in the case of doing homework.
I have very much not had that experience. Learning is much easier when you can focus on something long enough to actually learn about it. Or when other things your brain feels are important but which aren't actually are not intruding.
I think know what you mean, but dumber kids aren't better at arithmetic. Rigidly simulating an abstract rule based system IS a kind of intelligence
This is entirely anecdotal evidence, but as a "gifted" child who got diagnosed with ADHD at age 27, I've always completely separated my ability to learn (processing+analyzing information) from my attention issues. I take an off-brand Concerta, and what it allows me to do is exert less effort to do things I otherwise get paralyzing executive dysfunction for. I.e. just about everything in my life that I'm not really interested in on a whim. Concerta is a tool that allows me to direct my attention better, and most importantly it helps massively with time regulation: so less "oh I can finish this task in 20 minutes because I couldn't make myself do it earlier" and more "ok I want to do this, I can do it at X hour, and allocate Y duration to it." This process is near impossible without the medication. As a child this translated to setting my alarm at 5am in the morning to fail to complete homework and ending up scribbling it in class before it was due.
As stated at the end of this piece, I feel like the major hurdle in these types of studies is defining significant variables that first qualify the ability to learn, separate from overall attention. But you very quickly get into extremely murky territory (and I'll admit I'm not super well read on this topic because I find filtering out my personal bias/experience extremely draining, a poor show of rationalism at work).
I share much of your experience. I was always a distractable kid, but I was never diagnosed with ADHD, due to a combination of success despite distraction, my parents' attitudes towards education and medication, and going to elementary school before Ritalin became the rage in my family's social cohort. My executive function was bad (probably not as bad as yours), but that weakness never caught up with me because while it might have taken me four hours to master an algebra concept that should have taken one hour, I had four hours to spend on it. College and law school were tough, but it was only as a young attorney, expected to work through tedious documents quickly, that the volume of work exceeded the available time. I got on stimulants at that point.
I don't take stimulants every day. When I do, I can't perceive a difference in the quality of my work. Some of that is surely that a legal brief cannot be measured the way that a page of twenty long-division problems can. But the biggest difference is simply time. On stimulants, I sit down and do the work. I don't take three bathroom and two coffee breaks every hour. For what I do, getting the writing done is what matters. There could be differences in the quality of my writing on and off stimulants, but the crucial thing is that the brief get finished and filed. A so-so brief can still win; a brief that never gets filed because I was writing on SlateStarCodex is a professional disaster.
Could it be that Ritalin is somewhat dumbing down the brains ability to process new information, which counteracts the increase in focus?
> Something like this must be true if we assume that it takes a certain intelligence level to learn surgery - or quantum physics, or whatever. Otherwise you could get a very dumb person, keep teaching them a little more quantum physics every day for twenty years, and eventually expect them to know as much as a smart person would after getting a four-year degree. I’ve never heard of someone formally trying this, but I predict it wouldn’t work.
... Don't we all start off as very dumb people, and we keep learning a little more every day for many years until we can do the complicated stuff?
Kids with low IQ hit the same milestones as kids with high IQ, just slower. Why would this be different in adult life?
When I tutored in college and HS, and now train (“capacity build”) as an adult I do not find the last graph true at all. Basic algebra is just literally beyond some people. And more and more things as you move up the intellectual hierarchy. Now how much of that is focus/interest versus raw intellect is maybe hard to say.
Could you torture the non algebra understanders into understanding algebra with the right negative stimulus? Maybe? But copious positive stimulus definitely has no effect for some people, once you start getting into mid level HS work. And these are not people who are “morons” or whatever medicalized term you want to use. Just on the low end of the distribution.
Given how hard it is for some adults to uptake certain skills/concepts even with the literal gun of “you will be fired if you don’t perform better” pointed at their head, I don’t think the “just slower” model is correct.
> Basic algebra is just literally beyond some people. And more and more things as you move up the intellectual hierarchy. Now how much of that is focus/interest versus raw intellect is maybe hard to say.
Set theory is beyond most set theorists, which is why Skolem's Paradox is simply swept under the rug.
Surely there's a threshold IQ for mathematics and abstract conceptualization. The more complex and logically fraught, the higher the threshold. Algebra, which is minimally troublesome and merely involves using letters to stand in for variables, has a low threshold -- but a threshold nevertheless -- whereas quantum mechanics and set theory have very high thresholds. With enough guidance, rote memorization, and mechanical problem solving, people below the threshold might be able to "fake it" -- but they won't be able to develop a comprehensive understanding or apply the abstract concepts they're "learning" to their daily life.
I don't think it's the case that everyone hits the same milestones in learning any subject beyond perhaps the very-most-basic level, no.
“ Kids with low IQ hit the same milestones as kids with high IQ, just slower.”
That’s simply not true. One issue with low IQ is poor working memory and poor long term recall. In some cases they simply don’t have enough RAM to hold all the information they need to complete the task. In others their ability to write to disk reliably is poor so they can’t recall the facts they need to complete the task. Part of having a low IQ would be both of those at the same time.
in regard to surgery students, maybe your brain just gets numb. at first you're excited - your brain is titillated. new, fun stuff is gobbled up. after four years it's just another serving of cottage pie.
to bring it to the classroom, not paying attention is an act to keep from getting bored. which is to say when you are paying attention you're paying attention.
As a language teacher, I can confirm from long experience that not all words, even those considered at the same 'level' are equally difficult to retain. Nor can you predict with much confidence whether a given student will retain a given word based on how other students do.
From a language research perspective, I do not put much faith in results from vocabulary teaching unless those words are guaranteed to be unknown to the subject. This was obviously not possible here, but the fact that these words were part of the standard curriculum and were relatively common English words means there will be significant exposure effects.
(Another possible explanation as a former student and teacher trainer: many teachers are just not very effective, for various reasons.)
I'm not sure if it's relevant at all, and this is just my personal experience so only anecdotal. I knew just a little German as my third language (2 hours per week between 6th and 10th grades). When I moved to Netherlands and started learning Dutch it replaced my German instead of becoming a separate language that I know. When I try to learn other languages they don't replace anything else, but since German and Dutch are more or less cousin languages my brain is only able to keep one among them. Now I still remember some German when I push myself, but it's a bit locked behind Dutch.
I took four years of Latin in HS, then minored in Russian. While I can still "read" (i.e., reconstruct the sounds of) Cyrillic text, I can only recall a few random words of Russian and can't string together a sentence. That was the case at little as a year out of undergrad, but I've retained probably 70% of my Latin decades later.
Nowhere near similar etymologically, but both are conjugated declined languages. Your experience makes me wonder whether I was leaning too heavily on their structural natures when learning each language, but only have one mental "slot" for such a framework and, since Latin has (bizarrely for a dead language) been much more useful in my adult life, it kept hold of the slot.
So your primary language is something else, English is second, Latin is third and Russian is fourth? While not the exact same circumstance, it's still similar enough to think of having "mental slots" especially for languages not repeatedly used. Also English has enough Latin in it to keep Latin fresh.
Although, if you started learning, let's say Italian, would it wipe the similar Latin? I have no idea how much similarity Latin has to any one of the Romance languages.
No, English is my native language.
I've picked up a fair amount of Spanish later in life in passing, certainly know more of it now than I remember Russian (low bar). But since I haven't studied it formally I couldn't tell you how to conjugate a verb in it (while I still remember multiple Latin declensions & conjugations). It *feels* very different than when I learned Latin & Russian.
FWIW, at least among the written forms, Portuguese seems to me to be the most similar Romance language to Latin. My pet theory is that in the time period when they were diverging from Latin (i.e., before Brazil was colonized), there was a much smaller pool of speakers along that strip of the Iberian peninsula so fewer opportunities for "mutations" to arise than in the other regions. Or maybe it was just more sheltered from neighboring languages like Arabic (Spanish) or German (French).
"So maybe even among seemingly similar words, some are arbitrarily easier to remember than others..."
Here is some work on the intrinsic differences in memorability of words:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0901-2
The obvious answer is that learning requires more than just paying attention.
Going a bit deeper, I suspect that learning - or at least learning in a useful way - is more about patterns and linking each new bit of information to existing bits you already know. That might be innate, or it might be possible to teach this. Rather than simply force someone to rewrite the laws of quantum physics ten thousand times while on Concerta, it probably makes more sense to figure out the underlying patterns and ideas, and focus on teaching them that.
What proportion of primary* school teachers are likely to themselves understand the underlying patterns of what they're teaching?
*Since secondary school teachers are subject-specific, the rates there are likely higher, but that's too late for a lot of students.
For certain subjects, I believe that homework matters a great deal. Because this is contrary to everything that the primary-education establishment has been saying for a while, I am fairly confident that I am correct. From my elementary school days learning multiplication tables to my undergraduate days learning organic chemistry, there was no substitute for simple drill: doing problems over and over until the concept stuck. You could show me the Friedel–Crafts acylation on the blackboard as much as you want, but I didn't fully get it until I went to the library and drew the arrow-pushing diagrams myself.
Prospective lawyers have two months between graduation and the bar exam. Generally they spend several weeks of that time attending bar prep courses. (This is because law school does little to prepare you for the bar exam; what this says about legal education, licensing, and testing is a separate debate). The most well-known courses have live instruction and charge $2,000-$3,000. From experience of two decades of education, I knew that the important thing for me was to do the thing that I would be tested on. And I didn't need to spend $2,499 to do that; I just needed to buy used practice tests from eBay and work through the multiple-choice questions.
So I'm inclined to believe that homework is where learning takes place. This seems consistent with the objectively poor results (50-75%) on these summer-school tests; I think it's a safe assumption that they were not assigned homework.
I agree. I think one can do homework wrong, and make it so that it has little benefit, but actually using the ideas you are supposed to learn, and doing it over time so you keep thinking about them, really helps. Practice, and reminding your brain how things work later, seem to be the key.
Half agree: I think it's important to distinguish between drill-type assignments as an activity and homework as an implementation. Drill in class where the teacher is around to help and the environment is reliably conducive to learning is likely better for many/most students than their home & parents.
Slight pushback against this: I'm very experienced in not understanding a topic at first, and then many months (or years) later, suddenly getting it because my method of inference has changed for the better. Although the effects of "raw ability" are real, they're not the full explanation I think
Re vocabulary: I'd definitely expect that some words will be easier than others *for a given person*: words you can connect to things you regularly think about will be easier to remember.
(Btw cramming lists of words must be the most boring way to learn a language, and I suspect one of the least effective ways.)
Re: surgeon residents: An explanation is that they regularly use some of the things that are on the test, and by the second year they'll remember those. Other things they rarely or never use, and among that they'll only know whatever they remember from their earlier education (and, if the test has stakes, whatever they can cram shortly before the test, which they'll forget shortly afterwards).
Cramming several thousand words using spaced repetition does wonders to jump-start your understanding of the language, nothing comes close in terms of efficiency. But it might feel demotivating because the app will keep showing you the words you find hard to remember, as though mocking your slow progress with those.
Your comment assumes learning is binary - you've taken a fact on board, or not. But both fact-learning and process-learning are probably more complicated than that. Educators talk about the process of assimilating learning in stages, though, sometimes described as acquisition, competence, mastery. Do you know it only in the first context? Can you do it easily and automatically? Can you apply it in a new context if someone calls it up? How about it you have to think yourself of calling it up from among all the facts or processes in your head (Homer!)? It seems likely to me that kids (learners) might be better at getting started by taking on stage one with better attention, but that they will still need similar hours or repetitions or opportunities to move up the ladder to mastery.
One parallel I would draw to AI is that learning and intelligence are functions of compression: We don't remember all the facts we learned but hopefully they fed into a deeper more generalised understanding of the subject area. So forgetting specifics is part of the same process that also synthesises a more general understanding.
If I read lots of medieval history books soon enough I will forget the names of most people involved, the dates and many more specifics. But I suppose the more facts I learned and forgot the more nuanced the retained understanding of the general structure of the thing would become - I would become closer to grok the era. But this kind of understanding is much harder to evaluate based on taking a test so it might not bear out in an average study.
For language learning, obviously you do need to remember the words. But presumably a summer camp is too short to allow the brain to create the internal compressed language model necessary in order to speak a language. But only once such a model is in place learning vocabulary becomes something other than rote learning of random unconnected facts?
Very rarely I use a small dose of Ritalin (apparently 1/4th of what some people in the US give to children, wtf is wrong with you) to get a lot of boring things done. The key is to create an environment in which there is a continuous stream of things to do and enter a flow state. It's best to close IMs and slack, unless you want to end up writing an essay of your thoughts to an unsuspecting friend.
On the other hand, I can't think of a _less_ flow inducing environment than a classroom, where there's some kind of boring lecture, no research materials other than maybe a textbook - if you don't understand, where are you supposed to find information that will help you understand? Talking with your classmate or drawing or doing literally anything else is more absorbing for a mind that wants to do something, anything, ASAP.
The bottom line is, modern education sucks, drugs won't fix it, go full autodidact and leave humanity behind.
I totally understand the reasoning, but that seems like a path to becoming an addled and isolated eccentric (polite for "wierdo")
If you can choose, the best path is to surround yourself with smart/healthy/priviledged people so you aren't slowed down by normals/poors. This applies especially to primary and even preschool I think
Yeah, realistically you want to reform education so it doesn't suck, but if I had a gifted child I'd tell them to do spend the minimum required time in school and learn cool stuff on their own. This is roughly what I did, but I fully figured the system out around high school, earlier I assumed grades have some kind of use (they don't).
I’m one of those kids who was diagnosed with ADD in the 90s, but whose parents looked at her good grades and decided not to medicate. I always did great on tests, but I feel like test taking is not a great way to determine if these drugs are useful. I often wonder if I could have gone through childhood and adolescence NOT constantly forgetting things.
I’d write a great book report, then leave it at home and turn it in late. My mother was constantly dropping off things I’d left behind. She didn’t really connect this to ADD, or see it as something Ritalin could have helped. By high school, being scatterbrained had become part of my identity, and my nickname was “Airhead”. I had great test scores the whole time, but I felt helpless and incompetent. I’m concerned that leaning too hard on test scores might make people miss the big picture for their own kids.
Not that any of this has dinged me too hard in life; I have an interesting career and a wonderful partner and kids. Whatever coping strategies or mental hacks I’ve developed in 30 years are mostly doing the job. But sometimes I wonder if I’ve been rolling the ball uphill this whole time, and if a little Ritalin might still be a good idea. But “on paper” I’m doing well, and I can’t make up my mind whether or not trying medication would be a good idea. I’d like to see more research that looks at general well-being, since measurable performance isn’t where I’d expect to see an improvement.
Similar situation here. Teachers wanted me to take Ritalin, but test scores were good so parents didn’t want to medicate me.
I’m grateful I wasn’t medicated as a child, as I am nervous about how that would have impacted brain development (based on absolutely zero evidence / mostly superstition), but wish I had access to it after undergrad.
So much of early analyst jobs is incredibly boring. You don’t get to the good stuff until you get promoted. I never made it there!
I find, as some others have noted, that there’s a narrowing of the mind on meds. That doesn’t mean it’s bad for creativity, but it does mean I don’t want to always be on it. I want regular access to the full spectrum
There are definitely tasks where it’s less productive to be on meds. Ie anything I’m really interested in.
I do imagine a world when I won’t need to take meds. Useful to have access until then!
Speaking as someone with a not-dissimilar experience of life to you pre-medication: you have been doing things the hard way.
This doesn't mean you have to stop doing so, but you definitely have been.
The way I find medication is that it turns my brain from a noisy house into a quiet one. This is a marked improvement for getting things done, not losing things, etc. But, of course, one does get somewhat used to them, so unmedicated days can certainly be trickier than they once were.
Has anyone tested whether or not if you have huge cash prizes for success in school, kids would do better? It’s not hard to imagine that what’s happening is this stuff just doesn’t seem that important to them.
It seems like in almost any field, you need increasing amounts of money to power experiments.
Fascinating analysis and speculation.
I had the unexpected experience of teaching high school math for about 8 years, with at least 99.9% math ability myself. During that period I also realized I am high on the spectrum.
This is how it seemed to me. I describe most people as learning in parallel columns. They did not seem to automatically mentally search for connections between new information and everything they already knew that could possibly relate to it. That would be an untidy node network. But it greatly reduces the amount of separate information one has to store. Information has meaning. It is not a set of facts. This is consistent with studies I have read that people who are good at math use less mental effort, not more, to accomplish more than people who are weak at math.
People who establish a new mental category for every topic and master or fail to master it do not seem to be able to think the other way, and that other way can not be taught IMO.
This is totally black box, inferential, anecdotal observation. I doubt I have more neurons. But I seem to have a different method of connecting them.
It was intriguing to attempt to work out ways to motivate students, and figure out what they were failing to see that seemed self-evident. How to unsee. I try to use analogous strategies for my own social blindness, with mixed success. (I did get some feedback that I was a caring teacher, encouraging, and students' test scores were higher than my colleagues'.)
At a first reading, I want to challenge the entire model these researchers are using. I think it misunderstands what ADHD is actually like and what the actual issues are.
I've been on and off (currently off) stimulant meds for ADHD over the years. I was *constantly* accused of "not paying attention" in school, but that was simply untrue. I was hearing everything the teacher said and learning it just fine, even if I was also shredding paper with my fingers or literally reading a book during instruction. In fact, I absorbed the material *better* if I was fidgeting or reading a book during instruction, because having a second stimulus helps me focus. I was considered an underachiever due to constantly forgetting homework and seeming inattentive, despite also acing nearly all tests and getting perfect scores on standardized tests like the PSAT.
If I did struggle, it was always with forgetting to do things (did this study allow the kids to simply forget to do their homework?) or with an ADHD trait that non-ADHD people rarely understand; the "brain not available" effect. Having a stimulant to overcome "brain not available" - the frequent times when no amount of staring at the paper and willing myself to do the problem would work - would be very helpful for i.e. test-taking and especially helpful for homework. (Test-taking is exigent, ADHD brains love exigence, homework is not exigent.)
Didn't Scott already do an article suggesting that years/hours of schooling make only a minimal difference to educational outcomes?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
Great info here, but slides off the rails a little around rote memorization of vocabulary words from flashcards. Surely this is not (except for people with eidetic memories) a meaningful test of greater than short term vocabulary retention?
Memorizing definitions doesn't, IME, convey meaning adequately to spark retention. Like, if you have no familiarity with the sport in question, so no visual or domain knowledge to fit your understanding into, how will you conceptualize a flashcard definition of the word "regatta"? Why would you hang on to that knowledge once you had committed it to memory for purposes of taking a quiz?
Human Scaling Hypothesis: Human learning capacity are largely determined by three factors in order of importance: mental capacity, diversity of experience, and time.
My understanding of learning based on a *very* superficial review of the literature and my experience is that there are four kinds of memory: working verbal memory, working non-verbal memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
Working verbal memory is the most straightforward: Someone gives you a phone number and you rehearse it mentally until you get to the phone. You can hold a single-digit number of "pieces of information" this way, but can improve this by "chunking" multiple items into a single "piece of information." Once you hit your limit, new items will replace old items, but it's neither FIFO or FILO. Instead items tend to come off the list based on what your brain decides is most important according to some algorithm I don't understand.
Working non-verbal memory is basically just visual recall. I'm mostly aphantasiac, and my working non-verbal memory is essentially non-existent so it's very hard for me to understand this one. I know how intelligence assessments test it though: you'll be shown a picture, the picture will be taken away, and about 30 seconds later you'll be asked to describe it in as much detail as possible. Apparently some folks just refer to a mental image that is held in their brains. At any rate, nonverbal working memory also is limited in some way (I assume to a few "scenes") and items also get replaced.
Short-term memory I know very little about but it's essentially what lets you remember what you had for breakfast two or three days ago but not on May 23, 2003.
If your brain finds an item important, it will move it from short-term or working memory to long-term memory. I'm speculating here but for me that *only* works if there's a way to link it to something I already know and care about. This is how I have always learned new vocabulary: "legislative" and "legal" clearly have the same root, and both deal with laws, for instance. If I needed to learn Mandarin, I'd be in a lot of trouble initially, because there isn't a lot of verbal similarity so not a lot of nodes on my mind map to hang new language. Studies would seem to back me up here: When young your brain creates new long-term memory super easily, but with time it gets harder to add stuff as neuroplasticity decreases. And that's credited as the reason *most* folks struggle to learn new languages.
Anyway, based on that model of learning and literature on stimulants, I'd expect that Concerta would improve working memory but would not necessarily have any impact at all on converting working memory to long-term memory. This seems extremely consistent with that hypothesis.
I'm not...sure this means that putting students on Concerta is meaningless. It just means that school teaches different skills than long-term recall. It's very very clear that most students, even those that are bright and do well, don't come out of school with a life-long understanding of physics *and* history. It's also not clear what giving bright adults a long-term understanding of physics *and* history would accomplish. Instead, school seems to be focused on 1) exposing students to topics that they might find interesting enough to dedicate long-term memory space to, and 2) teaching students to do boring stuff they don't care about. I'll mention again that "doing boring stuff you don't care about" is an underrated skill, and one folks with ADHD struggle with in particular. That said, it might also kill their spirits so *shrug* who knows.
The ability to do boring things so as to thrive in a boring world is hugely important, and many teens with ADHD add their lack of it to the list of "why life really doesn't seem to be worth living." The suffering appears to be very real.
In general, though, how important is the actual learning k-12? My own recollection is that I never learned anything in school because I'd already learned it at home. Would I have learned these same things a few years later if my own father hadn't been such an aggressive tutor? Perhaps, perhaps not. Were there whole hosts of things I could have learned at school but which I did not then notice and cannot now recall because they were invisible to me (i.e. because I hadn't already learned them)? Perhaps, but not according to the standardized testing.
Good point about the boring thing there. Haven't been diagnosed with anything (yet) but I feel it is a gargantuan task to do just basic things every day. Quite validating to hear the first paragraph.
With vocabulary in particular, I would expect the learning has almost nothing to do with what is in the classroom and everything to do with how much the kids are hearing and using the words outside. After all, unless a word really nails a concept you use a lot but don't have a word for, words just fall into that category of "noise that can be safely ignored". I know I have a lot of trouble remembering names of people unless I hear others use the name a lot, because the noise itself doesn't tell me much about the person in a useful way, nor is it often necessary unless I need to call them by name. Only when other people use the name and I need to connect it to the particular person to understand does it stick.
Anecdotally, I know I lost a lot of used vocabulary when I went to college, simply because the lexicon that got used at home was much broader than 18-22 year olds, and most professors, used. Likewise with jargon; stop being around people who use it and you rapidly forget, although it is easier to remember what it means than come up with the word yourself.
I think the best metaphor for schools is playing team sports. Working out and practicing shooting or fielding obsessively is a necessary part of success. Structure and discipline are a huge part of the equation, but in the end, talent rules. Actual knowledge builds and fades like fitness and sports skills.
I have taught students who were on Ritalin, went on Ritalin, went off Ritalin, etc. It doesn't do much long term for most students. It also dulls the emotions. It's a powerful drug. It's mostly "needed" because teachers and classrooms are boring and have weak classroom management.
What happens if a kid who doesn't have ADHD takes Ritalin? Does it still help increase their grades and focus? It's widely reported that ADHD is overdiagnosed in kids, so you have to assume that many of them taking Ritalin don't actually have ADHD.
Yes, Ritalin is a stimulant. It increases everyone's concentration and focus.
I’m going to take this post as an excuse to link my favorite psychology lecture of all time.
Robert Bjork’s, “How we Learn vs How We Think We Learn.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxZzoVp5jmI
It goes into a bit more detail on the Homer Simpson effect, but also the testing effect, interleaving effect, and spaced repetition.
An interesting take away: the intuitions people have about how well they learned material are usually wrong. Learning techniques that are objectively the most effective, are seen by students as less effective—even after using them successfully.
People with ADHD can often focus quite well on things they are interested in. Of course school is standardized and boring as hell, so no surprise they have a hard time tuning in to the tedium.
Interesting study but my intuition is that stimulants could still increase the amount that was learned by allowing the teacher to lead the class through more material in the same amount of time.
Teachers might do this fairly naturally if more kids, especially more disruptive or lower performers, were on stimulants?
What effect would that have on how much is learned?
What if teachers pace of instruction was varied experimentally?
(Full disclosure: I didn't read the study)
As a person with ADHD, these results make sense to me. I feel like the challenges associated with it are greatly misunderstood. I can concentrate for short bursts, and my innate intelligence always carried me on tests. My impulsivity often got in the way and i would slip up when I didn’t read something carefully, but by and large I don’t think my ADHD effected my test taking too much. Where stimulants make a huge difference is in managing the day-to-day minutiae of life that for most people is second nature. For example, keeping your house clean, getting small chores done, paying bills on time, etc. To the extent that stimulants positively effect grades I expect it to be because students are showing up to class and turning their assignments in on time.
Absolutely agree - the skills that stimulants would help with have nothing to do with long-term memory and retrieval. Had my grade been based solely on long learning window testing (i.e. final exams and such) I'd have been a 4.0 student despite serious attention problems.
But I think the underlying assumption that school is for learning how to take derivatives and whose assassination sparked WWI is flawed. The skills improved by stimulants in this study are important skills: working memory, moment-to-moment concentration, and completion of tasks all come up in my adult life much more regularly than being told something and needing to recall it 12 weeks later.
Same here. There was a class I failed simply because I kept forgetting to do the weekly online pop quiz, even though I got nearly perfect scores on all 3 exams. It was around this time I got my official diagnosis in spite of being aware I had adhd since I was very young.
But yes, things have gotten difficult for me in early adulthood thus far. ADHD wreaks infinitely more havoc on adult functioning than on a child in school, and the stakes are usually much higher.
In your 2017 post on adderall you cited a study where kids on stimulant medication, after 8 years, performed the same on all metrics as kids on CBT. I was a bit excited reading this post thinking "maybe it's just that school sucks," though it looks like the study also looked at factors beyond grades like arrests and psychiatric hospitalizations/
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063150/
"bottlenecked by some other resource"
There's a common observation made by nurses, I don't know if they have a name for it. Where a patient has long term disability [some blocked resource] later in life, they make a dramatic recovery, only to quickly die.
In the 80s, I trained as an EMT. I was required to spend a shift in the emergency room. I came back to volunteer often. EMTs brought in an elderly man, his wife said, in the previous weeks, he'd made a dramatic recovery from WWII head injury, and had been quite talkative up until that evening. Apparently, he'd been all but non-communicative for 35 years.
When we had a moment, the nurse explained this is a common occurrence, typically followed by death.
I find it plausible that some mental channel was blocked creating a backup, and this backup prevented other traffic. Perhaps some transient ischemic event either blocked, or released the blocking agent resulting in restored traffic.
I've noticed Pelham etc. in a couple of the studies you've cited recently (or maybe I've been reading through archives and I'm conflating past and present). Are these quality researchers or something?
I wonder how nicotine would fair.
The idea of hitting the wall in learning based on personal limitations is experimentally accurate. I hit one when trying to study more complicated math than my brain would be able to cope with, despite being fine with the uni-level basics. As mentioned in previous posts, some people can't grasp hypotheticals and counter-factuals. Others can't learn to sing well. No growth mindset will help you beyond some personal limit. Once you hit it, learning progress stops being efficient (as in, polynomial in effort) and becomes exponential, or even super-exponential. There is a tiny bit of plasticity if one starts learning the skills early, but once you are an adult, you are hooped. Often you can compensate by getting at the same ideas from a different direction, where your brain has different limits, but simply scaling the mountain of knowledge that you see others walking up effortlessly is a fools errand.
Personal experience—I've been taking Adderall for ADHD off and on recently. It does seem like it has an effect on my focus and motivation; I very rarely feel like just staying in bed and doing nothing when I've taken a recent Adderall dose. But, that extra motivation never seems to go into focusing more on work or prioritizing household chores more highly. Instead, I just spend that time highly focused on whatever new retro game hacking idea my brain spontaneously generated that day.
So I'd speculate that Adderall (and probably Ritalin as well?) is capable of giving people additional focus and motivation, but it's not going to make them *care* about tasks that they don't already care about. If mowing the lawn or paying attention to a school lecture isn't inherently interesting to you, then it's probably not going to become any more interesting to you after you start a focus-enhancing drug. And so you're not likely to prioritize it any more highly than you would otherwise, for so long as your focus-enhanced brain is capable of generating something more interesting to focus on.
I started taking Adderall for ADD as an adult. I hadn't considered that I might have it previously because I got very good grades in school. During the process of getting diagnosed, I slowly realized how little I was paying attention in school. If a class was "boring" (which most of them were) I often brought a book with me and would read while the teacher lectured. If I didn't have a book. the teacher wouldn't let me read mine (most teachers left me alone because I didn't cause trouble and was smart, others were sticklers) then I would often read ahead in the textbook, doodle, or daydream. The only class I ever really took notes on were math classes, and only that because I couldn't memorize a formula just by listening to it. I usually wasn't paying close attention: if I tried to listen I often drifted off into other thoughts, would realize I hadn't been listening, listen for two minutes, and then drift off again.
So why did I get good grades? I dunno, I'm smart and I wanted good grades so I actually tried. I have good reading comprehension. I ended up something like 14th in my High School class, but I could have been in the top 5 if I wanted to be. Getting anything beyond an A average was just not interesting to me, I'd rather read my books.
I don't know where this ties in, but the over-under is that I think if I was on stimulants during High School I would have paid much better attention, but I doubt my grades would have gone up all that much.
I’ve been on ADHD medication since a very young age. I scored very high on reading comprehension as well. However, I can not even read if I am off my medication.
I read a lot, but I only generally only read things that were interesting to me. If I wasn't interested, or if something was moving too slowly, I couldn't focus on it. Are you a very fast reader? I read faster than average, which I think helped. I definitely read faster than people talk, and I often wished my teachers could move more quickly when giving lectures. In a book, I can move at my own pace.
As long as I’m not tired I can read anything pretty quick. However I’m a very slow writer, so any advantages I have from my reading abilities were largely offset. I found it especially painful when my teachers didn’t teach from the text.
This articles comes to a comparable result - but by doing PET scans:
Methylphenidate Decreased the Amount of Glucose Needed by the Brain to Perform a Cognitive Task
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2291196/
> The biochemical mechanisms of action of MP have been well characterized: it increases extracellular levels of dopamine and norepinephrine by blocking the respective monoamine transporters[5]. It is unclear how these actions relate to its effects in attention and performance. Since dopamine and norepinephrine decrease background firing rates of neuronal cells increasing signal-to-noise ratio[6], [7], we hypothesized that in humans MP's dopaminergic and noradrenergic effects by decreasing non-task related activity should reduce the amount of glucose utilized by the brain while performing a cognitive task.
> There were no differences in money made (surrogate marker of performance) when the cognitive task was done with placebo ($47.60±4) versus when it was done with MP ($48.80±3).
My interpretation: All Ritalin does is *reducing* brain activity in non-task-related brain regions.
Interesting, and reminds me of TLP's description of the drug's effects in 'How to take Ritalin correctly':
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/08/how_to_take_ritalin_correctly.html
"Now you take amphetamines. The parts of your brain that you are using light up brighter, but the parts you aren't using go darker."
I have a few things that come to mind.
1) ADHD symptoms correlate to trauma symptoms
2) The study is far from representative (173 children (77% male, 86% Hispanic, 10% African–American) with ADHD between the ages of 7 and 12 years (M = 9.2, SD = 1.4))
3) The study doesn't evaluate socioeconomic factors
4) The study doesn't evaluate language factors
5) The study has a highly male and minority sample, that is (generally speaking) more prone to socioeconomic concerns, linguistic barriers, undiagnosed trauma that affect academic performance
For reason 5, I am not surprised that the medication used had a negligible impact in this study. My personal and professional academic and mental health experience all suggests that ADHD medications can move the needle in some cases, but are (generally speaking) misprescribed, overused, and deliver little return. When they are used appropriately, they can have a transformative impact. I'm still waiting for a great study that quantifies the appropriateness of ADHD prescriptions.
Here are some summaries and studies
https://sites.bu.edu/daniellerousseau/2017/12/11/adhd-the-misdiagnosis-hiding-a-larger-problem-in-children/ (see citations)
(removed paywall) https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fhealth%2Farchive%2F2014%2F07%2Fhow-childhood-trauma-could-be-mistaken-for-adhd%2F373328%2F (see cited studies)
1 Brown N, Brown S, Briggs R, et al. Associations Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and ADHD Diagnosis and Severity. Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Children’s Hospital at Montefiore. Accepted August 29, 2016.
https://www.academicpedsjnl.net/pb/assets/raw/Health%20Advance/journals/acap/ACAP_900_approved.pdf
Let's not forget that a "summer camp" type situation is very different from a school. I would expect students to spend most of their mental energy on more social "stuff". Learning names, affinities, making friends, maybe establishing some kind of social ladder. Usually these things are simply more important to a teenager than learning vocabulary, but they tend to stabilize over a school year, and not over a month of attention training.
> These students must be bottlenecked by some other resource.
I think the bottleneck for almost all school-related things student's interest in the task being measured. Most of the things kids are made to do in school don't have much bearing at all on the things they care about working on. Not-giving-a-shit can be a really strong component in the multi-factor equation leading to someone learning something (or not).
Most "good students" have had their motivation adequately hacked by teachers and parents who praise them for good performance, internalizing that extrinsic motivation. Most kids don't buy it. They'd much rather go build a fort, chat with their friends, etc.
Jumping through hoops to get gold stars is obviously a waste of time to many kids, so we have to find ways to allow them to pursue actually-interesting, actually-challenging, actually-useful work. Real, useful work creates opportunities for them to bolster reading/math skills to accomplish something that matters. It's the antidote to the not-giving-a-shit bottleneck.
For further exploration of this issue check out ASDE: https://www.self-directed.org/sde/
These scores are incredibly low, especially given that the tests were multiple-choice questions with only four choices and that kids with IQ below 80 were excluded from the study. To get only 50% correct on the subject area on average, it seems like a significant fraction of the class was guessing no better than chance both before and after the intervention. (If 1/3 of the class got perfect scores, the other 2/3 did no better than chance in the post-test for the subject areas test.)
The study mentions that the test-givers read the questions aloud because they weren't confident the students were literate in English; but I don't think it mentioned anything they did to offset any lack of confidence that the students were verbally fluent in English.
Also note, the decision to test students by reading questions allowed (1) is a very unusual test-giving procedure, and (2) greatly amplifies the effects of concentration relative to learning in the results. And the combination of those two facts seems like evidence to me that that this experiment was trying to obtain the headline result it obtained. i.e. "medication doesn't help students learn."
Significant lack of fluency in English would also explain why the improvement on vocabulary was much better than the improvement in the subject areas (i.e. science and social studies). It's way easier to learn vocabulary in a language that you barely understand than it is to follow a history lesson in that language. (And is most of what you do in a learning-a-second-language class.)
The pre-test baseline of students scoring 40% on average on a multiple choice test of grade-appropriate vocabulary with only four choices also seems like pretty significant evidence that a sizeable percent of the students were not fluent in English. (That's what would happen if 20% of the class answered perfectly and the other 80% answered no better than chance, which is equivalent to saying that the class as a whole was able to recognize the correct answer [though not necessarily supply it] 20% of the time and randomly guessing the other 80% of the time! Recognizing the definition of only 1/5th of grade-appropriate vocabulary is not fluency when the grades in question are kindergarten through fourth grade.)
If you start with the assumption many of the students weren't fluent in English, "Maybe classroom instruction is redundant? That is, teachers say everything a few times, so if you miss it once, it doesn’t matter?" becomes a much more plausible explanation. For many of the kids it didn't matter because they weren't going to understand it no matter how many times they heard it. And for the rest, it didn't matter because they understood it the first time.
But my default interpretation of this study would be:
A third of the students were fluent in English. In the post-test, they knew all the answers to both the vocab tests and the subject area tests, so no impact of learning could be detected in them, only effects of concentration.
A third of the students knew enough English to understand English-to-English definitions. In the post-test, they knew all of the answers to the vocab tests, and guessed randomly on the subject tests, so no impact of learning could be detected in them, only effects of concentration during the vocab test.
A third of the students didn't know enough English to be able to learn English-to-English definitions, so they guessed randomly on all the questions, and the post-tests were not able to detect evidence of either concentration or learning in them.
No matter how real and significant an effect is, it is possible to design a study that is sufficiently bad that it can fail to find the effect. I suspect this is much more common than studies finding an effect that isn't real because it's much easier to do by accident. But I've rarely encountered an example full of nice round numbers that reeks of experimenters trying to hack a no-effect result as strongly as this one does to me.
Since this specifically mentioned these were Hispanic kids, I did wonder if they were all (or a majority) English As A Second Language.
That would explain part of the difference in results if they're not fluent in English and getting tested on classes taught in English.
I think the prescriptions for ADHD to kids are more about "get them to sit down and be quiet in class" more than anything else. Some kids really have it very bad, with muscular spasms, facial tics, and involuntary noises so they do need something. But if it's "Johnny fidgets and talks and distracts the other kids in class", it's not so much about learning or even paying attention; I've daydreamed in class while sitting there quietly and looking as if I'm paying attention.
A lot of this is because teachers have to wrangle a class full of kids and it's easier to medicate the distracted ones into good behaviour. If they then do well on tests, that looks like "the medication is helping them learn". As everyone is pointing out, learning and paying attention is not the same thing as 'can finally focus and concentrate long enough to do a test'.
It is too bad that the authors did not design the experiment (or at least analyze the data) with an interaction for IQ. It would be interesting to see whether it was possible to tease apart whether the medicine had a differential effect for smarter children, which would be a reasonable a priori hypothesis.
Does learning plateau or are exams just bad at capturing learning beyond a certain point?
I don't know anything about surgery, but I'm reasonably confident that an experienced surgeon knows a lot more than an inexperienced surgeon. But the things he knows are difficult to test on a written exam, he probably knows things like "What to do if things start going wrong in this particular way", and "How to pick up the subtle signs that you might need to do X rather than Y in this procedure" and "Here's the exact amount of pressure and the correct angle that you need to cleanly cut this thing under these conditions". These things are incredibly important but won't make it into a textbook. Meanwhile he's probably slowly forgetting all sorts of stuff that was in his textbook but is irrelevant in practice.
I've been a private tutor/classroom instructor for 12 years. My own experience suggests the following things:
- Ability to concentrate has a substantial effect on test performance regardless of the level of understanding of the material, so we should expect ADHD medication to improve test performance EVEN IF they did not learn more in a classroom experience
- I have taught "large" classes (20-30 students), small classes (3-5 students) and of course 1 on 1 tutoring. In my experience ~15-50% of students do not learn very much in classes larger than ~4-5. The issue in my experience is you need back and forth to make sure they're getting it. In a class of 4 there are still tons of opportunities for 1 on 1 attention. Not so in a class of 20-30. My hunch is that the classroom is having no effect for this reason.
If Concerta helped (significantly) with test scores, then most college kids would be taking it. I doubt kids on Concerta are really paying attention more. Staring at the teacher, does not necessarily translate to paying attention.
When you consider that Concerta can lead to wild swings in appetite, sleep disruptions, and delays or reductions in growth and development, the idea of putting a child on Concerta for such minimal gain is absurd.
"These students must be bottlenecked by some other resource."
Yes, and it's something psychiatry alone can never solve: desire.
Fascinating, but, the question not asked is why school in the first place?
From Monty Roberts, an internationally famous horse trainer and the first "Horse Whisperer,": As I have often said, there is no teaching, only learning. If you are a teacher, you have to create an environment in which your student can learn. You can't take knowledge and push it into a brain. The brain has to pull it in.
I don't follow. How do we know Ritalin doesn't improve learning? In my classes I can only measure student performance by tests and assignments; if those are better, how do we know learning isn't? Do they give em another test while not on Ritalin? Considering it 4 my ADD kid, but not if it doesn't really help.
Just as a personal experience addy doesn't really make a difference to me for HS style activities, even ones I'm bad at like writing. Those tasks just don't seem very attention limited.
OTOH trying to keep a math proof of an unsolved question in my mind is definitely helped.
Anecdotally when I got on meds in university my grades improved - in units where a self-guided assignment made up most of the grade.
I did the same in most exams, which was already okay. Maybe a tiny bit better for stuff I wasn't super interested in. But the single biggest thing I got out of it was reducing complex assignments from this incredibly emotionally fraught ordeal to manageable.
I guess it also helps with random things like not losing count of things, but that's a pretty niche case.
I have two sons that are eighteen months apart and rising 3rd and 2nd graders. They are both high functioning ASD and ADHD but present very differently. My older son has serious non compliance behavior issues and went on amphetamines early in his 2nd grade year. It really did nothing for him which wasn't a huge surprise to me because I truly see his behavior as substantially a maturity/emotional issue rather than impulsive disruption. He has no desire to appease adults and simply gets tired of things when they are no longer novel. We took him off the medication.
My younger son is definitely more of a "good boy" that wants to do well in school but cannot control his hyperactivity. He doesn't pay attention to the rules, etc. and then gets upset when he does something wrong. I actually think he would be a great candidate for amphetamine type medication as his inability to pay attention is really impacting what he gets out of school, sports, etc. My biggest reservation is really the philosophical objection to giving a seven year old boy drugs to make them more compliant for an institution and better participation in organized activities and balancing the reality that he needs help.
I realize this is mostly venting with little to the specific discussion but it seemed somewhat appropriate and this comment section is much better versed in this area than my own intuition.
Not to tell you how to parent, but you might wanna consider what other difficulties the younger one has. If he can't pay attention to formal rules, chances are he can't pay attention to informal social rules either. How's he doing socially? Does he have friends? Is he well liked?
For me personally, the single biggest impact earlier medication could have had for me is improving my social skills. I went several years with zero peers that I considered my friend, and no one was deliberately ostracising me (I think), I was purely just really bad at making friends because I couldn't pay attention and constantly slighted people without noticing.
7 is probably a bit young, but high school/middle school is already bad enough without being unable to make friends. So I'd keep that in mind.
(Amphetamines might also make the kid too irritable to make friends, which is something else to consider! Maybe try starting in summer if you go that route)
He actually does ok with peers, he is very sweet/nice and funny but can be a little intense with trying to be funny so some kids aren't quite sure what to make of him. He has friends although I don't know how deep the relationships are.
Funny timing on your comment. We had his check in yesterday and he was prescribed 5mg of time release that we might try over the summer when he has an organized activity like hockey to see how it works for him. I'm very conflicted about doing this because it feels very unnatural but he also needs help. We'll see.
Interestingly, golf is one sport where this sort of ‘plateau effect’ is evident for all skill levels. A common comment from golfers of every skill level is ‘forgetting how to play’ and/or having to ‘relearn’ some aspect of the game. Greats like Jack Nicklaus and Bobby Jones to the worst hackers comment on this frustration. I expect that non-golfers just assume that once you master the game (or some aspect of the game) you’ll always ‘have it’, like riding a bike. But it doesn’t work that way. Could it be a brain limitation, where the various ‘swing thoughts’ can’t be properly categorized and then written into permanent memory?
There is a developing tolerance problem with Ritalin and probably the three weeks results can't be extrapolated long-term.
I think two things are going on here.
The first is approaching ability caps.
The closer you are to your ability cap, the harder it is to progress. As people approach their personal ability cap, they will have an increasingly more difficult time getting higher, resulting in progressively smaller gains. The better you are, the harder it becomes to progress even higher - something we see in a lot of things in technology as well. I suspect this is because you learn the easiest things, then have to work harder to learn increasingly harder things, and while it is not always the case that you learn all the easiest things first, it is common that you will master more easier things than harder things.
This is why the SAT has questions of different ability levels, and you'll find that the top students miss far more hard questions than they do easy ones, and some people may well miss nothing BUT the hardest ones.
I think, however, there is a secondary problem here, which is that we are measuring against a standard of perfection, when in reality ability levels don't really work that way.
Say we took some artists and had them draw stuff. They might screw up a few easier things but do things that are way harder than other artists do. These things might not be on the "test", but are more advanced skills.
As such, what we are really measuring with these things where we are measuring against a fixed, perfect data set may not be "overall skill level" but "error rate".
I have noticed that some people seem to innately have higher error rates than other people - they simply make more mistakes. I am not sure if this applies to every task, or just some limited subset of tasks, but no amount of repetition will ever cause them to be perfect at a task. While this seems like it might be related to intelligence, I'm not sure that it is; some intelligent people seem to have issues with this as well.
Everyone makes typos no matter how skilled a typist they are, for instance; I make far fewer typos than most amateur typists and type at a very, very high rate of speed, but I still make typos.
I have the suspicion that if you are measuring against some standard of perfection, at some point this innate error rate will dominate over all other factors.
I think it would be interesting to see if these medications cause people to "plateau" in their agility earlier, and/or if it lowers innate error rate on random other tasks.