ADD World

A little while back I went to an NBA game for the first time in forever. I got a free ticket for giving blood and predictably and ironically my free ticket was in the nosebleed seats. But the Oakland arena is a pretty good place to see a game from any seat in the house and we had a decent time. Except for one thing. There was so much going on in terms of auxiliary entertainment that it was hard to pay attention to the game.

Every few minutes LCD lights that circle the upper balcony would have some ad or pyrotechnic-like display. There were dancers. There were giveaways where employees threw stuff into the stands. There were contests. The hip-hop DJ kept pumping out tunes during every break. It was so distracting that I could hardly pay attention to the court, which is what I came to see in the first place. When I watch a game, I like to follow the flow of momentum, the subtle changes that define which team is going to eventually win. All the hoopla got in the way. I felt anxious as a result.

Most fans don’t respond negatively to multiple stimuli. They like all the distractions. Otherwise they get bored. All the hoopla is designed for them. The team simply assumes that most everyone has attention deficit disorder. Maybe they are right.

I don’t respond well to snippets of information flashed by me rapid fire. I’m old school. Give me one thing to ponder that’s worth pondering over and I’m as happy as a clam. One book with a lot of depth. One musical score. One differential equation. One thing at a time please.

I grew up in a throwback kind of environment. Three days a week, I’d go to Hebrew school and ponder over the comments of Rashi, an 11th century biblical scholar. It was a struggle. The idea beaten into me – literally beaten; those rabbis had a mean streak – was that struggling through a text written by a genius had profound rewards. I still believe in that idea.

But American culture is not based on that idea. And with the movement away from reading and toward visual entertainment, how most Americans process information is quite different than how I approach the world.

I first became aware of the ADD approach to delivering information when I babysat for my cousin. Sometimes we would watch Sesame Street, his favorite show. To my eyes, there appeared to be no flow to the show at all, just random pieces of information stitched together. I was 13. I’d never seen Sesame Street before. It seemed like a mess to me. I actually got kind of dizzy watching it and not in a good way. But my views of Sesame Street are clearly outside the mainstream; it remains one of the most popular children shows on TV and regularly receives awards for its educational value.

We process information much differently than we did 50 years ago. I’m not particularly good at handling disparate visual pieces of information coming at me at a rapid clip, but I notice that people younger than me are quite skillful at it. They can’t sit down and struggle through one text for hours on end like I can, but they sure can synthesize snippets without getting dizzy. They even enjoy it. It’s how they like to receive information.

The difference in how I process information and how most anyone else does was a key reason why I had such a hard time as a teacher. I wanted students to take one thing at a time and study it in detail exhaustively, learn its subtleties and beauty. For them, this was a foreign concept. They didn’t do it in high school. No one else was asking them to do it in college either. My approach to learning was off the charts. And unlike the rabbis I learned from, I couldn’t lift my students up by the collar and slap them across the face until they understood. That would have been considered a little inappropriate.

As a society, we’ve moved much more in a direction of keeping the information flow fast and shallow. All you have to do is look at newspapers and television news programs of 30 years ago to understand how we’ve assumed that everyone has ADD. It’s true in college texts as well. I once asked the author of a popular textbook in my field why he had taken his original version and so radically transformed it in a new edition – more pictures and less text with simpler language – and he just smiled at me. No one was buying the old one anymore, he said. They found it too difficult.

In a dreary classroom somewhere, there is no doubt right now a group of Jewish boys struggling over Rashi in Hebrew. And when they screw up or when the rabbi is in a bad mood, they get slapped silly. I’m sure it still goes on. But its connection to how the rest of America learns and processes information is even more out of touch than it was when I was growing up.