Interesting Thoughts

Learning is experience. Everything else is just information. -- Albert Einstein

The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth. -- Norman Cousins

What doctors and teachers call hyperactivity can also be called exuberance. Exuberance is characterized by high energy and an intense interest and curiosity in the world. -- Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D.

Imagination is more important than knowledge, for while knowledge points to all there is, imagination points to all there will be. -- Albert Einstein

The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself -- but that force is not independent of the belief system, which can translate expectations into physiological change. -- Frank Lawlis, Ph. D

In the early formative years, play is almost synonymous with life. It is second only to being nourished, protected and loved. It is a basic ingredient of physical, intellectual, social and emotional growth. -- Ashley Montague

“Caution: Children Not At Play.” -- From the American Heart Association

Exercise is really for the brain, not the body. It affects mood, vitality, alertness and feelings of well-being. -- John J. Ratey, MD, Harvard Medical School

Every child has inside him an aching void for excitement and if we don’t fill it with something which is exciting and interesting and good for him, he will fill it with something which is exciting and interesting and which isn’t good for him. -- Theodore Roosevelt

It surprises me how our culture can destroy curiosity in the most curious of all animals – human beings. -- Paul MacLean

ADHD is not like a medical disease, in that it is not something your child “has” but a description of a set of behaviors the child does. -- Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D.

I oppose the typical shotgun approach to medical treatment for ADD, in which one drug is supposed to cure all symptoms. -- Frank Lawliss, Ph.D.

I will not tell kids Attention Deficit Disorder is “continual and lifelong.” To me, this contributes to the problem, not the solution… Words structure our reality, and these words corrode on a subconscious level. -- Lucy Jo Palladino, Ph.D.

The power to reshape the world, lies in the subconscious mind. -- William James

Creativity requires goofing off. Goofing off is play, experimentation, trying out new ideas, and adjusting them to see what fits, what works, and what is more fun. -- Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D.

ADD is not a Ritalin deficiency disease. -- Thom Hartmann

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness….the moment one commits oneself, then providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have happened. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We never know how high we are Till we are called to rise And then, if we are true to plan Our statures touch the skies. -- Emily Dickinson

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill conviction, but to destroy the capacity to form any. -- Hanna Arendt

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when is old, he will not depart from it. -- Proverbs 22:6

And, since the standardized curriculum has implicit in it a concept of normalcy, if students are not performing well it’s obviously because they – not their teachers or their schools, but they – are not normal. -- Thom Hartmann

Children with AD/HD are often socially and academically isolated. The school environment conspires in this by sending them to separate special classes and labeling them as “disordered” and “deficient.” Who wants to have a friend who is disordered? Not your average 10 years old child… -- Jimmy Rhee, SmartCoach Founder

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. -- Sir William Haley

Exercise is reliable, effective for most people, and has few side effects…I often recommend it be tried first before moving on to stronger therapies such as medication. -- John Ratey, MD, Harvard Medical School

Highly successful people thought their learning disabilities or ADD were a gift and not a disease. -- Thom Hartmann

One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. -- Henry Miller

The important concept for people with ADD to grasp, however, is that the concept of “normal” is not an absolute. It shifts like the sands of the desert, nearly always in ways which serve the institutions of power in society. -- Thom Hartmann

Many times differences evolve to solve problems that are caused by the “normal” way of doing things….children with ADHD have a different way of doing things that will solve problems that cannot be solved by doing things in the normal way. -- Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D.

When is a “difference” a “disease?” -- Thom Hartmann

Differences do not mean disorders. -- Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D.

He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as diseases, is insane. It is an insanity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims. -- James Tyler Kent, Physician.