I'm not a big drug guy, don't even take Tylenol, but I thought the point of drugging these kids was to make them mellow and easier for the teachers to "manage"
That may in fact be the goal, but the mechanism is the opposite of what one might expect. The stimulants are believed to act on a very primitive and vital system in the brain that's called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS, among
many other functions that are essential to life, acts as a bridge between sensory input and states of wakefulness and attentiveness. It gets our attention when its needed.
The RAS is the reason why alarm clocks wake us up, why cockpit annunciators get our attention, why we may jump when we hear a loud noise, why we curse and look at the speedometer when we see a cop's flashing lights in the rear-view mirror, and so forth. It detects from sensory input that something is happening that requires our immediate attention, so it places us in an attentive state.
What the stimulant drugs do is maintain that attentive state even when the situation at hand may not require or warrant it. In the case of school children, it keeps them paying attention even when the subject matter is as boring as hell to them, when they are preoccupied with other concerns or problems, or when they already grasp the content but are forced to sit through it again and again until the rest of the class understands it. It focuses their attention; and in the process the signs of boredom like fidgeting and so forth recede.
There was no such thing as ADD / ADHD when I was a kid. It hadn't been invented yet. But I know that I was bored as hell for most of third-grade math because I'd already memorized the "times tables," but I still had to sit through interminable drills by Mrs. Maresca until the rest of the class understood them.
She could tell my mind was wandering far from the classroom and that I was thinking about anything other than her interminable droning. Sometimes I'd be doodling, other times making paper airplanes, and still other times literally falling asleep. So she'd trigger my RAS by rapping her yardstick on the desk and yelling my first and last names. Once she got my attention, she'd ask me a multiplication question, which I would immediately answer correctly.
It really ****ed her off.
Nowadays I'd probably be diagnosed with ADD and medicated. But the reality is that I was just bored because I already knew the times tables and was tired of listening to them being repeated every day.
Rich
