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Исполнительная дисфункция
I’m super excited to pick your brains, Winford, and to hear about the vast amount of new research you’ve done that is going to help people with ADHD, especially regarding the more challenging aspects of the condition.
Before we get into the meat of the episode, I ask all my guests to tell me an item that most represents ADHD in their life. I’m going to reveal yours now, under this cloth.
Dedication
Not many went flying, as I thought. It is a load of Post-it notes. That is embarrassing – desperate, even. Now, Winford, what role have ADHD and dyslexia played in your life?
They entered my radar because my oldest daughter – I have four children – absolutely struggled at school. She had the same teachers and the same nurturing and support as my other three children. She actually seemed very intelligent, but it wasn’t long before the teacher said she couldn’t read and wasn’t learning. Before long, her younger sister had overtaken her. This was quite a few decades ago, and of course, the understanding of ADHD and dyslexia wasn’t developed then. I had to struggle to find specialists for her. Eventually, I found some, and the best help they could give her at that time was to say she had to learn to live with her problems. I found a specialist in New York – he was eccentric but a wonderfully bright guy. I flew her to New York, and he was doing some good work, but there was no published research. So, I flew his clinic to one of my schools – Lamington Spa Private School – and we did a study. I started to learn about the neuroscience of what he was doing. He didn’t want to work with me because I wasn’t a medic, but about a second after he told me his clue – which was priceless – he taught me that the cerebellum is probably linked to the root cause of all of the symptoms. My next job was to look for a professor who specialized in the cerebellum. Two names came up quickly: Professor Jeremy Scharman at Harvard Medical School – with whom I’ve had several meetings – and Professor Rod Nicholson at Sheffield University, who became my mentor. This was 25 years ago. Alex, he is my mentor to this day; in fact, he’s coming to see me again tomorrow because he started teaching the world that the cerebellum is the root cause of learning issues. By the way, my daughter now reads, writes, and concentrates exceptionally well. You’ve seen the inadequacies of dyslexia and ADHD, and how negatively they affect someone’s life.
What do you think are the long-term consequences of these inadequacies on someone’s self-esteem?
It is impossible to measure. I don’t blame teachers – in fact, I’m a big fan of them. The education system revolves around great teaching, and in the Western world, we are so blessed to have fantastic teachers who are capable, passionate, and enthusiastic. But what doesn’t happen is that we address the neurological limitations. If someone doesn’t have the ability to take in information visually or auditorily, they won’t learn in the standard way. We know that when we jump to what happens after school, we learn about billionaires and successful entrepreneurs – they might not read much, but they are incredibly clever. Yet, for every one of those, there are probably a hundred who underachieve. Some sadly end up in prison, some tragically commit suicide, and many suffer huge mental health issues because living in a modern world that makes concentration difficult is extremely stressful. Mental health issues today are so under-resourced; people often wait for years for a diagnosis, and what good is a diagnosis if it doesn’t lead you a step closer to solving the problem?
You mentioned the cerebellum. I feel the cerebellum is going to be a big part of this episode. Where does the cerebellum fit into the conversation of ADHD? What exactly is it, and how important is it in understanding neurodiverse conditions? Can we delve into some neuroscience?
The cerebellum is a bit like a room full of computer coders. All the things we do repeatedly need to become automatized so that they become effortless – even quite complex tasks, like social skills. For instance, driving a car, moving your eyes to read, or turning sound waves from your ears into comprehensible thoughts are processes that either become fully automatized or not. If your skills are fully automatized, life is easy and fun. But for those with learning issues, often they are much brighter than average yet suffer limitations in developing key skills. That is what the cerebellum does. We can go into more depth later about why this happens and what you can do about it. For example, if the part of the cerebellum responsible for eye movement isn’t fully developed, your eyes may be jumpy when you try to read. Reading becomes very hard work. In a school situation, teachers assume you can’t read or that you aren’t very bright, even though the opposite is often true – it’s simply a skill that hasn’t been fully developed because the "coder" in the cerebellum responsible for those fine motor skills has not finished its job. As a result, your eyes might sometimes move backwards instead of forwards, or jump around. This forces your thinking brain to work extra hard to unscramble the words. Someone who struggles with reading may work a hundred times harder than others to process the same text. Their thinking brain becomes busy controlling eye movement, leaving little capacity for other functions, which can lead to feelings of being thick, stupid, or lazy – when in fact, they are quite the opposite. The impact on self-esteem is enormous. My own daughter witnessed her younger sister reading effortlessly, getting good marks, being chosen for school teams, and acing her spellings, while she struggled. That early blow to self-esteem is profoundly damaging.
What do you think the long-term mental health costs are for someone who sees others gliding by with ease?
Parents have a huge impact, as do teachers. If a teacher has a class of 30 and three or four children struggle with reading, there is simply not enough time to help each child develop coping strategies. That child gets left behind, and if you fall behind at an early age, it’s likely you’ll underachieve for the rest of your life. By the time puberty hits, the child may start to believe that life holds no hope, that they are stupid and thick – a belief that is psychologically damaging. I have had the privilege of working with many adults, showing them that it is possible to correct eye-tracking issues at any age. I once gave a talk in Southampton, and after the session, a woman approached me at age 82, saying she wanted to read and write before she died. I cautioned her that the exercise might be risky, but she insisted. Three months later, she appeared on Breakfast Television displaying the first letters she had ever written. It was life-changing. Although she had been in mental institutions during her life, two years later she was reading and writing in three languages. This shows that early interventions have an enormous impact on self-esteem, skills, and life outcomes.
How does the cerebellum appear differently in a neurotypical compared to a neurodiverse person?
A neurotypical person usually exhibits fairly even development across different parts of the cerebellum. They are likely to be good at music, art, expressing feelings, sports – in general, well-rounded. In neurodiverse individuals, however, there is an eccentricity: they might be exceptionally good at some things while falling behind in others. The world, especially the school system, tends to focus on negatives. As Ned Hell says, if you have a Ferrari engine, you need all the parts that make a Ferrari. If a child has eccentricities and does not exhibit the stereotypical “normal” traits, they may feel broken. Yet, it is often quite easy to see their creativity, their outside-the-box thinking, and their determination. In my view, the ability to make connections in unique ways is true intelligence.
At some point, we might discuss where that creativity comes from. Almost every example of neurodiversity can be traced back to very early childhood trauma – whether in the womb, at birth, or soon after. Sometimes, neglect or poor nurturing plays a role. Very often, however, it is an early incident or an emotional experience of the mother that causes trauma. Trauma at such an early stage can stunt the development of the cerebellum. Think of the cerebellum as a room full of computer coders, each with a different role. If a child is brilliant at music, the coder responsible for auditory processing is highly capable. If a child excels at math, then the logic-related coders are very efficient. But trauma can stunt the development of some parts, leading to lower density of gray matter in those regions. This may force the brain to focus on other areas that were urgently needed at the time. Trauma can also force the development of a degree of genius; if a young child must solve problems that the brain isn’t programmed for, they begin thinking outside the box. However, it may also trigger sensitivities or PTSD-like symptoms, related to other parts of the brain such as the amygdala.
I just want to pick up on something you mentioned earlier – early trauma, even in the womb. What kind of behavior causes trauma that early on? Is it something the parents do?
Not at all. Imagine a mother who, for instance, is ill or experiences the murder of her father while pregnant. The resulting stress transfers to the baby. The trauma might occur due to complications at birth, such as a cord around the neck or an emergency cesarean. A baby’s brain, programmed to deal with a typical environment, is unprepared for such incidents. These events, though sometimes not labeled as trauma by some, are adverse experiences that affect neurological development.
Now, what do we know about the scientific unknowns surrounding the cerebellum, dyslexia, and ADHD? What remains mysterious in the scientific community?
We don’t know what we don’t know. There is an amazing amount of neuroscience that is taking decades to reach the people who could apply it usefully. My job is to unearth this neuroscience. I see neuroscientists who are brilliant at assembling pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, yet they struggle to see the complete picture. Until you put the pieces together, you don’t understand the problem, assess it, or find a solution. For the last 25 years, I have been assembling these jigsaws from different neuroscientists. It wasn’t long before a brilliant picture emerged. I believe that if neuroscience were fully adopted and delivered to those in need, at least 80% of what we describe as neurodiverse symptoms could be addressed very effectively and permanently. I get excited when I meet people with ADHD symptoms because they are interesting. If they survive a negative school experience, they often become the creative, out-of-the-box thinkers in the workplace. Employers appreciate someone who solves problems in unique ways, even if teachers struggle with such unconventional approaches.
How important is the cerebellum’s role in the ADHD brain, and what can we do to change it?
There are two parts to your question. First, what is the cerebellum? It is located near the brainstem and constitutes only about 10% of the brain’s volume. For many years, it was thought to be only involved in balance and the coordination of gross motor skills. However, Professor Scharman at Harvard University noted that while it is small, it contains nearly 75% of all our brain cells. It is the brain within the brain, masterminding the connections that make life easier. The cerebellum develops rapidly up to about the age of seven; during this time, those “computer coders” are busy learning to talk, crawl, walk, develop social skills, interact with people, and play sports. For example, when learning to ride a bike, you watch others, you try, and you fall off repeatedly while your cerebellum is busy processing and debugging the actions until, eventually, riding becomes effortless.
Now, what can someone do to train the cerebellum?
When my daughter attempted to take her life, I asked Professor Nicholson in Sheffield what could be done. He admitted that no one had ever successfully done it unless drugs were involved – which I did not want for her. I was determined to find a natural way to develop the cerebellum permanently. His hunch was that doing any exercise repetitively, especially those that stimulate the vestibular system (our balance organ), could help. For example, standing on one leg, closing your eyes, and tilting your head to one side challenges both balance and cerebellar function. I later developed programs involving hundreds of people with different brains; each needed personalized ways of stimulating their cerebellum. The key is to combine challenging vestibular stimulation (spinning, jumping, lateral movements) with activities that force the cerebellum to work outside of its automatic functions. For instance, standing on one leg with eyes closed requires intense concentration and balance. In my experience, consistent practice – around 10 minutes a day for about 90 days – can transform the cerebellum permanently. Once developed, the skills become automatic, freeing up space in the thinking brain, improving organization, emotional control, and decision-making.
How often must these exercises be done and over what time frame would you expect to see a difference?
Every person is different. Different parts of the cerebellum develop at different rates, so the stimulation must be enough to notice improvements without causing discomfort. Each program has to be individualized and adjusted daily to keep the cerebellum optimally stimulated, thereby increasing gray matter density. Nature published an article a few years ago showing that combining vestibular stimulation with cerebellum-challenging exercises multiplies stem cells in the cerebellum and hippocampus – the two key junctions for learning. The combined exercises create neuroplasticity, which helps form new, important connections in this vital part of the brain.
Have you noticed a connection between the cerebellum and intelligence?
The world has misunderstood intelligence for too long. I once started an examination board because I realized the system measured mere regurgitation rather than true intelligence. Children who perform well in exams often do poorly in life because they aren’t creative; whereas many with neurodiversity become the creative problem-solvers we need. Our education system focuses on regurgitation rather than the ability to make unique connections – the true sign of intelligence. In my experience, when children with ADHD learn to channel their creativity and overcome their neurological limitations, they can excel in ways that traditional education never measures.
What tests have you used to understand the cerebellum and ADHD?
We have tested over 50,000 people using various measures such as auditory and visual working memory, processing speed, reaction time, and response time. Psychologists and neuroscientists around the world use these measures. We have integrated these into game-like tests that reliably reveal someone’s strengths and limitations. Neurological tests can categorically show whether reading or concentration difficulties have a physical basis. Remember, the processing speed when a skill is automated in the cortex is about 100,000 times faster than when your thinking brain has to compensate.
Some people still dismiss ADHD as a fad, but neurological evidence is undeniable. Children who struggle are not choosing to behave a certain way; they are wired to do so. Consider a child with poor auditory processing: after 10 minutes in class, they work far harder than their peers. Their behavior is not a choice but a consequence of limited mental capacity.
Looking ahead, if budget and resources were unlimited, what research on the cerebellum would you pursue?
I’m beginning to work with a very famous UK university that wants to perform fMRI studies to show what happens in the mind of a child or adult with ADHD and then demonstrate how targeted interventions can fundamentally calm and organize the brain. With unlimited resources, research could transform neurological processing, making motions calmer and more structured.
I dream of a world where we view neurodiversity not as a disorder but as a sign of vast potential. Instead of focusing on negatives, we should celebrate the creativity and unique problem-solving abilities of those with ADHD. Imagine if we replaced the term “ADHD” with “vast potential” – a phrase that acknowledges the brilliance within. It is tragic that our current education system, which was designed decades ago, labels these traits negatively. I believe that if we truly understood the neuroscience, we would treat neurodiversity with respect and nurture it.
Can an injured cerebellum cause ADHD?
Yes, injury to the cerebellum—such as from a road traffic accident, sporting injury, or other head trauma—can produce traits associated with ADHD. The brain develops in layers, and if a brick is missing, you can often repair the gap. The brain’s neuroplasticity allows it to reassign functions to other areas, which is why rehabilitation is possible. We are currently working with Medicare Part B in America to fund programs that help seniors recover balance, memory, and overall cognition. Recovery is possible, although it may not be perfect.
What about your signature “ADHD item” – the Post-it notes?
I use Post-it notes because my brain is like an overfilled desk. When ideas flood in, I scribble them down to free up space in my thinking brain. At the end of the week, when the phone stops ringing, I go through the notes – though half are illegible, they served their purpose at the time. In contrast, organized people like accountants or lawyers compile their ideas systematically in notebooks or action lists. I have tried using notebooks and electronic calendars, but often the notes get forgotten. I now use a huge whiteboard to capture my ideas; it’s not perfect, but it’s far better than a forgotten notebook. My housekeeper even collects stray Post-its to ensure I don’t accidentally throw them away. I would estimate that less than half of the Post-it ideas actually get actioned. Yet, even those discarded ideas reflect a mind overwhelmed by possibilities.
I'm super excited Winford to pick your brains and to hear about the vast amount of new research that you've done that are going to help people with ADHD with perhaps the more of the slightly challenging aspects of the condition
before we get into the meat of the episode I ask all my guests to tell ADHD item reveal me an item that most represents ADHD in their life and I'm going to reveal yours now under this cloth
okay not many went flying as I thought it's um a load of Post-it notes yes yeah so that's embarrassing desperate to tell us that AR you we we we'll save it but
Winford what role has ADHD and dyslexia What role has ADHD and Dyslexia played in your life? played in your life
it came on my radar because my oldest daughter I've got four children the oldest one absolutely struggled at school and she had the same teachers as my other three children she had the same nurturing and same support she actually seemed very intelligent but it wasn't long before the teacher was saying she can't read she's not learning and it wasn't long before her her younger sister had overtaken her so this was quite a few decades ago and of course the understanding about ADHD and Lexia just wasn't developed then so I had to struggle to find Specialists for her and eventually I found some Specialists and the best help they could give her at that time was to say she's got to learn to live with her [Music] problems um I found a a specialist in New York that was that was quite eccentric but a wonderfully bright guy I flew her to New York and he had he was doing some good work but there was no published research so I flew his Clinic to one of my schools in lamington Spa private school and we did a study so I started to learn about the Neuroscience of what he was doing he didn't want to work with me because I'm not a a medic um but about a second after he told me that I decided I had to do the research for myself the clue that he gave me which was priceless and I'll always be grateful to him for he taught me that the sarabella is probably linked to the root cause of all of the symptoms so my next job was to look for a professor who specialized in the cerebellum well there was two that came up quickly one was Professor Jeremy scharman at Harvard Medical School and I've had several meetings with him and learned such a lot from him but there was a professor then at Sheffield university called Professor Rod Nicholson he became my mentor this was 25 years ago Alex he's my mentor to this day in fact he's coming to see me again tomorrow because he he started teaching the world specifically that the sarabellum was the root cause of learning issues so that was the the Gen by the way my daughter reads and writes and and concentrates and she's got an amazing brain to this day
so you've you've seen the um inadequacies of Dyslexia and ADHD and and how much a negative effect that can have on someone's life
absolutely
what do you think are the long-term consequences or costs on The affect of the Dyslexia and ADHD inadequacies on someone’s life someone's self-esteem of those inadequacies at an early age
oh it it it's impossible to measure I I don't blame teachers in fact I'm a big fan of teachers as you can imagine uh but the education system revolves around creating great teaching and we in the western world are so blessed having fantastic teachers they're capable they're passionate they're enthusiastic they work long hours and so on but what doesn't happen is that we address at all the neurological limitations if someone hasn't got the ability to take in information visually or auditorally then they're not going to learn in the standard way now we know if we jump to what happens after school we we we we learn about billionaires and so many successful entrepreneurs they don't read very much but boy are they clever but for every one of those there's probably another hundred that underachieve some sadly end up in prison some tragically commit suicide some have huge amounts of mental health issues because the stress of living in a modern world where you don't find concentration easy where you're not naturally a complete a finisher where naturally you don't read very much and all of the other negative symptoms that is so harmful you know mental health issues today is so under under resourced and so you know we hear of of people waiting for years to have just a diagnosis and what good is a diagnosis doesn't actually lead you a step closer to solving the problem
you mentioned the cerebellum ear and I feel like the cerebellum is going to be a big part of What exactly is the cerebellum? this episode absolutely where does the cerebelum fit into the conversation of ADHD what exactly is it and how important is it in the understanding of neurodiverse conditions can we go into the bit of Neuroscience
yeah for sure go for it so the cerebelum is a bit like a room full of computer coders all the things we do in life if we do them repeatedly need to become automatized so that they become effortless even quite complex things like social skills you know we you're you're asking me questions now and I'm thinking what's relevant to Alex's audience so in the background is a social scale happening what is pertinent for me to bring out in words and language that's relevant to to the audience that Alex got as his followers driving a car is a scale moving your eyes so you can read turning sound waves that go into your ears into thoughts that you comprehend is a process and all of those are either fully automatized or not so if you've got skills that fully automatize do you know what life is easy it's such a lot of fun because everything is easy but for those with learning issues often often they're very much brighter than average but along with that often comes a limitation in the development of some key skills and that's what the cerebellum does we can go into it deeper later if you want about why it happens and what you can do about it but if part of the cbol Bellum responsible say for for IM movement if that isn't fully developed your eyes are going to always be a bit jumpy when you're trying to read so reading becomes very hard work now in a school situation teachers assume you can't read you can't be very bright and that's often the very opposite of the truth it's simply a skill that hasn't been fully developed because the bit the coder in the cerebellum that's responsible for those F motor skills has not finished off the job so you've got jumpy eye movements so your eyes are sometimes going backwards instead of forwards sometimes up instead of straight along the line so for some the words move for some they jump words but it means that such a huge amount of work has to take place in their thinking brain unscrambling the word so someone that struggles with reading they'll be trying to read they'll be working very very hard probably about a hundred times harder than anybody else in the room trying to read the letters are jumping around they eventually oh I think I know what that word is and they move on to the next word where do they store that word in their thinking brain what happens in their thinking brain now their thinking brain gets really busy trying to control their eye movement because they haven't got an automatized skill to do that automatically for them so their thinking brain becomes full of stuff that shouldn't be there they get to the end of the sentence and they have to reread it because all the words they've taken in have been scrubbed then people think that they're thick or stupid or lazy and they're the opposite of all of those the absolute opposite so the impact it has on their self-esteem very early on comes huge it was for my own daughter you know she was seeing her younger sister effortlessly reading getting good marks getting picked for the school team for this and that getting all her spellings right and she never did imagine what that does to a self-esteem
what do you think the the long-term mental health costs are for someone in that situation where they see other people just gliding by apparently with ease
but horrific you obviously parents have a huge impact teachers have a huge impact if a teacher's got a class of 30 and has got three or four children that are struggling with reading they simply do not have the time to help that child overcome these issues and find coping strategies to deal with them so that child tends to get left behind and if you get left behind when you're 5 six 7 8 n it's very likely that you'll go right through that and underachieve the whole of your life so by the time you're going through puberty 13 14 15 you're beginning to think that life hasn't got any hope for me I'm stupid I'm thick and that becomes a a psychological belief self-belief which is hugely harmful so I I have the thrill of working with with very often not just with children but with adults and proving to them and I'd like to show you that one day adults can sort out their ey tracking at any age in fact I was giving a talk in Southampton a while back and a lady came up to me at the end and she said uh I'm 82 um I want to read and write before I die so I started to say well what I'm going to ask you to do is probably a bit risky because it involves exercise and she said look young man thank you the pain that I have not being able to do the things that everybody else finds easy is horrific and whatever pain I'm feeling now is worse than the pain I could possibly feel if I do some exercises that that uh that I struggle with so she said can I do it well it wasn't it was just three months later she was on Breakfast Television uh showing the first letters she'd written in her life I mean that was life-changing but she'd been in mental institutions during her life so the impact for her going through that was she intelligent hugely intelligent two years after that she was reading and writing in three languages so the intelligence had been there for all of her 80 years so what happens early on has an enormous impact on the self-esteem the skills they have the careers they can follow and so on the
How does the cerebellum appear differently in a Neurotypical compared to a Neurodiverse person? cerebellum the the part of the brain that you've just mentioned the one that we're sort of trying to train yeah before the training happens before we do any of these exercises how does it look in a neurotypical compared to a neurodiverse person well a neurotypical person
will have fairly even development of different parts of the sarabellum so you'll be probably pretty good at music pretty good at Art pretty good at expressing your feelings pretty good at sport and pretty good at you know you'll be pretty good but with neurodiversity you will get an eccentricity in other words you'll probably be hugely good at some things but Fallen badly behind in other things and the trouble is we live in a world where where it's the negatives that are focused on and especially in the school system you know all of the wonderful things that that that I see neurodiverse people having are not focused on typically in the school system it's all the negative things that are focused on so if you get eccentricity you're going to get some you're going to get some things you know the brighter you are the more likely it is as as Ned hell says if you've got a Ferrari engine you actually need everything else from the Ferrari or there's going to be some things go wrong and
if if a child has these eccentricities and they don't have the sort of stereotypical normal traits and metrics that we judge children on how do you make a child who is slightly out of the norm not feel broken i
that's actually generally that's pretty easy because you haven't got to look far before you find some element of creativity thinking outside the box determination to make things happen the ability to solve problems that other people can't solve they're making connections that others can't and that's what I call intelligence so the ability to make connections is always always comes up in in children with that are or nearly always comes up in children that are neurodiverse
and at some point we perhaps we should discuss where does that come from where does it come from
that's interesting you ask that you can trace almost every example of neurodiversity back to some very early childhood trauma so it can be trauma in the womb it can be trauma at Birth it can be trauma soon after birth and sometimes of course it's because of neglect and poor nurturing but very often it's nothing to do with that very often it's it's incidents that happen in the womb or emotional experiences that the mom has there's always a trauma so when you have a trauma at the very early stage that can do a number of things first of all it can stunt the development of a part of the cerebellum so if you cerebellum room full of computer coders each coder has a different role to play so I'll give just an example or two of that so if if a child is brilliant at music then the coder responsible for all things auditory and sound and so on will be itself very capable a child might be brilliant at maths well all of the logic in maths is coded up by another coder so the weaknesses and strengths are going to show up in increased levels of density of gray matter in different parts of the cerebellum
so that we don't know why but trauma at very early stages will stunt the development of growth in other words there'll be lower levels of density of gray matter in a part of the cerebellum it often means that the the brain in its development has focused more on other areas potentially because that was an urgent need at the time time so trauma can often stunt the development of the cerebellum which has implications for your your attributes your skills or lack of them later on in life but it can also force you to develop a degree of Genius so if a baby or a very young child has to solve problems that his brain isn't equipped to solve it's having to think outside the box it's having to take risks that it normally wouldn't have to take through no fault of its own and very often through no fault of or inadequacy of the parents either but if a baby has to deal with things that his BR brain hasn't been programmed to deal with it starts having to use the traits that will show right through their life so the ability to think outside the box the ability to solve problems the preparedness to take risks often will be forced on a young baby or young child and so that's so that's the second thing first thing is cerebellum stunted development in some part second thing is a degree of Genius will show the third thing of course is you may well create some triggers some PTSD type triggers they may not be categorized as that but some huge sensitivities and that's another part of the brain called the amydala that that works on that so often people that go through not all but often people that go through life with a DHD symptoms often have a tendency for PTSD a tendency for anxiety tendency to to to find difficult things Amplified out of all proportion all of those things are what can happen with an early childhood trauma
I just want to pick up on something you said a minute ago you said really early trauma within the womb yeah what Behavior causes trauma that early on is it something the parents doing well
you know for instance if the mother is ill case last week the mother's father was murdered whilst she was pregnant with her child so you can imagine the stress on the mother well that transfers did the mother do anything wrong absolutely not but the child will have will have suffered sometimes if it's the cord round the neck at Birth or or an emergency cesarian a baby's brain right from in the womb is programmed to deal with all of the things that normally come up so if something happens that the baby's brain hasn't been programmed to deal with all of this is of course is in the unconscious mind because their conscious mind isn't working but if something comes up that they haven't been programmed to deal with that is effectively a trauma I'm using the word trauma in the kind of neurological sense these events many of these events people wouldn't call a trauma they'd be they'd be adverse experiences in another in another form
I want to get on to what we do know and what the new studies are showing us about the brain but with regards to the science and what we do know about the The scientific unknowns surrounding the cerebellum, dyslexia and ADHD brain before we get on to that what do we not know about the brain um and the cerebellum dyslexia ADHD what is still a mystery in the in the scientific Community
well we we don't know what we don't know what we do know is there's an amazing amount of incredible Neuroscience out there that it's taking decades to reach the people that could do something useful with it and that that's that's what I'm making my job is to Let's unearth this Neuroscience I don't know why it's not getting there to me I see neurosciences people that make awesome pieces of a jigsaw they're brilliant at making pieces of a jigsaw they do it in a huge amount of detail they know everything about that piece of Jigsaw but they're no good at doing the jigsaw and until you put those pieces of Jigsaw together you don't understand the problem assess it find a way of rectifying it and monitoring it you know the so so all I've been this last 25 years Alex is is I just do jigsaws and I go to different neuroscientists and I oh wow that fits with that oh that makes sense that fits with that and it isn't long it wasn't long before a brilliant picture was emerging wow why isn't this reaching people that was 25 years ago and you can criticize me all you like cuz I deserve it I still am failing to get the enormous opportunities that exist for people with neurodiversity I really feel can I say something that I really feel I'm not it might be a bit too much for some people I believe that the Neuroscience is there that if it was adopted and delivered to those that need it I think at least 80% of what we describe as as neurodiverse symptoms could be addressed very effectively and permanently so to me I get excited when I meet people with ADHD symptoms because they are always interesting sometimes if they're very young and at school and they they've having a negative experience but if they survive that they get to the workplace usually employers are thrilled to have somebody that thinks outside the box teachers can't cope with it they want you to teach be taught and learn and answer all your tests and exam questions in the same Way kids with ADHD don't want to do that they want to solve it their way so they're interesting they're interesting to talk to they're wonderful in the workplace but you do have to have that nurturing going on so they don't lose everything because their mental health suffers from being so totally misunderstood
and if someone's listening who relates to that and and they have the traits that you associate with ADHD um and they're interested in the cerebellum how important is the How important is the cerebellum's role in the ADHD brain cerebellum in creating these traits that we associate with ADHD and what can we do to change that
okay there's there's a few questions buried there first of all what what is the cerebellum it's it's it's it's near our brain stem it's actually only 10% of the volume it was for many many years until quite recently it wasn't thought to be that important neuroscientists doctors all knew uh it's to do with balance and coordination of the gross motor skills of the body yeah yep that's true but that's only a small proportion of its overall work so for many years when they did brain Imaging you've heard of MRI imaging often MRI imaging would cut off the cerebellum then professor scharman at Harvard University said hey what this is we're missing something important here this might only be small it's only 10% of the volume of the brain but it's close to 3/4s 75% of all our brain cells it is the brain Within in the brain it is masterminding all of the connections that make life easy or not as the case may be so it's hugely important and it's developing rapidly up to about the age of seven so it's involved with you know those those computer coders are busy learning how to talk learning how to crawl learning how to walk learning how to develop social skills learning how to interact with people learning how to play sport that's when the cerebellum is busy the cerebellum is busy turning all of our thought s so you imagine when you're learning to ride a bike you're learning to ride a bike you've watched everybody else you know what to do it's obvious what you've got to do and you get on the bike and you fall off you're thinking very very hard at this point and the harder you think about how to Pedal how to balance how hard to lean over oh my goodness the processing is so involved you keep falling off but what those coders are now doing in the cerebellum they're looking at what you're thinking what you're trying to do they're looking at the mistakes you're making and they're creating a program and debugging a program that eventually ends up as a completely perfect program that you don't have to think about and it Parks it up here in the cortex and then you can ride in fact you can only ride a two- wheel bike when you don't have to think about it because the processing speed when you have to think is about 100,000 times slower than it is when it's up in the cortex so that's how important the cerebellum is all of those things that you are natural at are because the part of the cerebellum responsible for developing that process or skill is itself highly developed
so I guess the How to train your cerebellum next question is what can someone do to train the cerebellum to to Beef It Up
well when my daughter attempted to take her life that was the very question I put to Professor uh Professor Nicholson up in Sheffield and he said well nobody's ever done it he said unless you want to take drugs I said no I I don't want to give her drugs I I'm sure there must be a way of naturally permanently developing the cerebellum and he said well he said this is just a hunch he said I think it's anything you do repetitively and I think you've got to involve the the uh vestibular system the balance organ so I said what do you mean do two exercises challenging the cerebellum and stimulating the vestibular he said probably and that was enough you know within months I'd taken on literally hundreds of Staff All researching how to do this and in our first cohort we had over 40,000 people all with 40,000 different brains would you believe needing completely personalized ways of stimulating their cerebellum and this the stimul that works it's it's combination of two exercises we've not tried to obviously we' not tried to patent this because it's too important for the world but if you make someone do some difficult vestibular stimulation and that's spinning around jumping up and down going from side to side those are all different types of vestibular balance stimulation you got to do that at the same time as challenging the cerebellum in other words getting the cerebellum to do something that it does normally have to do in other words it's got no automaticity so the one that caught me out for a long time an exercise which we built into our programs I had to stand on one leg shut my eyes and put my head on one shoulder that took me weeks to sort out but when I was doing that what I was doing was I wasn't just improving complex balance I was actually developing the very bit of the cerebellum that learns so those same circuits that control balance and coordination also act as learning circuits they're actually the fundamental piece of the coder's work to learn whatever it is you know I I and I came to your studio today if I had to come again I'd walk straight here I wouldn't have to ring you up and say Alex where are you mate uh because I'll have learned it tonight actually during my REM sleep my rapid eye movement sleep tonight all of the things I learned all of the sensory inputs become coordinated ated by the cerebellum and turned into a memory that will last and that's the role of the cerebellum so improving your balance coordination actually improves your ability to learn all sorts of different skills and processes
and if someone starts doing these exercises say the one You' just mentioned standing on one leg closing your eyes tilting your head to the side doing all those three things simultaneously how often does one have to do something like that and over what time frame would you expect to see a difference to your cognitive ability
that's a good question Well everybody's brain is different different parts of the cerebellum are developed at different places therefore the the sensory stimulation you need has to be enough so you notice it but not too much that causes you a problem causes you to be nauseous or whatever so so everybody's program I'm afraid has to be totally individualized I would love to create a one size fits all that suits everybody's brain but everybody's brain is totally different and so therefore you have to customize it and you have to move it you have to adjust it every day so that you're always optimally stimulating the different parts of the cerebellum so that the density of gray matter increases what was interesting I I only a few years ago now nature years after I started this research nature published an article saying that if you combine stimulation to the vestibular and an exercise that challenges the cerebellum you multiply stem cells in the cerebellum and in the hippocampus the two key junction boxes that causes us to learn in the brain are flooded with stem cells how exciting is I couldn't sleep for days when I heard that because it explained why we were doing so successfully what we were doing
could go back a bit there what what are you combine combining the exercise with to create that new effect
to change the cerebel you have to do two things one you have to to stimulate your vestibular system and you must be doing something that's forcing your balance organ to work so that's why I gave the example of standing on one leg is is a is a classic example um there's various different things you can do you can jump up and down and be turning around in a circle there's different types of stimulation and different people need different things so the vestibular system seems to increase the neuroplasticity we're collecting a lot of evidence on that it certainly appears to be the case the nature article suggests it is the case and the challenge to the cerebellum says okay we've got neuroplasticity we've got all the key elements we've got the stem cells we've got everything we need to make important new Connections in this all important part of the brain cerebellum so that combination of two exercises creates the cere creates the the neuroplasticity and gives the stimuli to change the very part of the brain that is The Mastermind for developing and learning
and all of the cerebellums that you've studied have you noticed the The connection between intelligence and the cerebellum connection between the cerebellum and intelligence
Ah that's an interesting question I think the world has got intelligence totally wrong in fact I I started a new examination board for a while I didn't know what to do when my daughter attempted to take her life so I bought some schools I bought a school at the time initially I started an examination board because I said the world isn't measuring in Ence properly we're actually measuring regurgitation in the main regurgitation is not intelligence at all and I started this Research into the brain but it wasn't long before I realized that what we were calling or what we were thinking of as intelligence and we still do to this day if someone does really well in exams you know there's some wonderful research in America on on the valid dictor uh candidates who had huge success uccess in school typically they have very poor success in life very average they do okay but it's the kids that had the neurodiversity suddenly become the hugely creative ones in life how crazy is that so we've got an education system that prizes itself on how many exams can we get these children to pass and we ignore the creativity employers of course they realize I want someone that can solve problems I want someone that can think outside the box I want someone that can be so obsessed with something they see the things that nobody else sees and what are they doing they're making connections that others people don't make so if you have an education system that's all about training you to regurgitate it doesn't encourage creativity tot in fact it's the opposite it discourages creativity fortunately the the folk the kids with with neurodiversity with ADHD symptoms and so on in the main they're so determined to do it their way that they do it their way but we do kill an awful lot of creativity but to me the bottom line is making connections that others don't make is the true sign of intelligence
I'm fascinated about the the tests that you've done on people uh to to understand the cerebellum yeah how How many people have you tested and what are the tests to find out more about the cerebellum and their ADHD? many people have you tested and what are the tests to find out more about the cerebellum and ADHD
we we've tested well over 50,000 you know I've lost track now of of how many we've tested but there are some there are some very good tests that measure for instance mental capacity measure things like auditory working memory auditory processing speed visual working memory visual processing speed um your reaction time your response time so there's a number of measures there that you can use that and and and psychologists and neuroscientists around the world use these all the time we've built them into games so reliably and quickly and effortlessly you can actually see where someone's strengths are and where their limitations are and it's reliable so there's an awful lot of people that still think that ADHD is just a fad no it's not then you can actually do neurological tests and say categorically whether someone's got a neurological reason why reading is hard work or concentration is hard work so you remember I said that the proing speed of the the the cortex is about 100,000 times faster than the thinking brain so folk with neurodiversity have got some things that they don't do naturally that they have to work hard at and when they're doing that it's a 100,000 times slower than up here that's why you fall off your bike that's why you can't concentrate for long so if a child has got say poor auditory processing when they're listening in class after 10 minutes they've done a thousand times as much work as the other children in the class will do all day so no wonder they're exhausted no wonder they can't concentrate no wonder they're looking out of the window or fiddling with their pencil and distracting others these aren't choices that they have so I just want to make clear there are undeniable neurological measures neurological reasons why neurodiversity exists so if anybody still thinks be it a parent or a teacher or whoever that this is just naughty boy or naughty girl Syndrome look at the science because you will very quickly change your mind and realize these children don't have a choice they're behaving the way they are because they are wired to behave the way they are
say you fast forward 50 years from now oh what research do you think would have been done on the cerebellum that might shed light on ADHD in other words if budget wasn't an issue if you had all the resources in the world what research would you like to do on the cerebellum today
well I'm beginning to work with a very famous UK University that they came to me saying we've been watching your research and one of the things I want to do is to do some fmri studies because if you show with pictures this is what's happening in the mind of a child or an adult with ADHD and this is what you can do that just takes a matter of weeks and you change the fundamental neurological processing in the brain it becomes much calmer it becomes much more structured much more organized motions are far calmer so that's the kind of research that could be done given unlimited budgets uh and time so I look I live with the dream that we will change the way we look at people with neurodiversity if we were totally logical and sensible about it we would look at them we would look at all of these symptoms and say hey they've got this huge flag saying massive potential come and disc it instead of focusing on all their negatives you know the wonderful Ned hell that you did an amazing interview with just recently Alex he he's been pushing this idea of vast for a long time and I I can see why he's saying all the people that come to him they're hugely talented in most cases not always but nearly every case hugely talented yet they've been slammed down hammered down in their in their school life some for fortunately they emerge into adult life and discover their true potential but if we thought of these children as vast potential instead of ADHD what an insult tension deficit hyperactivity disorder disorder and these are the people that are brightest and the best these are the people that that are changing the world and yet we we insult them with a term like ADHD you know I I I agree with Ned I want to ban the term I want to call everybody vast I I got a different acronym to him my acronym is very detention stunning talent and that's so that's my dream that's my vision of where we've got to get this and we've we we've got to do it in the next decade too many are struggling too many commit suicide too many end up with mental health issues and that ends up in dementia if a brain is worrying a 100,000 times harder than it should of course it's going to wear out early
it is sad isn't it you know you you get a child young child getting diagnosed and they might be brilliant they might be creative resourceful at home doing amazing things and they get a diagnosis they go on the internet and they read that they're disordered at a young age it's heartbreaking
it it is it's it's a disgrace and it's because the education system has not kept up with neuroscientists Neuroscience around this has been there for many years and the the cerebellum when I when I first started working on the cerebellum 25 years ago there there was only two professors I could find that were really focused on it now there are loads and and if you look you look at the graph of what's happened with research papers the research papers have just gone up exponentially in the last 15 years more and more people are realizing do you know what the cerebellum has got the clue to mental health we when we use the term mental health we think of it in a negative light when we use the term physical health immediately we're thinking let's do some more exercises Let each properly and we will get stronger and you can actually get stronger far more than you naturally would have done if you hadn't taken the trouble to go to the gym a lot and eat a lot of healthy food so we've got the concept that physical health can be enhanced when we think about mental health it's totally different we assume that oh you know there there's a there's a glass ceiling whatever we were born with that's the best it's going to be and what we probably happen if we'll have various mental health issues a bit of depression bit of anxiety bit of ADHD and that mental health goes down in other words we've got no vision of The Upside potential now we know what we know about the cerebellum we can think about mental health in exactly the same way as we can think about physical health do the right things stimulate it in the right way you can grow your brain you can become more intelligent you can increase your mental capacity and strength to the point that you can feel on top of what life is throwing at you isn't that a brilliant solution to anxiety to depression to ADHD symptoms you know all of the symptoms of neurodiversity are to do with when the brain has run out of mental capacity to do whatever it is properly so you're not unnatural at it
if we can take steps to Can an injured cerebellum cause ADHD flex improve our cerebellum can it work the other way for example if we had an accident a head injury and the cerebellum is injured can it cause traits that we associ iate with ADHD
it it will cause different traits I mean the the the whole development process is is like laying bricks there's layer upon layer upon layer up of of of skill and competence and processes so it so so that's a process that you can replicate and you can plug the gaps if there's been a a missing element so autism for instance it's far more complex than ADHD and sometimes you've got to put in several layers of new development because several layers of development have missed out but in the case of injury road traffic accidents or sporting injuries or whatever then that that's a different scenario and is it possible to repair it yes it is because the brain naturally is very good at finding other parts of the brain that can replicate the the replicate the the the processes that originally carried out were carried out there so it's really useful to have levels of neuroplasticity if you're trying to do that so we we are working now in fact with the the um Medicare in America is is Medicare Part B is funding people and seniors to do the program to recover balance recover memory and recover all aspects of cognition and confidence so that is that is already happening so is it possible to repair later on yes I didn't believe it was but my mentor at Sheffield said I'm doing a research study on it and he's published it it's it's fantastic what he was Achi what he was achieving so recovery is possible if we wanted to do a study on road traffic accidents we'd need 20 accidents all with exactly the same 20 injuries so that we can do a study that's probably not going to happen anytime soon is it theoretically possible absolutely
no it is fascinating and I want to talk about some truly shocking new findings that have come up in some new research but first Winfield I want to draw attention back to your ADHD item ADHD item explanation just quickly and find out what the explanation is for your Post-it notes
oh Alex it's so embarrassing but this isn't just me folk that are highly creative if you've got a fire hose of ideas coming to you you know every phone conversation you have every discussion you have triggers and load more of that fire hose just pouring ideas where does it go in it goes into this thinking brain which easily gets full you have to do something with it so if you're ADHD and you've got a big fire hose you need Post-it notes thank God for posted notes and you scribble something down because it's freeing up a bit of memory in your thinking brain and so posted notes are an extension of my whole crazy thinking brain across my desk I often get to the end of the week on a Saturday morning when the phones have stop ringing I go through my Post-It notes and you know half of them I can't even read them they were great at the time I got something out of my thinking brain to give me enough space to focus on the next shiny object I wanted to focus on so Post-it notes if you see a lot of posted notes especially if they're random you've probably got some some neurodiverse symptoms there the organized people of course the accountants and the lawyers and the civil servants and the teachers and so on they'll have collected their few ideas in a structured book an action list which they will systematically go down do you know how many times I have tried to create a systematized action list in my life it's it's it's ridiculous I've never had I'm useless at running businesses so I always find people that are structured and organized so I've never had for instance a management meeting two weeks running never in my life I've always had we need a management meeting so we have a management meeting get the team together and have a lovely time right we'll have another one next Tuesday there's always a reason why that doesn't happen so the structure in my life is absurd but fortunately I've got an amaz team they understand that so they just use me as a fire hose of ideas and they discard some and they use the others but my desk is Post-it notes on my desk are just a tra reflection of that endless stream of ideas that I've got no capacity for we've only got room for about seven things in our thinking brain and as we get older that goes down so if you get the E thing come along it goes on a Post-It note and the ninth and the 10th and the 11th and they're all over my desk randomly nothing like as tidy as your wonderful I relate to that a lot um I've tried buying notebooks and writing ideas down or using an electronic calendar but as soon as it's in the calendar or the notebook it gets shut and it gets forgotten about I have this huge whiteboard now I've mentioned this quite a few times on my desk um and things that come into my mind similar to your Post-it notes they go on the Whiteboard and um not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than putting it in a notebook which gets shut and therefore that note ceases to exist in my mind and it gets forgotten about
how many of your not your Post-it notes do you actually action or how how and how what percentage of them just kind of float off into the ether
my housekeeper always takes the posted notes out of my bin in case I've missed them thrown them away accidentally when she EMP that my bin twice a week um I would say of the ones I write down probably less than half actually action it's a bit embarrassing
you think the ones you don't action do you think that's a sign that they probably weren't a good fit for your brain anyway
well what what folk with neurodiversity do they're always re prioritizing always always most of them don't know what they're doing in a day they wake up in the morning and they decide what they're doing when they get downstairs and so there's a lot of reprioritization going on and they're very good at it we are very good at it because as you get a new idea you just rank that somewhere oh oh I got to do that now I had one this morning I had can I mention what it is we we're talking about doing Retreats for people because because there's some there's some wonderful Retreats out there and I was talking to my son and he was saying um look I I had agobia and he said people with agrob don't want to go to Retreats so I said right great so suddenly you know I'd been looking at anxiety and AD h d and and divorce and all sorts of wonderful ideas high functioning anxiet got a whole long list of ideas suddenly agobia went to the top of the list and it's still there now and that to me is a burning issue on the train down on the train back I'll be obsessed with how do we reach people through a virtual retreat with agoraphobia because they they can't go and see therapists they don't even want to leave the house to see their doctor they think they're going to die it's a terrible condition so that was one example of today's example of what went the top of my list of prioriti and of course everything else gets pushed down the list what was really important yesterday is now ranking third or fourth in my list it's the unpredictability
I find with with when something is going to pop to the top of that priority list um you know I could be working in my office and I decide I want a cup of coffee a cup of coffee is now at the top y so I go into the kitchen I put the kettle on but then I see see a parcel that got delivered in the morning sudden that parcel is now above the coffee yeah the coffee gets forgotten about yeah and I go to the and it continues side quest after but everything's just has a way of of of working it out and you get to the end of the day and actually there's there's been a lot of productivity that's that's happened and maybe the stuff that hasn't got happened it wasn't actually that important
you've actually raised a very important point because the way those with neurodiversity makes decisions is very interesting remember I've said earlier on that when the cerebellum has some parts that aren't fully developed you end up with some skills that you not be don't become a natural at you need them all the time so your thinking brain is very busy looking after those skills so if it's ey tracking or auditory processing we need both of those now so if we've got those limitations our thinking brain is full of stuff that shouldn't be there thinking brain is precious it might be slow but it's precious space because it's where we rationalize it's where we make decisions it's where we control our emotions it's where we control impulsivity and and inhibitory control and so on it's the boss of the brain so if this is pretty full with stuff that shouldn't be there and this is the space where we make decisions we got problems so if if if when I Mak an important decision like um I saw a packet of chocolates over there and so the battle started when my brain is busy I can only think about my immediate need I can't take I can't also find space in my thinking brain it's too full to think actually I've made a commitment that I'm going to lose five kilos in the next three months I can't I haven't got space for that so guess what I eat the chocolate so you can have a degree of impulsivity because you haven't got the room to take in the other factors you should be thinking about so you just take in the most important but there's an I think an even worse situation some with neurodiversity have real issues around procrastination some do especially those with high levels of anxiety so if you've got a lot of anxiety your thinking brain is full of emotions and and helping out with those skills that that that that you're not unnatural at you end up not being able to make a decision at all so these are the kind of neurological clues that people can get about why am I the way I am every single symptom of neurodiversity can be explained by the degree of development or not of the cerebellum the amount of mental capacity you've got in your prefrontal cortex in your thinking brain or not that explains all of the symptoms it also gives us clues about why there is a high level of creativity why there is the ability to think outside the box because from a child onwards you've been forced to do that at times so it becomes a natural thing to do in life
having lots of things to do and therefore almost being too overwhelmed to do anything like you mentioned it's almost like a paralysis of thought overwhelm is here overwhelm until I mean certainly the case with me sometimes I know I've got 10 things to do in a day so I won't do anything until one of them and Ned mentioned this until one of them kind of comes into your now which creates that urgency yeah which which which activates the adrenaline which makes you do the thing yeah how can you this is something I've struggled with How to create urgency to beat overwhelm paralysis how can you create replicate that urgency how can you create a artificial deadline in for in order for you to get over that procrastination hump for order for you to cut through that overwhelm paralysis
the only way of doing that successfully you can do it artificially of course with notepads and all sorts of reminders and the secretary badgering you what to do but if you want to do it naturally the only way that I've Found You Can Do It Is by freeing up space in your thinking brain free up your prefrontal cortex until that's free you're going to be constantly overwhelmed this is where overwhelm is this is your mental capacity if this is full it's full You' run out of mental capacity you're not going to feel on top of what life is throwing at you you've got nowhere to organize you got nowhere to make quality decisions you got nowhere to control your emotions you got nowhere to control your impulsivity and your inhibitory control so you know the the leg shakers is that stemming it's it's yeah yes it's lack of inhibitory control and where's that that's in the prefrontal cortex in the in the exe it's one of the executive functions and so all of these symptoms are clear so organization we haven't touched on that sometimes folk with neurodiversity are hopelessly disorganized you only organize in your mind if you've got space in your mind if your mind is like your desk and it's full of junk you got no space to organize you've got room for one thing if you're lucky to organize you need space for several things and you can rank them in order and you can position them and and and and so on
I'm convinced that with ADHD it's it's the effort needs to go into working on your selfawareness and building up a understanding of what you're genuinely passionate about because I think when someone with ADHD discovers that then they can be become world-beating world class ad um I discovered it with this podcast and I think the podcast is doing well but other things in my life like you don't want to see my flat you know it's it's a genuine State um I can't clean my clothes most days but something that I'm passionate about um it can go well and I genuinely believe that's the case with so many people with ADHD is they just haven't figured out what their true intrinsic motivations are
well if you if you but if you're thinking brain is pretty full you've only got room for one thing it's the most important that's going to get there and have all the priority and that I suspect explains an awful lot in our lives
Winfield I want to do the this is fascinating by the way truly fascinating I want to do the washing machine of w which is the ADHD Agony AR section um every week I asked my Instagram Community for a ADHD wo of theirs and I put it in the washing machine because my item is the washing machine because I always leave my clothes in the machine and I ask everyone do you leave your laundry in the machine
I don't know
okay I've never had that answer before you don't know well
my housekeeper does it
oh of course yes of thought so
I wouldn't know fa no don't worry then
not a relevant question then God that's that's the hack isn't it like hire a a house cleaner you can afford it I guess
I don't I've never had to look in the washing machine for my clothes I don't know it's magic they just they're always in my wardrobe and drawers they just appear yeah I do put dirty washing in the washing basket I don't know how it gets back
yeah well I I do mine myself um but maybe I need to do that because I always forget mine and it stinks of of damp you have to wash it again wash it again yeah it's it's although I have been using the Teemo app and I have been getting a bit better but yeah it's still a bit of a nightmare for me
well there is a solution
do you do you want to do the washing machine first no desperate because I'm honestly it's a problem okay
the solution is to create more capacity in your prefrontal cortex how do you do that you drive the development of the cerebellum and if you do that in the right way using the stimulations we've talked about you do it systematically in 10 minutes a day for about 90 days you can transform the cerebellum and you transform it permanently in the same way as when you learn to ride a bike you can not ride a bike for 20 years you've still got that skill there that's the beauty of the sarabellum remembering your phone number might be easy if I ring you every week but if I didn't ring you for 6 months I'd have probably forgotten it that's the hippocampus that's a different learning process totally but the cerebellum when the cerebellum learns and the cerebellum develops it is lasting and and so the transformation you can get by stimulating the cerebellum so it develops then it naturally completes the development of the various skills and processes that weren't fully automatized before that removes the need for the thinking brain to act as your conscious compensation so the skills get better but equally as importantly it frees up space in your thinking brain so suddenly you've got peace there's nothing greater than Peace So if you can develop your cerebellum and clear out your thinking brain so that you've got peace that gives you the space to be organized it gives you the chance to be on top of your emotional control it gives you the chance to make better decisions and control impulsivity and so on and so on
Winford I want to The ADHD agony aunt (The washing machine of woes) read the woe that's in the washing machine this week someone has asked my daughter has low self-esteem due to below average exam results she's bright in other ways but exams aren't for her what's the best way to deal with a situation like this when she's still got many years of the school system to go through
wow that's a beautiful question and I feel really sorry for her daughter but let me talk you through what's going on why is she done badly in exams one of the problems when you've got any form of neurodiversity is the thinking brain is full of stuff that should be but that this is the this is the working table with for your for your working memory so in other words if this is full it's really hard for you to find Space to to go and search in your mind to bring back the information you need to pass an exam so many people with neurodiversity they'll go through the exam and they be uptight oh no I know this I know this and they walk out of the exam and they remember it but they don't get scored for it and bear in mind they're not getting scores for their creativity which is cruel and unfair but they're only getting scores for their regurgitation and that's not their best skill so that's the first thing children with neurodiversity don't get scored properly because their memory recall isn't as good as it should be do they know it very often yes not always but very often they do but very often they don't actually get it down on paper so they don't get don't get scored for it so that's the first thing but the next point is an interesting one self-esteem confidence I see as neurological not psychological so if whatever you're doing requires uh a lot of thinking brain activity the busier this is the lower your self-esteem is so if you take think of athletes where in then then when they're in the zone they are not thinking at all and they're their highest confidence their skills are automatized they're consistent they're precise they're in the zone that means they're not having to think about anything but those with neurodiversity have got some skills they need to use all the time so their thinking brain is constantly full of stuff that shouldn't be there the more that's happening here the lower your confidence is and conversely the same when you develop the serabellum when you get rid of the conscious compensation processes that are taking place there and you free up capacity self-esteem goes up we've just done a wonderful study up in the north of England in SEF andb Council the the results have just been analyzed all these children that did the program their self-belief their confidence their happiness went through the roof because we were freeing up space in their prefrontal cortex so there is hope for her daughter she a she probably knows it B she's probably very much brighter than anyone's giving her credit for C there's logic as to why her self-esteem is low
that's brilliant I mean I'm no doubt that's going to be so reassuring for them to hear
what are some of the biggest studies Winford um most shocking findings that you or other scientists What are most shocking findings that you have done in search for more information about what ADHD actually is? have done in search for more information on what actually is ADHD
what is ADHD a ADHD are symptoms that are created by underdevelopment of the cerebellum I mean I I I totally disagree with the whole diagnosis process we've got a diagnosis process that focuses on the negative all the negatives and it's totally unbalanced totally cruel totally unfair and doesn't take anybody forward the best it does is say do you know what you qualify for some medication okay I'm not against medication because some absolutely need it but it doesn't take them one step closer to the root cause and we now know what the root cause is and what we can do about it to find this potential you know I I I dream I pray for the day when we stop using ADHD and we start using Ned's term vast and we treat these people properly and we put them through a school process where we get rid of the negative things that are a challenge and we focus and develop all of the positive things we would treat them with huge respect at the moment ADHD oh no he's got ADHD we should be saying he's got vast potential same child just a different attitude and a much more realistic attitude so what is to answer your question well what is called ADHD is underdevelopment of the cerebellum that limits the development of key skills and processes and gets labeled in a totally inappropriate totally negative way
so do you take ADHD seriously as a diagnosis
um not really because I would say some people are just so bright they're so nurtured and supported at at school and so on that that there is more emphasis so there's an awful lot of folk with obvious ADHD symptoms look at my desk look at look at people's desks with loads of Post-it notes and messy desks there's a lot of it about and and and it just depends on which experts have you been taken to which school did you go to did you parents badly want you to be labeled or not so there's all sorts of variables so it is not a consist diagnosis the numbers are going up but I think that's largely driven by the fact that teachers are quite happy to see children with medication because it dumbs down their creativity takes them to a lower level so they're more manageable doesn't do anything to encourage their creativity so I think there's all sorts of Dynamics going on I think it was it was a concept that was developed way before the Neuroscience was understood it needs tearing up now and starting again let's let's this have a positive approach don't call it diagnosis you know if if someone is in Mensa you don't call it a diagnosis they qualify to be in Mena I want folk to be qualifying to be described as vast potential
we go back to your daughter Yeah you mentioned that she's now free from some of her dyslexia
well for instance she she she would have been diagnosed as ADHD and dyslexic and possibly even slightly autistic I don't know but within months she was reading and writing we didn't have to teach her all we did was make the connections in the cerebellum so the cerebellum could naturally finish off the skills her problem was severe eye tracking terrible eye tracking and that's the case with many who struggle with reading High Intelligence struggling with one particular scale we sorted that out she's been able to read and write ever since with no more teaching this isn't teacher fault it isn't parents' fault it's a neurological limitation caused by some trauma very early on in life in Why are 3% not affected by these exercises? know
we had a pre-chat before today um I think you mentioned that 97% of people that uptake partake in your cerebellum exercises they see improvements in their
absolutely
the three% that are not affected by them why do you think that is
well do we want to focus on on the 3% or the 97% um there are all sorts of other things going wrong we have a full analysis of anybody that's clearly doing the exercises and not making not making the progress so there's there are other s forms of General developmental delay which can stop fundamentals taking place and very often it is that folk have improved but not enough to be taken out of the C the diagnosis they originally had and of course we've got no control no complete control over whether they're doing the exercises and activities properly you know if they do it in a school the teachers are supervising them and more and more schools are thinking this is a really good idea to repair the holes in the buckets before we try filling the buckets so that when it's in school it it we've got more reliable results
who have you been working with and what have they taught you about ADHD that you didn't already know
well NE Ned has been quite an inspiration I met Ned over 20 years ago and uh actually worked with his wife and son which he's gone public on uh and and he taught me a lot about the traditional beliefs but of course he's cynical towards the traditional beliefs and of course now he he he wants to see far more natural solutions been added into the mix he's obviously is a psychiatrist he's not against medication but he is saying more and more of his clients are saying we don't want medication we want to find a natural solution he has taught me in fact he pointed out to me initially and he's taught me the in great detail the the awesome nature of the positives of those with ADHD so I've learned a lot from NED I've learned a lot from from Jeremy schaman he's done some amazing research about about the and it was his work that led me to understand exactly how I believe all of the symptoms of neurodiversity can be explained by the cerebell and the impact that has on our thinking brain our prefrontal cortex so Rod Nicholson Jeremy scharman those and Ned hell those have been my biggest mentors
a lot of our listeners What have your studies taught you about ADHD that our audience might be shocked by they will they'll they'll have digested consumed a lot of the traditional information on ADHD that's out there is there anything that you've learned that are listeners might be shocked to hear about ADHD
well I think they'll be shocked to hear many of things we've shared tonight because if you look at if you look at the Neuroscience of what's happening it fits together guess why because it works it does explain the root cause it does explain that if you develop the cerebellum all of these symptoms start to subside we're never going to get rid rid of the huge creativity nor do we want to of course we want to let that Blossom and flourish but we do get rid of many of the limitations we do particularly get rid of the limit ations in the prefrontal cortex which gives you more organization it gives you a bit more peace it gives you a bit more control over your emotions and impulsivity so all of these things fit together the bigger shock to me is has been why hasn't this reached the educational establishment why hasn't somebody in government level taken this up and said do you know what the impact at the economic level is huge my focus is of course the impact at the human level the individual's level but at government level they should also be hugely impressed by the fact that that if we did this to our school population the transformational in the cost of educating in the level of unemployment in the level of mental health issues would be transformed you know if you can create mental strength why wouldn't you you know we've got a mental health service that's fantastic it works very very hard we haven't got enough resources I'm a I'm a a direct of a charity a big charity in America and the the statistics on the number of children self Haring the number of children committing suicide the number of children that are missing school through through high levels of anxiety is scary it's got so much worse in this last few years why is nobody looking outside of the box why aren't educationalists talking to neuroscientists and saying can't you do something about this the answers are there the explanation is clear it's just the word isn't getting to people
if we if we do Is a person with ADHD keeping all of their strengths and losing their downsides a realistic outcome? these exercises we work on the cerebellum is it possible to just see a downtick in the negative traits that we associate with ADHD without the positives being affected in other words is it a realistic Prospect for somebody to keep all of the positives of ADHD while simultaneously losing all the negatives
absolutely we we we don't increase the creativity but we do increase the mental capacity so that you can use it more you can structure your output more you can do more with it you can be more organized we don't need to increase the fundamental creativity the perceived intelligence will go up because you'll be able to use it far more so whether it's in exams because your memory recall is improved and you control your emotions you don't get so worked up you don't get so anxious walking into exams you're feeling on top of it because you've got more mental capacity so you will come across as being more more eloquent more more educated because your regurgitation will be better so no don't expect that we're going to create creativity that's already there in those with neurodiversity we just allow it allow it to flourish and to be used
and ultimately Winford why was it important for you to come on here today and talk about ADHD
because I watched my own daughter suffer and I've me met countless other families whose children are suffered I meet people I I know you know walking here I had to walk around several people in the street who are homeless nearly all of those have got signs of neurodiversity so the pain that I see people in the pain I see families in it's not the what the child has to go through at school what the adult has to go through during life is bad enough but the family is also affected parents of a child with neurodiversity lose sleep they feel guilty I still feel guilty that I haven't done everything I could for my own daughter and she's now 50 years of age I still feel it so it it affects the whole of their lives I want her and I want everyone like her to have the richest possible life so that's why I came on you today and thank you you reach a lot of people and and I I sincerely hope that what I've shared today is going to make sense is going to encourage some to say you know what I'm going to be a warrior parent the education Authority may not have picked up on this yet maybe it'll take another generation who knows I hope it doesn't the last generation suffered needlessly because this has been around for more than a generation so if parents are listening to this be a worrior parent don't delegate to the school hoping they're going to find the problem find the solution and apply it they haven't got the time they haven't got the resources and in many cases they're not even allowed to even think about it let alone do it so I'm afraid it's for now it's going to be Warrior parents but eventually there'll be enough Warrior parents who'll be having influence on policy and changing those policies when that happens my job will be done but not until no
it's truly interesting Winford and thank you for coming on and um I think it's important to share and to look at it with a different perspective because it might just plant the seed in a listener who can then go away and Implement what you're saying and just look at the whole situation through a fresh perspective we have a closing tradition A letter from the previous guest Winford and that is for me to deliver a letter from the previous guest previous guest wrote three rules to live by yes I'm going to deliver it to you and if you could be so kindness to read them out
three rules to live by know yourself and nurture your potential find something you are passionate about and engage fully love that too surround yourself with people who you trust and you can be yourself with wow those that's May who was that it's amazing
I think 95% sure that was Joe Perkins who is a psychologist
wow that's deep and Brilliant advice know yourself and nurture your potential well we've talked tonight about the fact that there is huge potential every symptom of ADHD is an absolute sign that there can be growth and development take place in the brain which will show as your hidden potential so many people are told oh you've got potential nobody ever says and this is where it's hiding and this is what you've got to do to find it well I'm hoping tonight those two questions will be answered the next one find something you are passionate about and engage fully that's finding a purpose oh that's a thrill far too to few people in this life have a purpose when you've got a purpose you know why you're on this planet why it makes a difference and of course folk with ADHD in the in the main they are more inclined than others the neurotypical to have a purpose to have a passion and commit to it so that's great advice and surround yourself with people who you trust and you can be yourself with well if anyone's cynical about ADHD they they're not welcome in my house it's a true problem with an amazing solution an amazing potential amazing opportunities
absolutely and I'll ask you if you're kind enough to write your rules to live by after this one on every Post-it not
that's 100
Winford thank you so much
Alex thank you you're amazing host thank you
I'm super excited, Winford, to pick your brains and to hear about the vast amount of new research that you've done that are going to help people with ADHD with perhaps more of the slightly challenging aspects of the condition.
Before we get into the meat of the episode, I ask all my guests to tell ADHD item—reveal me an item that most represents ADHD in their life—and I’m going to reveal yours now under this cloth.
Okay, not many went flying as I thought. It’s a load of Post-it notes. That’s embarrassing. Desperate to tell us that AR you—we’ll save it, but—
Winford, what role has ADHD and dyslexia—what role has ADHD and Dyslexia played in your life? Played in your life?
It came on my radar because my oldest daughter—I’ve got four children, the oldest one absolutely struggled at school. She had the same teachers as my other three children, the same nurturing and support. She actually seemed very intelligent, but it wasn’t long before the teacher was saying she can’t read, she’s not learning, and it wasn’t long before her younger sister had overtaken her. This was quite a few decades ago, and of course the understanding about ADHD and Lexia just wasn’t developed then, so I had to struggle to find specialists for her. Eventually I found some specialists, and the best help they could give her at that time was to say she’s got to learn to live with her problems.
I found a specialist in New York that was quite eccentric but a wonderfully bright guy. I flew her to New York, and he was doing some good work, but there was no published research. So I flew his clinic to one of my schools in lamington Spa private school, and we did a study. I started to learn about the neuroscience of what he was doing. He didn’t want to work with me because I’m not a medic, but about a second after he told me that, I decided I had to do the research for myself. The clue that he gave me, which was priceless and I’ll always be grateful to him for, was that the cerebellum is probably linked to the root cause of all of the symptoms.
My next job was to look for a professor who specialized in the cerebellum. There were two that came up quickly. One was Professor Jeremy scharman at Harvard Medical School, and I’ve had several meetings with him and learned such a lot from him. But there was a professor then at Sheffield University called Professor Rod Nicholson. He became my mentor 25 years ago, Alex. He’s my mentor to this day; in fact, he’s coming to see me again tomorrow because he started teaching the world specifically that the cerebellum was the root cause of learning issues. That was the gen. By the way, my daughter reads and writes and concentrates, and she’s got an amazing brain to this day.
So you’ve seen the inadequacies of dyslexia and ADHD and how much of a negative effect that can have on someone’s life.
Absolutely.
What do you think are the long-term consequences or costs on the affect of the dyslexia and ADHD inadequacies on someone’s life—someone’s self-esteem—at an early age?
It’s impossible to measure. I don’t blame teachers; in fact, I’m a big fan of teachers, as you can imagine, but the education system revolves around creating great teaching. In the Western world we are so blessed having fantastic teachers: they’re capable, passionate, enthusiastic, and they work long hours. But what doesn’t happen is that we address the neurological limitations. If someone hasn’t got the ability to take in information visually or auditorily, then they’re not going to learn in the standard way.
Now, if we jump to what happens after school, we learn about billionaires and so many successful entrepreneurs who don’t read very much, but are they clever? Absolutely. For every one of those, there’s probably another hundred that underachieve. Some sadly end up in prison; some tragically commit suicide; some have huge amounts of mental health issues because the stress of living in a modern world—where you don’t find concentration easy, where you’re not naturally a completer-finisher, where naturally you don’t read very much, and all of the other negative symptoms—is so harmful. Mental health issues today are so under-resourced. We hear of people waiting for years to have just a diagnosis, and what good is a diagnosis? It doesn’t actually lead you a step closer to solving the problem.
You mentioned the cerebellum, and I feel like the cerebellum is going to be a big part of this episode. Absolutely. What exactly is the cerebellum? Where does the cerebellum fit into the conversation of ADHD? How important is it in the understanding of neurodiverse conditions? Can we go into a bit of neuroscience?
For sure, go for it. The cerebellum is a bit like a room full of computer coders. All the things we do in life, if we do them repeatedly, need to become automatized so they become effortless. Even quite complex things like social skills: you’re asking me questions now, and I’m thinking what’s relevant to Alex’s audience. In the background is a social skill happening—what is pertinent for me to bring out in words and language that’s relevant to the audience that Alex has as his followers?
Driving a car is a skill. Moving your eyes so you can read, turning sound waves that go into your ears into thoughts you comprehend, is a process, and all of those are either fully automatized or not. If you’ve got skills that fully automatize, life is easy. But for those with learning issues—often they’re much brighter than average, but along with that often comes a limitation in the development of some key skills. That’s what the cerebellum does. We can go deeper later if you want about why it happens and what you can do about it, but if part of the cerebellum responsible, say, for eye movement isn’t fully developed, your eyes are going to always be a bit jumpy when you’re trying to read, so reading becomes very hard work.
In a school situation, teachers assume you can’t read, so you can’t be very bright, and that’s often the very opposite of the truth. It’s simply a skill that hasn’t been fully developed because the coder in the cerebellum responsible for those fine motor skills has not finished off the job, so you’ve got jumpy eye movements. Your eyes are sometimes going backwards instead of forwards, sometimes up instead of straight along the line. For some, the words move; for some, they jump words; but it means that a huge amount of work has to take place in their thinking brain unscrambling the words. So someone that struggles with reading is working very, very hard, probably about 100 times harder than anybody else in the room trying to read. The letters are jumping around, and eventually they think, “I know what that word is,” and move on to the next word. Where do they store that word? In their thinking brain. What happens in their thinking brain? Now their thinking brain gets really busy trying to control their eye movement, because they haven’t got an automatized skill to do that automatically for them, so their thinking brain becomes full of stuff that shouldn’t be there. They get to the end of the sentence and have to reread it because all the words they’ve taken in have been scrubbed. Then people think they’re thick or stupid or lazy, and they’re the opposite of all of those—the absolute opposite. So the impact it has on their self-esteem very early on becomes huge. It was for my own daughter: she was seeing her younger sister effortlessly reading, getting good marks, getting picked for the school team for this and that, getting all her spellings right, and she never did. Imagine what that does to self-esteem.
What do you think the long-term mental health costs are for someone in that situation, where they see other people just gliding by apparently with ease?
Horrific. Obviously parents have a huge impact; teachers have a huge impact. If a teacher’s got a class of 30 and has three or four children that are struggling with reading, they simply do not have the time to help that child overcome these issues and find coping strategies to deal with them, so that child tends to get left behind. If you get left behind when you’re five, six, seven, eight, it’s very likely you’ll go right through and underachieve the whole of your life. By the time you’re going through puberty, 13, 14, 15, you’re beginning to think that life hasn’t got any hope for you: “I’m stupid, I’m thick,” and that becomes a psychological belief—self-belief—which is hugely harmful.
I have the thrill of working not just with children but with adults, and proving to them—and I’d like to show you that one day—adults can sort out their eye tracking at any age. In fact, I was giving a talk in Southampton a while back, and a lady came up to me at the end. She said, “I’m 82. I want to read and write before I die.” I started to say, “Well, what I’m going to ask you to do is probably a bit risky because it involves exercise,” and she said, “Look, young man, thank you. The pain that I have, not being able to do the things that everybody else finds easy, is horrific, and whatever pain I’m feeling now is worse than the pain I could possibly feel if I do some exercises that I struggle with.” So she said, “Can I do it?” Well, it was just three months later she was on breakfast television showing the first letters she’d written in her life. That was life-changing, but she’d been in mental institutions during her life. Was she intelligent? Hugely intelligent. Two years after that, she was reading and writing in three languages. The intelligence had been there for all of her 80 years. So what happens early on has an enormous impact on self-esteem, the skills they have, the careers they can follow, and so on.
How does the cerebellum appear differently in a neurotypical compared to a neurodiverse person? Cerebellum the part of the brain that you've just mentioned the one that we're sort of trying to train. (But) before the training happens before we do any of these exercises, how does it look in a neurotypical compared to a neurodiverse person
Well, a neurotypical person will have fairly even development of different parts of the cerebellum. You’ll probably be pretty good at music, pretty good at art, pretty good at expressing your feelings, pretty good at sport, and pretty good at…you know, you’ll be pretty good. But with neurodiversity, you get an eccentricity. In other words, you’ll probably be hugely good at some things but fall badly behind in other things. The trouble is we live in a world where it’s the negatives that are focused on, and especially in the school system. All of the wonderful things that I see neurodiverse people having are not focused on typically in the school system; it’s all the negative things that are focused on. If you get eccentricity, you’re going to get some things. The brighter you are, the more likely it is, as Ned Hallowell says, if you’ve got a Ferrari engine, you actually need everything else from the Ferrari, or there are going to be some things that go wrong.
If a child has these eccentricities and they don’t have the stereotypical normal traits and metrics that we judge children on, how do you make a child who is slightly out of the norm not feel broken?
Generally that’s pretty easy, because you haven’t got to look far before you find some element of creativity, thinking outside the box, determination to make things happen, the ability to solve problems that other people can’t solve. They’re making connections that others can’t, and that’s what I call intelligence. The ability to make connections always comes up—nearly always—in children that are neurodiverse.
At some point, perhaps we should discuss where does that come from. Where does it come from?
That’s interesting you ask that. You can trace almost every example of neurodiversity back to some very early childhood trauma. It can be trauma in the womb, trauma at birth, trauma soon after birth, and sometimes, of course, it’s because of neglect and poor nurturing. But very often it’s nothing to do with that. Very often it’s incidents that happen in the womb or emotional experiences that the mom has. There’s always a trauma. When you have a trauma at a very early stage, that can do a number of things. First of all, it can stunt the development of a part of the cerebellum—your room full of computer coders, each coder having a different role to play. An example: if a child is brilliant at music, then the coder responsible for all things auditory and sound will be very capable. A child might be brilliant at math—then the logic in math is coded up by another coder. The weaknesses and strengths are going to show up in increased levels of density of gray matter in different parts of the cerebellum.
We don’t know why, but trauma at very early stages will stunt the development of growth, in other words there’ll be lower levels of density of gray matter in a part of the cerebellum. It often means the brain, in its development, has focused more on other areas, potentially because that was an urgent need at the time. Trauma can often stunt the development of the cerebellum, which has implications for your attributes, your skills, or lack of them later on in life. But it can also force you to develop a degree of genius. If a baby or a very young child has to solve problems that its brain isn’t equipped to solve, it’s having to think outside the box, it’s having to take risks that it normally wouldn’t have to take, through no fault of its own, and very often through no fault or inadequacy of the parents either. If a baby has to deal with things that the brain hasn’t been programmed to deal with, it starts having to use the traits that will show right through its life: the ability to think outside the box, the ability to solve problems, the preparedness to take risks. That’s the second thing: first is cerebellum stunted development in some part, second is a degree of genius will show. The third thing, of course, is you may create some triggers, some PTSD-type triggers—they may not be categorized as that, but some huge sensitivities—and that’s another part of the brain called the amygdala. Often people that go through life with ADHD symptoms have a tendency for PTSD, a tendency for anxiety, a tendency to find difficult things amplified out of all proportion. All of those things can happen with early childhood trauma.
I just want to pick up on something you said a minute ago: you said really early trauma within the womb. What behavior causes trauma that early on? Is it something the parent’s doing?
Well, for instance, if the mother is ill. Case last week: the mother’s father was murdered while she was pregnant with her child, so you can imagine the stress on the mother. That transfers. Did the mother do anything wrong? Absolutely not. But the child will have suffered. Sometimes it’s the cord round the neck at birth or an emergency cesarean. A baby’s brain, right from in the womb, is programmed to deal with all of the things that normally come up. If something happens that the baby’s brain hasn’t been programmed to deal with—and all of this, of course, is in the unconscious mind because their conscious mind isn’t working—if something comes up that they haven’t been programmed to deal with, that is effectively a trauma. I’m using the word trauma in the neurological sense. Many of these events people wouldn’t call a trauma; they’d be adverse experiences in another form.
I want to get on to what we do know and what the new studies are showing us about the brain, but with regards to the science and what we do know about the brain before we get on to that: The scientific unknowns surrounding the cerebellum, dyslexia, and ADHD. What is still a mystery in the scientific community?
We don’t know what we don’t know. What we do know is there’s an amazing amount of incredible neuroscience out there that’s taking decades to reach the people that could do something useful with it. That’s what I’m making my job: unearth this neuroscience. I don’t know why it’s not getting there. To me, I see neuroscientists as people that make awesome pieces of a jigsaw. They’re brilliant at making pieces of a jigsaw. They do it in a huge amount of detail; they know everything about that piece of jigsaw, but they’re no good at doing the jigsaw. Until you put those pieces together, you don’t understand the problem, assess it, find a way of rectifying it, and monitor it. All I’ve been these last 25 years, Alex, is I just do jigsaws, and I go to different neuroscientists and say, “Oh wow, that fits with that, oh that makes sense, that fits with that,” and it wasn’t long before a brilliant picture was emerging. “Wow, why isn’t this reaching people?” That was 25 years ago, and you can criticize me all you like because I deserve it: I still am failing to get the enormous opportunities that exist for people with neurodiversity. I really feel—can I say something that I really feel, it might be a bit too much for some people? I believe that the neuroscience is there, that if it was adopted and delivered to those that need it, I think at least 80% of what we describe as neurodiverse symptoms could be addressed very effectively and permanently.
So to me, I get excited when I meet people with ADHD symptoms because they are always interesting. Sometimes if they’re very young and at school, they’re having a negative experience, but if they survive that, they get to the workplace. Usually employers are thrilled to have somebody that thinks outside the box. Teachers can’t cope with it. They want you to be taught, learn, and answer all your tests and exam questions in the same way, but kids with ADHD don’t want to do that; they want to solve it their way. So they’re interesting, interesting to talk to. They’re wonderful in the workplace, but you do have to have that nurturing going on so they don’t lose everything because their mental health suffers from being so totally misunderstood.
If someone’s listening who relates to that and they have the traits that you associate with ADHD, and they’re interested in the cerebellum, how important is the cerebellum in creating these traits that we associate with ADHD, and what can we do to change that?
There are a few questions buried there. First of all, what is the cerebellum? It’s near our brainstem. It’s only 10% of the volume; for many, many years, until quite recently, it wasn’t thought to be that important. Neuroscientists and doctors all knew it’s to do with balance and coordination of the gross motor skills of the body. Yes, that’s true, but that’s only a small proportion of its overall work. For many years, when they did brain imaging—you’ve heard of MRI imaging—often MRI imaging would cut off the cerebellum. Then Professor scharman at Harvard University said, “Hey, we’re missing something important here. This might only be small, 10% of the volume of the brain, but it’s close to three-quarters, 75%, of all our brain cells.” It is the brain within the brain. It is masterminding all of the connections that make life easy, or not, as the case may be. It’s hugely important, and it’s developing rapidly up to about the age of seven, so it’s involved with those coders learning how to talk, learning how to crawl, learning how to walk, learning how to develop social skills, learning how to interact with people, learning how to play sport. That’s when the cerebellum is busy.
The cerebellum is busy turning all of our thoughts—imagine when you’re learning to ride a bike. You’ve watched everybody else; you know what to do, it’s obvious what you’ve got to do. You get on the bike and you fall off; you’re thinking very hard at this point, and the harder you think about how to pedal, how to balance, how hard to lean over, oh my goodness, the processing is so involved, you keep falling off. But what those coders are now doing in the cerebellum is looking at what you’re thinking, what you’re trying to do, looking at the mistakes you’re making, and creating a program and debugging a program that eventually ends up as a completely perfect program that you don’t have to think about. It parks it up here in the cortex, and then you can ride. In fact, you can only ride a two-wheel bike when you don’t have to think about it because the processing speed when you have to think is about 100,000 times slower than it is when it’s up in the cortex. That’s how important the cerebellum is. All of those things that you are natural at are because the part of the cerebellum responsible for developing that process or skill is itself highly developed.
How to train your cerebellum. I guess the next question is, what can someone do to train the cerebellum, to beef it up?
When my daughter attempted to take her life, that was the very question I put to Professor Nicholson up in Sheffield. He said, “Well, nobody’s ever done it, unless you want to take drugs.” I said no, I don’t want to give her drugs. “I’m sure there must be a way of naturally, permanently developing the cerebellum.” He said, “Well, this is just a hunch. I think it’s anything you do repetitively, and I think you’ve got to involve the vestibular system, the balance organ.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Do exercises challenging the cerebellum and stimulating the vestibular?” “Probably.” That was enough. Within months, I’d taken on literally hundreds of staff, all researching how to do this. In our first cohort, we had over 40,000 people—all with 40,000 different brains—needing completely personalized ways of stimulating their cerebellum.
The stimulation that works is a combination of two exercises. We’ve not tried to patent this, because it’s too important for the world, but if you make someone do some difficult vestibular stimulation—and that’s spinning around, jumping up and down, going from side to side—and do that at the same time as challenging the cerebellum, in other words getting the cerebellum to do something that it doesn’t normally have to do, so there’s no automaticity… The one that caught me out for a long time—an exercise we built into our programs—I had to stand on one leg, shut my eyes, and put my head on one shoulder. That took me weeks to sort out. But when I was doing that, I wasn’t just improving complex balance; I was actually developing the very bit of the cerebellum that learns. Those same circuits that control balance and coordination also act as learning circuits. They’re the fundamental piece of the coders’ work to learn whatever it is. I came to your studio today; if I had to come again, I’d walk straight here. I wouldn’t have to ring you up and say, “Alex, where are you, mate?” because I’ll have learned it tonight during my REM sleep—my rapid eye movement sleep. Tonight, all of the things I learned, all of the sensory inputs, become coordinated by the cerebellum and turned into a memory that will last. That’s the role of the cerebellum. So improving your balance and coordination actually improves your ability to learn all sorts of different skills and processes.
If someone starts doing these exercises, say the one you just mentioned—standing on one leg, closing your eyes, tilting your head to the side—how often does one have to do something like that, and over what time frame would you expect to see a difference to your cognitive ability?
That’s a good question. Well, everybody’s brain is different. Different parts of the cerebellum are developed at different places; therefore, the sensory stimulation you need has to be enough so you notice it, but not too much that it causes a problem or nausea. So everybody’s program, I’m afraid, has to be totally individualized. I would love to create a one-size-fits-all that suits everybody’s brain, but everybody’s brain is totally different, so you have to customize it and adjust it every day so that you’re always optimally stimulating the different parts of the cerebellum so that the density of gray matter increases.
What was interesting: only a few years ago, Nature (the journal) published an article saying that if you combine stimulation to the vestibular and an exercise that challenges the cerebellum, you multiply stem cells in the cerebellum and in the hippocampus. The two key junction boxes that cause us to learn in the brain are flooded with stem cells. How exciting is that? I couldn’t sleep for days when I heard that, because it explained why we were doing so successfully what we were doing.
Could you go back a bit there? What are you combining the exercise with to create that new effect?
To change the cerebellum, you have to do two things: one, stimulate your vestibular system—you must be doing something that’s forcing your balance organ to work—so standing on one leg is a classic example. There are various different things you can do: you can jump up and down and be turning around in a circle. Different people need different things. The vestibular system seems to increase neuroplasticity; we’re collecting a lot of evidence on that. It certainly appears to be the case, and the Nature article suggests it is the case. The challenge to the cerebellum says, “Okay, we’ve got neuroplasticity, we’ve got all the key elements, we’ve got the stem cells, we’ve got everything we need to make important new connections in this all-important part of the brain—the cerebellum.” So that combination of two exercises creates the neuroplasticity and gives the stimuli to change the very part of the brain that is the mastermind for developing and learning
In all of the cerebellums that you’ve studied, have you noticed the connection between the cerebellum and intelligence?
That’s an interesting question. I think the world has got intelligence totally wrong. In fact, I started a new examination board for a while—I didn’t know what to do when my daughter attempted to take her life, so I bought a school at the time initially. I started an examination board because I said the world isn’t measuring intelligence properly; we’re measuring regurgitation in the main. Regurgitation is not intelligence at all. I started this research into the brain, but it wasn’t long before I realized that what we were calling or thinking of as intelligence—and we still do to this day—if someone does really well in exams… There’s some wonderful research in America on the valedictorian candidates who had huge success in school. Typically, they have very poor success in life—very average. They do okay, but it’s the kids with the neurodiversity who suddenly become the hugely creative ones in life. How crazy is that?
So we’ve got an education system that prides itself on how many exams can we get these children to pass, and we ignore the creativity. Employers, of course, realize, “I want someone that can solve problems. I want someone that can think outside the box. I want someone that can be so obsessed with something they see the things that nobody else sees.” What are they doing? They’re making connections that others don’t make. If you have an education system that’s all about training you to regurgitate, it doesn’t encourage creativity at all. In fact, it’s the opposite. It discourages creativity. Fortunately, the kids with neurodiversity, with ADHD symptoms and so on, in the main, they’re so determined to do it their way that they do it their way, but we kill an awful lot of creativity. To me, the bottom line is: making connections that others don’t make is the true sign of intelligence.
I’m fascinated about the tests that you’ve done on people to understand the cerebellum. How many people have you tested, and what are the tests to find out more about the cerebellum and ADHD?
We’ve tested well over 50,000. I’ve lost track now of how many we’ve tested, but there are some very good tests that measure, for instance, mental capacity, things like auditory working memory, auditory processing speed, visual working memory, visual processing speed, your reaction time, your response time. Psychologists and neuroscientists around the world use these all the time. We’ve built them into games so reliably and quickly and effortlessly you can actually see where someone’s strengths are and where their limitations are. It’s reliable, so there’s an awful lot of people that still think ADHD is just a fad. No, it’s not. You can do neurological tests and say categorically whether someone’s got a neurological reason why reading is hard work or concentration is hard work.
Remember I said the processing speed of the cortex is about 100,000 times faster than the thinking brain. Folks with neurodiversity have some things they don’t do naturally that they have to work hard at, and when they’re doing that, it’s 100,000 times slower than up here. That’s why you fall off your bike; that’s why you can’t concentrate for long. If a child has, say, poor auditory processing, when they’re listening in class, after ten minutes they’ve done 1,000 times as much work as the other children in the class will do all day. So no wonder they’re exhausted, no wonder they can’t concentrate, no wonder they’re looking out of the window or fiddling with their pencil and distracting others. These aren’t choices that they have. I just want to make clear there are undeniable neurological measures, neurological reasons why neurodiversity exists. If anybody still thinks—be it a parent or teacher or whoever—that this is just naughty boy or naughty girl syndrome, look at the science, because you will very quickly change your mind and realize these children don’t have a choice. They’re behaving the way they are because they are wired to behave the way they are.
Say you fast forward 50 years from now. What research do you think would have been done on the cerebellum that might shed light on ADHD? In other words, if budget wasn’t an issue, if you had all the resources in the world, what research would you like to do on the cerebellum today?
Well, I’m beginning to work with a very famous UK university that came to me saying, “We’ve been watching your research, and one of the things we want to do is some fMRI studies,” because if you show with pictures this is what’s happening in the mind of a child or an adult with ADHD, and this is what you can do that just takes a matter of weeks, and you change the fundamental neurological processing in the brain—it becomes much calmer, much more structured, much more organized; emotions are far calmer. That’s the kind of research that could be done given unlimited budgets and time. I live with the dream that we will change the way we look at people with neurodiversity. If we were totally logical and sensible about it, we would look at them, look at all of these symptoms, and say, “Hey, they’ve got this huge flag saying massive potential—come and discover it,” instead of focusing on all their negatives. The wonderful Ned Hallowell that you did an amazing interview with just recently, Alex—he’s been pushing this idea of “VAST” for a long time, and I can see why. He’s saying all the people that come to him are hugely talented, in most cases. Not always, but nearly every case, hugely talented, yet they’ve been slammed down, hammered down, in their school life. Some, fortunately, emerge into adult life and discover their true potential, but if we thought of these children as vast potential instead of ADHD—what an insult: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. “Disorder,” and these are the people that are brightest and the best. These are the people that are changing the world, and yet we insult them with a term like ADHD. I agree with Ned. I want to ban the term. I want to call everybody VAST. I got a different acronym to him. My acronym is “Very Attention, Stunning Talent.” That’s my dream; that’s my vision of where we’ve got to get this. We’ve got to do it in the next decade. Too many are struggling, too many commit suicide, too many end up with mental health issues, and that ends up in dementia. If a brain is worrying 100,000 times harder than it should, of course it’s going to wear out early.
It is sad, isn’t it? You get a young child getting diagnosed, and they might be brilliant, they might be creative, resourceful at home, doing amazing things, and they get a diagnosis, they go on the internet, and they read that they’re “disordered” at a young age. It’s heartbreaking.
It is. It’s a disgrace, and it’s because the education system has not kept up with neuroscience. Neuroscience around this has been there for many years. The cerebellum—when I first started working on the cerebellum 25 years ago, there were only two professors I could find that were really focused on it; now there are loads. If you look at the graph of what’s happened with research papers, the research papers have just gone up exponentially in the last 15 years. More and more people are realizing, do you know what, the cerebellum has got the clue to mental health. When we use the term mental health, we think of it in a negative light; when we use the term physical health, immediately we’re thinking, “Let’s do some more exercises, let’s eat properly, and we will get stronger,” and you can actually get stronger far more than you naturally would have done if you hadn’t taken the trouble to go to the gym a lot and eat a lot of healthy food. We’ve got the concept that physical health can be enhanced. When we think about mental health, it’s totally different. We assume there’s a glass ceiling; whatever we were born with, that’s the best it’s going to be, and what will probably happen is we’ll have various mental health issues—a bit of depression, a bit of anxiety, a bit of ADHD—and that mental health goes down. In other words, we’ve got no vision of the upside potential. Now we know what we know about the cerebellum, we can think about mental health in exactly the same way as we can think about physical health: do the right things, stimulate it in the right way, you can grow your brain, you can become more intelligent, you can increase your mental capacity and strength to the point that you can feel on top of what life is throwing at you. Isn’t that a brilliant solution to anxiety, to depression, to ADHD symptoms? All of the symptoms of neurodiversity are to do with when the brain has run out of mental capacity to do whatever it is properly, so you’re not unnatural at it.
If we can take steps to flex and improve our cerebellum, can an injured cerebellum cause ADHD? In other words, if we had an accident, a head injury, and the cerebellum is injured, can it cause traits that we associate with ADHD?
It will cause different traits. The whole development process is like laying bricks: there’s layer upon layer upon layer of skill and competence and processes. That’s a process you can replicate and you can plug the gaps if there’s been a missing element. Autism, for instance, is far more complex than ADHD, and sometimes you’ve got to put in several layers of new development because several layers of development have missed out. But in the case of injury—road traffic accidents or sporting injuries or whatever—then that’s a different scenario. Is it possible to repair it? Yes, it is, because the brain naturally is very good at finding other parts of the brain that can replicate the processes that originally were carried out there. It’s really useful to have levels of neuroplasticity if you’re trying to do that. We are working now, in fact, with Medicare in America. Medicare Part B is funding people—seniors—to do the program, to recover balance, recover memory, and recover all aspects of cognition and confidence. That is already happening. So is it possible to repair later on? Yes. I didn’t believe it was, but my mentor at Sheffield said, “I’m doing a research study on it,” and he’s published it. It’s fantastic what he was achieving. Recovery is possible. If we wanted to do a study on road traffic accidents, we’d need 20 accidents all with exactly the same 20 injuries so we could do a study. That’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. Is it theoretically possible? Absolutely.
It is fascinating, and I want to talk about some truly shocking new findings that have come up in some new research, but first, Winford, I want to draw attention back to your ADHD item just quickly and find out what the explanation is for your Post-it notes.
Oh Alex, it’s so embarrassing, but this isn’t just me. Folk that are highly creative, if you’ve got a firehose of ideas coming to you—every phone conversation you have, every discussion you have triggers more of that firehose just pouring ideas—where does it go? It goes into this thinking brain, which easily gets full. You have to do something with it. So if you’re ADHD and you’ve got a big firehose, you need Post-it notes. Thank God for Post-it notes. You scribble something down because it’s freeing up a bit of memory in your thinking brain. Post-it notes are an extension of my whole crazy thinking brain across my desk. I often get to the end of the week, on a Saturday morning when the phones have stopped ringing, I go through my Post-it notes and half of them I can’t even read. They were great at the time; I got something out of my thinking brain to give me enough space to focus on the next shiny object I wanted to focus on. So Post-it notes—if you see a lot of Post-it notes, especially if they’re random, you’ve probably got some neurodiverse symptoms. The organized people, of course, the accountants and the lawyers and the civil servants and the teachers and so on, they’ll have collected their few ideas in a structured book, an action list, which they will systematically go down. Do you know how many times I’ve tried to create a systematized action list in my life? It’s ridiculous. I’ve never had… I’m useless at running businesses, so I always find people that are structured and organized. I’ve never had, for instance, a management meeting two weeks running—never in my life. I’ve always had, “We need a management meeting,” so we have a management meeting, get the team together, have a lovely time. “We’ll have another one next Tuesday.” There’s always a reason why that doesn’t happen. So the structure in my life is absurd, but fortunately I’ve got an amazing team; they understand that. They just use me as a firehose of ideas, and they discard some and use others, but my desk is Post-it notes. It’s just a true reflection of that endless stream of ideas that I’ve got no capacity for. We’ve only got room for about seven things in our thinking brain, and as we get older that goes down. So if you get the eighth thing come along, it goes on a Post-it note, and the ninth and the tenth and the eleventh, and they’re all over my desk randomly, nothing like as tidy as yours.
I relate to that a lot. I’ve tried buying notebooks and writing ideas down or using an electronic calendar, but as soon as it’s in the calendar or the notebook, it gets shut and forgotten about. I have this huge whiteboard now. I’ve mentioned this quite a few times on my desk, and things that come into my mind, similar to your Post-it notes, they go on the whiteboard. Not perfect, but it’s a lot better than putting it in a notebook, which gets shut and therefore ceases to exist in my mind.
How many of your Post-it notes do you actually action, and what percentage of them just kind of float off into the ether?
My housekeeper always takes the Post-it notes out of my bin in case I’ve missed them, thrown them away accidentally, when she empties my bin twice a week. I would say of the ones I write down, probably less than half actually get actioned.
Do you think the ones you don’t action are a sign that they probably weren’t a good fit for your brain anyway?
Well, what folk with neurodiversity do—they’re always reprioritizing, always, most of them don’t know what they’re doing in a day. They wake up in the morning and decide what they’re doing when they get downstairs. There’s a lot of reprioritization going on, and they’re very good at it. We’re very good at it, because as you get a new idea, you rank that somewhere: “Oh, I’ve got to do that now.” I had one this morning—can I mention what it is? We’re talking about doing retreats for people, because there are some wonderful retreats out there, and I was talking to my son. He was saying, “Look, I had agoraphobia,” and he said people with agoraphobia don’t want to go to retreats. So I said, “Right, great.” Suddenly, I’d been looking at anxiety and ADHD and divorce and all sorts of wonderful ideas—high-functioning anxiety—a whole long list of ideas. Suddenly agoraphobia went to the top of the list, and it’s still there now. To me that is a burning issue. On the train down and on the train back I’ll be obsessed with how do we reach people through a virtual retreat with agoraphobia, because they can’t go and see therapists. They don’t want to leave the house to see their doctor; they think they’re going to die. It’s a terrible condition. So that was today’s example of what went to the top of my list, and of course everything else gets pushed down the list. What was really important yesterday is now ranking third or fourth in my list. It’s the unpredictability.
I find when something is going to pop to the top of that priority list, I could be working in my office and I decide I want a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee is now at the top, so I go into the kitchen, I put the kettle on, but then I see a parcel that got delivered in the morning. Suddenly that parcel is now above the coffee. The coffee gets forgotten about, and it continues—side quest after side quest. Everything just has a way of working itself out, and you get to the end of the day and there’s been a lot of productivity that’s happened, and maybe the stuff that hasn’t happened wasn’t actually that important.
You’ve actually raised a very important point, because the way those with neurodiversity make decisions is very interesting. Remember I said earlier on that when the cerebellum has some parts that aren’t fully developed, you end up with some skills that you’re not a natural at—but you need them all the time. So your thinking brain is very busy looking after those skills. If it’s eye tracking or auditory processing, we need both of those now. If we’ve got those limitations, our thinking brain is full of stuff that shouldn’t be there. The thinking brain is precious—it might be slow, but it’s precious space—because it’s where we rationalize, it’s where we make decisions, it’s where we control our emotions, it’s where we control impulsivity and inhibitory control, and so on. It’s the boss of the brain. If it’s pretty full with stuff that shouldn’t be there, this is the space where we make decisions. We’ve got problems. When I make an important decision like I saw a packet of chocolates over there—the battle starts. When my brain is busy, I can only think about my immediate need. I can’t also find space in my thinking brain to think, “Actually, I’ve made a commitment that I’m going to lose five kilos in the next three months.” I haven’t got space for that, so guess what—I eat the chocolate. So you can have a degree of impulsivity because you haven’t got the room to take in the other factors you should be thinking about. You just take in the most important.
But there’s, I think, an even worse situation. Some with neurodiversity have real issues around procrastination; some do, especially those with high levels of anxiety. If you’ve got a lot of anxiety, your thinking brain is full of emotions and helping out with those skills you’re not a natural at. You end up not being able to make a decision at all. These are the kind of neurological clues people can get about why they are the way they are. Every single symptom of neurodiversity can be explained by the degree of development, or not, of the cerebellum, the amount of mental capacity you’ve got in your prefrontal cortex, in your thinking brain, or not. That explains all of the symptoms. It also gives us clues about why there is a high level of creativity, why there is the ability to think outside the box, because from a child onwards you’ve been forced to do that at times, so it becomes a natural thing to do in life.
Having lots of things to do and therefore almost being too overwhelmed to do anything, like you mentioned, it’s almost like a paralysis of thought—overwhelm until… I mean, certainly the case with me sometimes. I know I’ve got 10 things to do in a day, so I won’t do anything until one of them—and Ned mentioned this—until one of them comes into your “now,” which creates that urgency, which activates the adrenaline, which makes you do the thing. How to create urgency to beat overwhelm paralysis: how can you replicate that urgency, create an artificial deadline, in order for you to get over that procrastination hump, cut through that overwhelm paralysis?
The only way of doing that successfully—you can do it artificially, of course, with notepads and all sorts of reminders and a secretary badgering you what to do. But if you want to do it naturally, the only way that I’ve found you can do it is by freeing up space in your thinking brain—free up your prefrontal cortex. Until that’s free, you’re going to be constantly overwhelmed. This is where overwhelm is—this is your mental capacity. If this is full, it’s full. You’ve run out of mental capacity. You’re not going to feel on top of what life is throwing at you. You’ve got nowhere to organize, you’ve got nowhere to make quality decisions, you’ve got nowhere to control your emotions and impulsivity, and so on.
I’m convinced that with ADHD, effort needs to go into working on your self-awareness and building up an understanding of what you’re genuinely passionate about, because I think when someone with ADHD discovers that, they can become world-beating, world-class. I discovered it with this podcast, and I think the podcast is doing well, but other things in my life—like, you don’t want to see my flat. It’s a genuine state; I can’t clean my clothes most days. But something that I’m passionate about can go well, and I genuinely believe that’s the case with so many people with ADHD: they just haven’t figured out what their true intrinsic motivations are.
Well, if your thinking brain is pretty full, you’ve only got room for one thing. It’s the most important, that’s going to get there and have all the priority.
Winford, I want to do The ADHD agony aunt (The washing machine of woes), which is the washing machine of woes—the ADHD Agony Aunt section. Every week I ask my Instagram community for an ADHD woe of theirs, and I put it in the washing machine because my item is the washing machine, because I always leave my clothes in the machine. I ask everyone: do you leave your laundry in the machine?
I don’t know.
Okay, I’ve never had that answer before. You don’t know?
My housekeeper does it.
Of course, yes, I thought so.
I wouldn’t know.
Not a relevant question then. God, that’s the hack, isn’t it, hire a house cleaner if you can afford it, I guess.
I’ve never had to look in the washing machine for my clothes. I don’t know; it’s magic. They’re always in my wardrobe and drawers; they just appear. Yeah, I do put dirty washing in the washing basket. I don’t know how it gets back.
Well, I do mine myself, but maybe I need to do that, because I always forget mine and it stinks of damp, then you have to wash it again and wash it again. Although I have been using the Teemo app and I have been getting a bit better, but it’s still a bit of a nightmare for me.
Well, there is a solution.
Do you want to do the washing machine first?
No, desperate, because honestly it’s a problem.
The solution is to create more capacity in your prefrontal cortex. How do you do that? You drive the development of the cerebellum. If you do that in the right way, using the stimulations we’ve talked about, and do it systematically—10 minutes a day for about 90 days—you can transform the cerebellum, and you transform it permanently. In the same way as when you learn to ride a bike, you can not ride a bike for 20 years, you’ve still got that skill there. That’s the beauty of the cerebellum. Remembering your phone number might be easy if I ring you every week, but if I didn’t ring you for six months, I’d have probably forgotten it. That’s the hippocampus; that’s a different learning process. But the cerebellum—when the cerebellum learns and the cerebellum develops, it is lasting. So the transformation you can get by stimulating the cerebellum so it develops, then it naturally completes the development of the various skills and processes that weren’t fully automatized before. That removes the need for the thinking brain to act as your conscious compensation. So the skills get better, but equally as importantly, it frees up space in your thinking brain. Suddenly you’ve got peace. There’s nothing greater than peace. So if you can develop your cerebellum and clear out your thinking brain so that you’ve got peace, that gives you the space to be organized, the chance to be on top of your emotional control, the chance to make better decisions and control impulsivity, and so on.
Winford, I want to read the woe that’s in the washing machine this week. Someone has asked: “My daughter has low self-esteem due to below-average exam results. She’s bright in other ways, but exams aren’t for her. What’s the best way to deal with a situation like this, when she’s still got many years of the school system to go through?”
Wow, that’s a beautiful question, and I feel really sorry for her daughter. But let me talk you through what’s going on. Why has she done badly in exams? One of the problems when you’ve got any form of neurodiversity is the thinking brain is full of stuff that shouldn’t be there. This is the working table for your working memory. If this is full, it’s really hard for you to find space to search in your mind to bring back the information you need to pass an exam. Many people with neurodiversity will go through the exam and be uptight: “Oh no, I know this, I know this!” Then they walk out of the exam and they remember it, but they don’t get scored for it. And bear in mind, they’re not getting scores for their creativity, which is cruel and unfair; they’re only getting scores for their regurgitation, and that’s not their best skill. So that’s the first thing: children with neurodiversity don’t get scored properly because their memory recall isn’t as good as it should be. Do they know it? Very often yes, not always, but very often. They don’t actually get it down on paper, so they don’t get scored for it.
The next point is an interesting one: self-esteem, confidence—I see as neurological, not psychological. Whatever you’re doing requires a lot of thinking brain activity; the busier this is, the lower your self-esteem is. Think of athletes: when they’re in the zone, they’re not thinking at all, and that’s their highest confidence, because their skills are automatized, they’re consistent, they’re precise. They’re in the zone—that means they’re not having to think about anything. But those with neurodiversity have some skills they need to use all the time, so their thinking brain is constantly full of stuff that shouldn’t be there. The more that’s happening here, the lower your confidence is. Conversely, when you develop the cerebellum, when you get rid of the conscious compensation processes that are taking place there and you free up capacity, self-esteem goes up. We’ve just done a wonderful study up in the north of England in Sefton Council. The results have just been analyzed; all these children that did the program, their self-belief, their confidence, their happiness went through the roof, because we were freeing up space in their prefrontal cortex. So there is hope for her daughter. A) She probably knows it. B) She’s probably very much brighter than anyone’s giving her credit for. C) There’s logic as to why her self-esteem is low.
That’s brilliant. I’m no doubt that’s going to be so reassuring for them to hear.
What are some of the biggest studies, most shocking findings that you or other scientists have done in search for more information about what ADHD actually is?
What is ADHD? ADHD are symptoms that are created by underdevelopment of the cerebellum. I totally disagree with the whole diagnosis process. We’ve got a diagnosis process that focuses on the negative—all the negatives—and it’s totally unbalanced, totally cruel, totally unfair, and doesn’t take anybody forward. The best it does is say, “You know what, you qualify for some medication.” Okay, I’m not against medication because some absolutely need it, but it doesn’t take them one step closer to the root cause. We now know what the root cause is and what we can do about it to find this potential. I dream, I pray for the day when we stop using ADHD and we start using Ned’s term VAST, and we treat these people properly, and we put them through a school process where we get rid of the negative things that are a challenge and focus and develop all of the positive things. We would treat them with huge respect. At the moment, ADHD… “Oh no, he’s got ADHD.” We should be saying, “He’s got VAST potential.” Same child, just a different attitude, and a much more realistic attitude.
So do you take ADHD seriously as a diagnosis?
Not really, because I would say some people are just so bright, they’re so nurtured and supported at school and so on, that there is more emphasis. There’s an awful lot of folk with obvious ADHD symptoms—look at my desk, look at people’s desks with loads of Post-it notes and messy desks. There’s a lot of it about, and it just depends on which experts have you been taken to, which school did you go to, did your parents badly want you to be labeled or not. So there are all sorts of variables. It is not a consistent diagnosis. The numbers are going up, but I think that’s largely driven by the fact that teachers are quite happy to see children with medication because it dumbs down their creativity, takes them to a lower level so they’re more manageable. It doesn’t do anything to encourage their creativity. I think there are all sorts of dynamics going on. I think it was a concept that was developed way before the neuroscience was understood. It needs tearing up now and starting again. Let’s have a positive approach. Don’t call it “diagnosis.” If someone is in Mensa, you don’t call it a diagnosis—they qualify to be in Mensa. I want folk to qualify to be described as VAST potential.
We go back to your daughter. You mentioned that she’s now free from some of her dyslexia.
Well, for instance, she would have been diagnosed as ADHD and dyslexic and possibly even slightly autistic, I don’t know. But within months, she was reading and writing. We didn’t have to teach her; all we did was make the connections in the cerebellum, so the cerebellum could naturally finish off the skills. Her problem was severe eye tracking, terrible eye tracking, and that’s the case with many who struggle with reading—high intelligence, struggling with one particular skill. We sorted that out. She’s been able to read and write ever since, with no more teaching. This isn’t teachers’ fault, it isn’t parents’ fault, it’s a neurological limitation caused by some trauma very early on in life.
You mentioned that 97% of people that partake in your cerebellum exercises see improvements. Why are 3% not affected by them?
Well, do we want to focus on the 3% or the 97%? There are all sorts of other things going wrong. We have a full analysis of anybody that’s clearly doing the exercises and not making the progress. There are other forms of general developmental delay which can stop fundamentals taking place, and very often it is that folk have improved but not enough to be taken out of the category they originally had. Of course, we’ve got no complete control over whether they’re doing the exercises and activities properly. If they do it in a school, the teachers are supervising them, and more and more schools are thinking this is a really good idea—to repair the holes in the buckets before we try filling the buckets. When it’s in school, we get more reliable results.
Who have you been working with, and what have they taught you about ADHD that you didn’t already know?
Well, Ned Hallowell has been quite an inspiration. I met Ned over 20 years ago and actually worked with his wife and son, which he’s gone public on, and he taught me a lot about the traditional beliefs. But of course, he’s cynical towards the traditional beliefs, and of course now he wants to see far more natural solutions being added into the mix. Obviously, he’s a psychiatrist—he’s not against medication—but he is saying more and more of his clients are saying, “We don’t want medication, we want to find a natural solution.” He has taught me—in fact, he pointed out to me initially and taught me in great detail—the awesome nature of the positives of those with ADHD. I’ve learned a lot from Ned. I’ve learned a lot from Jeremy scharman; he’s done some amazing research, and it was his work that led me to understand exactly how I believe all of the symptoms of neurodiversity can be explained by the cerebellum and the impact that has on our thinking brain, our prefrontal cortex. So Rod Nicholson, Jeremy scharman, and Ned Hallowell—those have been my biggest mentors.
A lot of our listeners will have digested, consumed a lot of the traditional information on ADHD that’s out there. What have your studies taught you about ADHD that our audience might be shocked by?
Well, I think they’ll be shocked to hear many of the things we’ve shared tonight, because if you look at the neuroscience of what’s happening, it fits together. Guess why? Because it works. It does explain the root cause, it does explain that if you develop the cerebellum, all of these symptoms start to subside. We’re never going to get rid of the huge creativity, nor do we want to. Of course we want to let that blossom and flourish, but we do get rid of many of the limitations. We do particularly get rid of the limitations in the prefrontal cortex, which gives you more organization, a bit more peace, more control over your emotions, and impulsivity. So all of these things fit together. The bigger shock to me has been why hasn’t this reached the educational establishment? Why hasn’t somebody at government level taken this up and said, “Do you know what, the impact at the economic level is huge?” My focus is, of course, the impact at the human level, the individual’s level, but at government level, they should also be hugely impressed by the fact that if we did this to our school population, the transformation in the cost of educating, in the level of unemployment, in the level of mental health issues, would be massive. If you can create mental strength, why wouldn’t you? We’ve got a mental health service that’s fantastic, works very hard, but we haven’t got enough resources. I’m a director of a big charity in America, and the statistics on the number of children self-harming, the number of children committing suicide, the number of children missing school through high levels of anxiety is scary. It’s got so much worse in these last few years. Why is nobody looking outside of the box? Why aren’t educationalists talking to neuroscientists and saying, “Can’t you do something about this?” The answers are there; the explanation is clear. It’s just the word isn’t getting to people.
Is a person with ADHD keeping all of their strengths and losing their downsides a realistic outcome? If we do these exercises, we work on the cerebellum, is it possible to just see a downtick in the negative traits that we associate with ADHD without the positives being affected? In other words, is it realistic for somebody to keep all of the positives of ADHD while simultaneously losing all the negatives?
Absolutely. We don’t increase the creativity, but we do increase the mental capacity so that you can use it more. You can structure your output more, you can do more with it, you can be more organized. We don’t need to increase the fundamental creativity. The perceived intelligence will go up because you’ll be able to use it far more—whether it’s in exams because your memory recall is improved and you control your emotions, you don’t get so worked up, you don’t get so anxious walking into exams. You’re feeling on top of it because you’ve got more mental capacity, so you’ll come across as being more eloquent, more educated, because your regurgitation will be better. No, don’t expect that we’re going to create creativity that’s already there in those with neurodiversity. We just allow it to flourish and be used.
Ultimately, Winford, why was it important for you to come on here today and talk about ADHD?
Because I watched my own daughter suffer, and I’ve met countless other families whose children have suffered. I meet people—I know, walking here, I had to walk around several people in the street who were homeless—nearly all of those have got signs of neurodiversity. The pain I see people in, the pain I see families in… It’s not just what the child has to go through at school or what the adult has to go through during life, it’s bad enough, but the family is also affected. Parents of a child with neurodiversity lose sleep; they feel guilty. I still feel guilty that I haven’t done everything I could for my own daughter, and she’s now 50 years of age. I still feel it. It affects the whole of their lives. I want her, and I want everyone like her, to have the richest possible life. That’s why I came on today. Thank you—you reach a lot of people, and I sincerely hope that what I’ve shared today is going to make sense, is going to encourage some to say, “You know what, I’m going to be a warrior parent.” The education authority may not have picked up on this yet—maybe it’ll take another generation, who knows, I hope it doesn’t. The last generation suffered needlessly because this has been around for more than a generation. So if parents are listening to this, be a warrior parent. Don’t delegate to the school hoping they’re going to find the problem, find the solution, and apply it. They haven’t got the time, they haven’t got the resources, and in many cases they’re not even allowed to think about it, let alone do it. So, I’m afraid for now it’s going to be warrior parents, but eventually there’ll be enough warrior parents who’ll have influence on policy and change those policies. When that happens, my job will be done, but not until. No.
It’s truly interesting, Winford, and thank you for coming on. I think it’s important to share and to look at it with a different perspective, because it might just plant the seed in a listener who can then go away and implement what you’re saying and just look at the whole situation through a fresh perspective.
We have a closing tradition, a letter from the previous guest, Winford, and that is for me to deliver a letter from the previous guest. The previous guest wrote three rules to live by. I’m going to deliver it to you, and if you could be so kind as to read them out:
“Three rules to live by:
Wow, that’s amazing advice. Who was that?
I think 95% sure that was Joe Perkins, who is a psychologist.
Wow, that’s deep and brilliant advice. “Know yourself and nurture your potential”—well, we’ve talked tonight about the fact that there is huge potential. Every symptom of ADHD is an absolute sign there can be growth and development take place in the brain, which will show as your hidden potential. So many people are told, “Oh, you’ve got potential,” but nobody ever says, “And this is where it’s hiding, and this is what you’ve got to do to find it.” Well, I’m hoping tonight those two questions will be answered.
The next one: “Find something you are passionate about and engage fully”—that’s finding a purpose. That’s a thrill. Far too few people in this life have a purpose. When you’ve got a purpose, you know why you’re on this planet, why it makes a difference. And of course, folk with ADHD, in the main, they are more inclined than others—neurotypical—to have a purpose, to have a passion, and commit to it. So that’s great advice.
And “Surround yourself with people who you trust and you can be yourself with”—well, if anyone’s cynical about ADHD, they’re not welcome in my house. It’s a true problem with an amazing solution and an amazing potential—amazing opportunities.
Absolutely. And I’ll ask you if you’re kind enough to write your rules to live by after this one on every Post-it note.
That’s 100%.
Winford, thank you so much.
Alex, thank you. You’re an amazing host. Thank you.
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