Video games as a possible treatment?
Two American firms, Akili Interactive Labs Inc. of Boston, Massachusetts, and Brain Plasticity Inc.
of San Francisco, California, are working on developing video games meant to help children with ADHD to develop their focusing skills (their ability to staying focused) and their selective attention (retaining only the information, which is relevant for the task to accomplish).
The idea is to enter into the children's and adolescents' world, which is to a large degree virtual nowadays, and implant in these virtual worlds well-being oriented practices and elements meant to help the children to develop coping mechanisms and skills they lack. Having them use video games, an environment that is familiar to them, seems like a very interesting idea.
The skills to be developed
The most interesting section of the article published by EMaxHealth is, to me, the one dedicated to visual attention: "Dr. Bavelier discovered that players of fast-paced, action
video games outperform non-gamers in their visual-attention skills, or
the ability to concentrate visually on an object while ignoring
irrelevant information."
The definition given here to "visual-attention skills": "the ability to concentrate visually on an object while ignoring
irrelevant information" reminds me of the definition of mindfulness: "the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgementally to the unfolding of experiences moment by moment" (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).
The sight, vehicle of guided meditation for ADHD children?
The sense mainly used as the vehicle for mindfulness practice is hearing: most of the mindful activities suggested for instance in the book The Mindful Way Through Depression (except for the raisin activity maybe) are guided by Jon Kabat-Zinn's voice recorded on a CD. In the case of ADHD, it might be interesting to use another sense: the sight, since it is usually highly developed (their visual memory is often excellent) in children with ADHD and it seems that the sight is the main source of the potentially distracting information to them, information that can trigger them to shift the focus. Training their sight andtheir ability to stay focused could be an interesting field to investigate for mindful educators.