Though we find it interesting that the concept of time plays a role in a variety of psychiatric issues,  we maintain that Ritalin is an absolute last resort.  Proper diet & nutrition,  removal of all food toxins (MSG/Aspartame/HFCS),  and an attempt to identify allergic reactions to foods & household chemicals should be the first line of action.

Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder might appear rowdy and indisciplined, but they are actually trying to cope with a faulty perception of time.

What to most of us seems like a short stretch of time would drag unbearably for someone with ADHD, says Katya Rubia of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Her team’s research, reported this week, adds to a growing body of evidence for the importance of time perception in a wide range of psychological disorders.

ADHD affects around 5 per cent of children globally, most of them boys. Studies relating to the disorder have focused on patients’ short attention spans and impulsive behaviour. But ADHD is characterised by a shortage of dopamine, which is known to affect time perception, so Rubia and her colleagues wanted to know if this was the source of the kids’ problems.

The researchers used MRI scans to show that 12 boys with ADHD had less activity than usual in the frontal lobe, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, all areas of the brain known to be crucial for time perception. These boys were also worse than 12 other boys at estimating how long circles appeared on a screen before vanishing.

When they were given the drug methylphenidate, aka Ritalin, which boosts dopamine levels and is used to treat ADHD, brain activity in the ADHD group became indistinguishable from that of the healthy boys. “Ritalin enhances brain regions that are important for time perception in ADHD children,” concludes Rubia. The results are published in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, which is devoted to time perception (DOI: link).

Rubia believes this is evidence that faulty time perception causes the major symptoms of ADHD, by making children perceive even short periods of inactivity as inordinately long and boring. Because novelty-seeking and risky behaviour increase dopamine levels, children with ADHD may be become hyperactive as a way of “self-medicating” with dopamine.

Catalin Buhusi of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston is an author of another paper in the themed issue of the journal. He says the results fit his own research on how intense activity or distraction warps our time perception, so that time appears to fly.

Buhusi’s theory is that when we are engaged in an intense task, the working memory required to execute it is too large to allow simultaneous tracking of time, so it appears to pass without us noticing. “We know that disruptions, distractions or plain simple fun have the ability to disrupt tracking of time in normal people,” he says. “I think ADHD children have even more of a problem with it.”

Researchers are realising that faulty time perception may be at the root of many more psychiatric disorders. People with depression experience time moving more slowly than usual, for example, while those with mania perceive it as passing much faster. Kwang-Hyuk Lee of the University of Sheffield, UK, showed earlier this year that people with schizophrenia experience varying time perception (Psychiatry Research vol 166, p 174). It is highly disorienting when someone’s internal perception doesn’t match up with cues from the outside world, says Lee. “Most psychiatric disorders are associated with a certain discrepancy between objective worldly time and subjective time,” he says. “At some point, patients would need to meet with reality.”

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/186474-Time-moves-too-slowly-for-hyperactive-boys