Huxley's Doors of Perception and Attention Deficit Disorder

As I become ever more interested in psychological studies, I look back on novels I read that might be better understood at this point. One book I specifically ponder over is Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. When it was once a self-case-study sortof account of mescaline use, it now has significance for studies on attentional processes in the brain, as well as implications for those who truly suffer from ADD/ADHD.

I do not have the book sitting in front of me; I loaned it to someone (and we all know what that means-saying goodbye to a book for the sake of spreading the mystique). I remember the scribbles I made in the front cover, months after reading the book-not even seeing the connection between those and the typed words in the text. Among my chicken scratch I see words and phrases like "ADD," "adaptation," and "filter;" I then realized why it was Huxley's book in which I chose to write on this topic.

Perception is our subjective and unconscious interpretation of that which our senses communicate to our faculty. It is assumed that the objects offering sensations to Huxley are objectively available to all beings; it is his perception, under the influence of mescaline that is altered-that is, those sharing his surroundings saw the same carpet that he himself wondered at. The carpet had the same texture and pattern as it always did, but it was only now that Huxley attended to its every detail. The perceptual doors had been opened.

What does the title mean? To me, it refers to the filter in our minds; that which blocks out those observations that are useless to immediate survival and daily, functional progress-filter that is "deficient" in those correctly diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder.

The modern world poses contradictive demands on us all (of the Western world especially). Primal survival is no longer a predicament for constant worry and attention, while over stimulation puts unneeded demands on that residual filter in our minds. In this era, our minds might be better of adapting to ignore; oddly enough, those who have adapted in this way (be it through conditioning or neuro-evolution) might be the ones most fit for survival.

Perhaps Huxley self-inflicted ADD when ingesting the natural drug. The attentional filter opened its doors and let all sensations through for subjective interpretation. One stimulus became a whole world of stimuli as each feature was separately attended to. There was no room left to interpret anything but that rug (at that moment of the book). Psychologists take this stuff seriously.

In Sensation, Perception and Action class, we participated in an attentional searching procedure composed of two types: conjunction and feature search; the former is considered to be more difficult-this type being the one I was assigned to complete. I completed the online, computer-generated, randomized lab experiment and upon comparing results with others, found that I, the ADD kid, had the slowest reaction times of them all.

A conjunction search involves (in this experiment) locating the target stimulus (a green "O") among a pool of green and blue "X"s (the distracters); the target was absent on some trials and so responding accordingly lengthened reaction times (it takes longer to search for the absence of something compared to the presence of that thing). The feature search was no different except that there were only blue Xs to sift through in finding the green O. Both types were further complicated with an increasing number of distracters to confront. It is easy to see why a feature search is more simple and speedy to complete. Imagine a mescaline induced Aldous trying to locate that one green O without fighting the tendency to examine each and every of the 64 distracters separately-this lack of filtering ability is what us ADD kids deal with on a daily basis. For example, I might be looking at the "TBS" emblem on the corner of the TV rather than pay attention to the show that fills the entire screen. ADD-ed people are prescribed stimulant drugs because their brain activity is indeed slower in processing and moving on. Every hour seems only to have been five minutes (visa-versa if the scenery is uninteresting); there is always a sense of falling behind and going against the current of flushing stimuli while everyone else seems to float above the pressure.

It is not surprising that an increasing number of kids are being diagnosed as ADD (or ADHD-more commonly seen in boys). It seems ridiculous, I know, but is it really that hard to believe when the world we live in today is a detailed rug within a detailed rug, within a detailed rug...I myself was diagnosed at 18-so I had some time to suffer before receiving medication that might actually induce the exact opposite effect than does Aldous's mescaline. By no means should you take mescaline if you would like to gain a greater understanding of ADD; simply reading Huxley's Doors of Perception can make things much clearer.