The Boy With the Faster Brain by Peter Shankman (illustrations by Isabela Flores de Moura); ISBN 9788987-703601; 29 pages including resources; $13.99
SAN DIEGO – This is a third-person memoir written for children so they can understand the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that some of them and author Shankman share. It starts off with a boy named Peter getting in trouble for the umpteenth time in his classroom for telling a joke instead of reciting an answer to a question.
Peter’s father tells him that when he was a boy, he faced the same situation: having a brain that worked faster than those of neurotypical people. “Sometimes, we say things without thinking … it’s like our brains don’t really hear the part of us that says, ‘maybe we shouldn’t say that …’ and before we know it, we’ve said it, and then we get in trouble.”
The father offers an analogy between Peter’s brain and a super-fast sports car. If you press down on the accelerator without knowing how to drive, you’re bound to crash into something. But if you learn how to drive that super-fast car, you could become another Mario Andretti.
His mother takes Peter to a very cool psychologist named Lisa, who wears casual clothes and loves to play video games. Together Peter and Lisa explore his daydreaming and joking in class and what prompts him to behave in that fashion.
Lisa tells Peter there is nothing wrong with him. When something interests him, he can focus on it and learn it very quickly, but when subjects bore him, his brain tries hard to compensate – sometimes unhelpfully prompting him to tell jokes, or to speak out.
Eventually, Lisa and Peter find a technique that works for Peter. Whenever he feels himself too distracted, he walks, with the permission of his teacher, quietly to the back of the classroom and stands for a while. That action helps him control his brain better.
Cognitive behavioral therapy helps Peter learn how to change some ways that his brain works. He also utilizes such techniques for self-control as breathing and mindfulness exercises.
The therapeutic sessions with Lisa pay off. His teacher writes a note to his parents saying that Peter is “an entirely different student than he was at the beginning of the year … (H)e participates actively, he doesn’t interrupt, he listens and is clearly thinking before he speaks.”
Author Shankman, a member of the Jewish community, wrote in an afterword that his own ADHD was responsible for most of his success, which has included selling three companies and writing some best-selling books, including Faster than Normal, which has been used as an ADHD reference book.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com