Johann Hari

Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”

She said, “Of over two hundred pesticides on the market in Europe, about two-thirds affect either brain development or thyroid hormone signaling.”
When monkeys are exposed to the same level of the common pollutant polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as humans currently are, they develop serious problems with their working memory and mental development. A team of scientists studied the
amount of
a pollutant named bisphenol A, or BPA—which is used to coat 80 percent of metal cans—that mothers are exposed to. They found that exposure to the chemical predicts which of them will have kids with behavior problems.

It sometimes seems like the same story that played out with lead is now happening with other attention-damaging chemicals. The industries that profit from using them fund the vast majority of the research into them; they systematically promote doubt about the possible harms; and they argue that if there’s any doubt at all about the danger of their products, they should be allowed to carry on using them.

He told me that at the moment, “chemicals are assumed to be innocent until study after study shows they’re toxic.” So if you want to put a product on the market containing a new chemical, you can use whatever you want, and, in the years that follow, poorly funded scientists have to scramble to figure out if it’s safe. “That’s because who’s calling the shots? Industry.”

“There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” It’s possible that a hundred years from now, when they look back at us and ask why we struggled to pay attention, they will say, “They were surrounded by pollutants and chemicals that inflamed their brains and harmed focus. They walked around exposed to BPA and PCBs, and breathing in metals. Their scientists knew what it did to their brains and their ability to focus. Why were they surprised they struggled to pay attention?” Those people in the future will know whether, after learning this, we banded together to protect our brains—or whether we allowed them to continue to degrade.

it comes to our own attention problems as adults, we often readily acknowledge a whole range of influences on us—the rise of invasive technologies, stress, lack of sleep, and so on. But when our children face the same challenges, over the past twenty years we have been drawn to a starkly simple story: that this problem is largely the result of a biological disorder. I wanted to investigate this in depth.

With each passing year, the number of kids identified as having this problem has soared, to the point that in many parts of the South in the United States, 30 percent of boys are now diagnosed with ADHD by the time they turn eighteen.

This is a condition of ‘domestication,’ keeping horses in unnatural situations,” he told me. “If they’d never been put in a stall, and they’d never been subjected to that psychological pressure early on, they wouldn’t develop it.”

He said these horses are suffering from “frustrated biological objectives.” Horses want to roam and run and graze. When they can’t express their innate nature, their behavior and focus go awry, and they start to act out. He told me that “the pressure of having your biological objectives thwarted is such that it opens a Pandora’s box,” where you’ll try to find any behavior that will “alleviate this crushing psychological pressure or inability to do anything…. Horses spend about 60 percent of their time in the wild grazing, so it’s not surprising that one of the things that gives them release is a sort of fake grazing, which is what cribbing is.”

They’ve got all these instincts that are all intact, that they’re unable to utilize.