"...and by the twenty-sixth Saturday, we had to admit that none of us knew what the word meant," said the panel's chair. She asked that the panel not be named, because it does not have a name yet.
The panel formed after new thinking, reported in The New York Times, suggested A.D.H.D. may be less about attention and more about sustained engagement. Sustained engagement means staying with a thing. That is the whole definition. We checked it twice.
To show what A.D.H.D. is not about, the panel first had to define attention. This took twenty-six meetings. The sample size was the panel. There was no control group, because nobody could agree on what one would be controlling for.
The results are in. Attention is when you look at something. Engagement is when you keep looking. Interest is when you want to keep looking. Focus is attention with a better publicist. Past that point, every word was defined using another word on the list. By the final Saturday, the dictionary had become a circle. The effect was large, which in plain terms means it probably was not luck.
