Autism Vox

Noise: Nice and Necessary?

by Kristina Chew, PhD on September 21st, 2007

A little noise is not necessarily a bad thing: Some noise, even high intensity broadband noise can help children with ADHD focus better. Today’s Developing Intelligence reports on a newly published study about stochastic resonance and ADHD by Göran B. W. Söderlund. My son Charlie does not have a diagnosis of ADHD in addition to autism; my husband Jim does have ADHD and he and I have noted some similarities in sensory and cognitive processing and attention.

42 children (21 with ADHD) between 9 and 12 years of age were tested in Söderlund’s study:

Interpreted loosely, the idea is that those with ADHD are chronically understimulated by both their environment and their internal cognitive representations, leading them to search almost incessantly for more stimulating things (environments or thoughts), which takes the behavioral form of distractibility. This chronic cognitive understimulation might be overcome by introducing additional noise to the cognitive system through the perceptual system.

To test this idea, 42 children (21 with ADHD) between 9 and 12 years of age completed both a low-load and a high-load memory task. These tasks were fairly unusual as memory tasks go: they involved subjects listening to a series of actions (and then performing them in the low-load condition) and then recalling them after a delay period. Each subject completed both task under conditions of no noise, or 80 db white noise.

The results showed that children with ADHD improved on their recall in the low-load task, whereas noise had no effect on the performance of healthy children. In contrast, on the high-load task, noise actually decreased recall performance of healthy children, and had no effect on ADHD children.

Charlie has been calling “turn on, turn on” when we’re in the car with a CD on (and these guys are his new favorite group, along with Jimi Hendrix). “Turn on” means (as Jim and I have figured out, through trial and error) “turn it up louder” (so we’ve been reminding Charlie to say “louder!”). Jim doesn’t seem to mind the music on at that decibel level, but I need to open the window—-Jim, as I’ve noted before, drove a taxi in 1970s New York city, and he has no trouble focusing amid the traffic, noise, general chaos. Charlie often hums, or warbles, or otherwise keeps up some kind of “buzz”: Noise need always be distracting, and perhaps helps him to focus more.

Good thing someone invented headphones.

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POSTED IN: Music, Neuroscience, Science, Sensory