Why Ritalin helps children with ADHD

There’s no way around it: methylphenidate – better known as Ritalin – is a stimulant in the same general category as cocaine. This leads to a seeming paradox: why would giving a stimulant to someone struggling with sustained attention help them to focus?

Although there continues to be much debate among researchers concerning the precise reasons for Ritalin’s beneficial impact, one compelling and likely mechanism concerns attention thresholds.

The world is an incredibly noisy place. All day we are constantly and continuously bombarded with sensations (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc) ...