Working with ADHD

I have two adult students with ADHD, who take medication for their condition. I have had others in the past. ADHD appears to make it difficult for a singer to track multiple events at the same time, such as the piano part and their own vocal part during a song. The singer wanders off pitch, not because they can't hear their pitches but because they can't hear the relationship between their notes and the piano part. To hear the relationship, they have to be able to track both simultaneously, something the rest of us take for granted.

It's difficult to tell whether the inability to track simultaneous events is the condition itself or a result of compensatory habits developed in childhood in order to be effective in school; specifically, the habit of concentration. Concentration is the habit of blocking everything out except for the object of your focus; your homework, perhaps. Is there another option?  Barbara Conable, in her course "What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body (Andover Educators, www.bodymap.org)", discusses the concept of Inclusive Awareness. In Inclusive Awareness, a central focus is maintained in a broader field of awareness. We are all taught this as part of learning to drive a car; we are told to keep our peripheral vision on our mirrors while we focus on the road ahead and to keep an expanded field of awareness at all times (this became much more developed in me when I started to ride a motorcycle).   By contrast, concentration could be described as Exclusive Awareness.  When someone only knows how to concentrate and they must track multiple events simultaneously, they end up scanning, moving thier attention rapidly back and forth, which requires a great deal of mental effort.

I had some success with one of my ADHD students by introducing a mental game based on a meditation technigue. I asked her to do this for a few minutes before bed, when she was already lying down. The game was to say hello to each part of her body sequentially, beginning with her feet, and to "see" in her mind's eye that part of her body while she acknowledged it. When she finished at her head, she was to take a mental step back and see her entire body as a whole ( like going from seeing just a tree to seeing the whole forest). After a few weeks of this, her ability to track simultaneous events, such as piano and vocal line in a song, improved 90%. She had only to reference the mental "stepping back".