Dr Gregg

“ADHD is built-in ..it’s part of our nomadic heritage ..otherwise our ancestors would have been eaten hundreds of thousands of years ago. Try wringing-out that kind of adaptation from kids by the second or third grade.”

..or so says Dr Gregg, speaking to me from his estate in Ann Arbor, where he’s surrounded by books from the 16th - 17th century, depicting life in Indian communities before the arrival of the conquistadors. He’s a one-man research institute. He’s writing a book on stress ..or ‘cortico-tropin releasing factor’, which he says gets triggered by the ‘reptilian’ part of the brain in response to sensory signals that haven’t reached the recognition-centers yet. Transmission to this area is more channel-direct, he tells me ..and it releases stress-hormones in response to anything unfamiliar, which means pretty much everything that hasn’t reached the recognition-centers yet. I called because I was reading about a group of neuroscientists at Emory University who have discovered pretty much the same thing he’s been lecturing about for decades ..that is, we’re not the brightest species on the planet. At best we come in a distant third. He goes on to tell me that whales have much greater potential for intelligence ..their brains are real well-suited for processing their underwater environment. And they have language. Their bio-sonar system allows them to communicate with whales in any ocean on the planet. Their language is complex, comes in different dialects, and they pass it on from one generation to the next. He cites linguists who have reported changes recently. Whales off the coast of California are chatting in deeper voices, which carry farther. Apparently local supplies of salmon are running low so they’re contacting suppliers off the coast of Japan. Whenever I get off the phone with Dr Gregg, I detect a mid-range humming sound running through my own brain.