If being distracted is in no way equivalent to not being attentive, but simply being being attentive to something else, then we can better understand why attentional problems problems are often described simultaneously in terms of deficit and hyperactivity. It seems paradoxical: either there is a lack or an excess. We might think we can resolve the problem by situating the paradox in a temporal succession: at one moment the child is inattentive, and, the next, over-attentive. But the truth is more complex, and more interesting: the child is both not attentive enough to the echoes that we would like him to repeat and excessively attentive to other echoes from which we would like to distract him.