The Creative Edge of ADHD
Don’t worry: The rest of us can hack our brains to catch up.
Maybe all those tech companies are onto something with games in their offices.
Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg
Not everything in life can be achieved with hard work. Creative insights have the perverse tendency to come when we’re not working at all. The more we hunker down and focus, the more creative thought flutters out of reach.
This seems to be the case for the various components into which scientists have broken creativity down. One of the most widely studied is a process called divergent thinking – a kind of mental exploration measured by such tasks as inventing new uses for a brick or a paper clip. In a Scientific American article that ran last week, psychologist Holly White argues that people with ADHD are more likely than the rest of us to summon divergent thinking as well as other facets of creative thought.