Dr. David Nowell has several blogs he maintains that frequently address topics of interest to persons with ADHD, their families and the professionals who are helping them to more effectively manage their ADHD:
- http://www.drnowell.com/blog.html
- Intrinsic Motivation and Magical Unicorns (The Art and Science of Time Management) (worth checking out if only for its title)
- The Neuropsychology of Happiness (discontinued but still available with a variety of older blog postings worth reading)
If you’re not following his blogs, or at least following him on Twitter (@davidnowell), you’re missing out on a steady flow of great information. I try to capture most of it here through reposts, but you’re only getting the high points…there’s much more for you if you go directly to the source.
Here are two more interesting articles that Dr. Nowell tweeted about in the past few days.
The first article comes to us via Psychology Today:
Is the ADHD Brain More Creative?
Is it possible that the impulsivity and quick-thinking that accompanies ADHD may also boost creativity? And what role does medication have in that creative process? Does stimulant medication hamper creativity, or boost it?
Click here for the full article.
While I have neither the impressive educational backround and extensive professional experience of Dr. Nowell or the article’s author, Dr. Stephanie Sarkis, I do bring one thing to the table that they don’t: I write and edit this blog. Based on that sole qualification, I’d like to weigh in on the question of whether or not we people with ADHD are more creative than the common, non-ADHD rabble all around us.
Short answer: yes. Fully 98% of people with ADHD are at least twice as creative as people without ADHD.
I can back that claim up! It was my creative, ADHD brain that just completely made up that statistic. Case closed!
What do you think? Do you feel that ADHD makes you more creative than most people? Do you feel that stimulant medications impact your creativity one way or the other?
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My sense of how my creativity is impacted by my ADHD goes something like this:
ReplyDelete1. ADHD causes me to get the "big picture" on a subject very quickly, but my mind will immediately start to wander while I should still be listening to the details of the subject.
2. ADHD causes me to rapidly approach the problem from a dozen different directions, looking for the greatest range of possible solutions. Digging deeper into each of those options is still a problem, but I'm good at flagging them initially.
3. ADHD causes me to rapidly do a quick mental "side-by-side" comparison of the problem at hand against a wide array of previous problems I've encountered, even ones that seem completely unrelated, looking for things that match up well. This often results in an unexpected way of framing the situation that leads to new ideas for solving it.