Under the right conditions, hyperfocus is ADHD’s secret superpower.įor a child or adult with ADHD, the determining variable is interest - if the person loves to play music, they can do it for hours. So this could suggest something rather exciting: that ADHD individuals have, at least in some contexts, a leg up over non- ADHD folks, in that ADHD in fact helps people sustain attention for longer periods than normal in some situations. But in Sklar’s sample, where people were intensely focused - or in a state of “hyperfocus” - those with ADHD had higher parietal lobe activation than the non- ADHD group, which “could support the idea of people with ADHD being able to sustain attention depending on the specific context,” says Sklar. This makes sense if you think about it - under normal day-to-day circumstances where shifting attention is required, the ADHD individual may struggle the usual lower activation in the parietal lobe of those with ADHD is thought to be linked to impaired attention. Additionally, the ADHD group had higher activation in the parietal lobe, which is notable because most studies have found that ADHD individuals have lower parietal lobe activation.

In Sklar’s limited research, she’s found that people with ADHD tend to use less mental effort to play a computer game than people without ADHD, “which could mean that they entered the flow state more readily than the non- ADHD group,” says Sklar. Their challenge is to learn ways to distribute their attention more evenly, by regulating it or even manipulating it to serve their purposes according to the task at hand, often through the use of practical tools like timers, calendars, reminders, alarms, and breaking tasks into concrete steps. It’s not about not being able to concentrate it’s about being able to concentrate in different forms and different intensity.” Put another way, there is a spectrum along which attention gets channeled for human beings those diagnosed with ADHD don’t have less attention than normal - it’s more accurate to say that their attention can be splintered or hyperfocused, or it can swing between the two.

“It’s not about having an attention deficit, it’s more a maldistribution of attention. “The field is wide open and people really need to start researching it,” Sklar told Science of Us. One of the few pieces of research on the hyperfocus piece of ADHD is from South Africa, and was the subject of a University of Johannesburg master’s thesis by researcher and writer Rony Sklar - indeed, much of her work has raised the question of why hyperfocus isn’t being looked at in the literature, since her own work was limited by sample size. When composing a song or coding a new program, the tendency to lose sight of all else proves beneficial when failing to get laundry or dishes done for days on end, the tendency becomes a potential problem. Hyperfocus is great for engaging in longer tasks which require intense concentration - but it’s not so great if that means that the more mundane tasks, chores, and assignments fall by the wayside. That’s surprising, especially considering the significant impact - both positive and negative - hyperfocus can have at work and at home. Hyperfocus is seen among both of these types - and yet it’s been largely neglected in academic research. (And recent research from Brazil and King’s College London, by the way, has suggested that despite its reputation as a childhood problem, it’s more common than you might think for the condition to show up for the first time in adulthood, even among people who never showed signs of it in childhood.) Generally speaking, ADHD is classified into two broad categories: inattentive type, and hyperactive/impulsive type. In other words, ADHD shows up in different ways depending on the person the goal is to help people regulate their attention and harness the kind of attention necessary for the task at hand. “You’re focused so intently on something, no other information gets into your brain,” Ashinoff has said. The latter is what Brandon Ashinoff, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham who studies hyperfocus, has called an “interesting paradox” - it’s too much focus, as opposed to a scattered attention span. It sounds like a contradiction in terms: You think ADHD and you think of a spaced-out, scattered kid, right? But by definition, ADHD is a “maldistribution” of attention - that is, people who have it often oscillate between splintered and hyperfocused attention. How Scientists Explain the Link Between Workaholism and ADHD

Learning to hyperfocus on cue