What even is the box? Inside the ADHD mind.

How ironic is it that I’m writing an article on ADHD when I have ADHD, so I can’t focus on writing the article. Okay, focus. Listen, I have a theory. You know that people with ADHD have difficulty focusing on past experiences when discussing something new. What if it gives us the power to not be bound to already-made solutions but grants us creativity? We know how creativity can be two things, one is thinking outside the box, and the other is thinking within it. Both are creative, but one is determined by references and environmental influences, and the other is not. People with ADHD don’t have the working memory capacity for these references (Abraham, 2006); therefore, we’re locked outside the box. This is problematic when for example, I try to explain an abstract idea like this one. Wait, let me try to organise my thoughts. 

Okay, I came up with some ideas. First, under-functioning working memory in ADHD does not allow one to account for prior assumptions, which loosens constrained thinking. Basically, promoting out-of-the-box thinking. Second, latent inhibition is lower in people with ADHD and is linked to creativity. Third, articles suggest that people with ADHD compensate for the under-activation of frontal areas by occipital areas and score higher on visual creativity. (Coincidence? I think not!)

Okay, let’s tackle this storm of ideas and make it coherent. First, a decreased working memory capacity underlies inattention in ADHD (Rapport et al., 2010). Imagine working memory as a 3-stack of coins. One coin is spent on conceptualising a problem, another on thinking about a solution, and one on assessing its viability. We have no coins left, but we need one more to consider past experiences. In other terms, people with ADHD have a decreased working memory capacity, which might not be able to factor in context-relevant past experiences (Abraham, 2006). Basing the product of our creativity less on context-relevant experiences, for example, previously mentioned solutions, inevitably leads us to heightened divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is conceptualised as fluency, flexibility, and originality in creative thinking (Acar et al. 2019). Basing new ideas less on existing ones, by definition, implies the originality of these ideas. Additionally, creativity is associated with poor organising and prioritising skills (Taylor et al., 2018), which implies how a working memory deficit-induced, chaotic problem-solving can lead to previously unthinkable answers. Lastly, ADHD is linked to greater semantic distances. Imagine a semantic network consisting of three nodes: the word apple is connected to vitamin and doctor. Hypothesise that in people’s semantic network, the words apple and vitamin are closer than apple and doctor. Because the words apple and doctor are more loosely connected, they are less likely to come to mind together than the words apple and vitamin. This likelihood difference is decreased in people with ADHD, meaning they make jumps in semantic networks, potentially leading to using unseen connections between concepts, allowing more flexible ways of thinking (White & Shah 2016).

Hopefully, you’re still following; bear with me. Our next concept that links ADHD to divergent thinking is latent inhibition. Latent inhibition refers to the hardship of dedicating new meanings to already encountered stimuli, manifesting as selective filtering in neurotypical individuals (Lubouw, 1973). This is an evolutionary adaptive process because it allows one to avoid ascribing meaning to irrelevant, familiar stimuli, conserving capacities in the working memory. At this point, I think you can guess that people with ADHD have a bit less of this. Fun fact: decreased latent inhibition was first identified in schizophrenia for explaining attentional difficulties (Rascle et al., 2001). However, it is linked to ADHD and creativity too. Low latent inhibition was linked to heightened trait creativity and originality (Carson et al., 2003). Possibly since low latent inhibition does not filter out seemingly irrelevant information and allows for new meaning in familiar things. This would suggest that the meaning and possible uses of concepts for people with ADHD are ever-changing, allowing more original ideas to emerge. 

Let’s finish this train of thought with some neuroscience because that’s so easy to digest. As it was identified, people with ADHD usually have deficits in frontal lobe activation linked to decreased executive functions (Miao et al., 2017). Executive dysfunctions include worse planning and organising skills in people with ADHD (Kliegel, 2007), possibly allowing them to create something new from the chaos. Also, studies found a higher co-activation of occipital and frontal areas, hypothesised to ‘assist’ frontal regions. (Ma et al., 2012). It was also found that even though people with ADHD excel in divergent thinking, this superpower, so to say, is even greater in divergent visual thinking (Gonzalez-Carpio et al., 2017), which is closely linked to low latent inhibition (Chirila & Feldman, 2012) and decreased top-down processing (Tang et al., 2022). It might be coincidental, but it’s worth giving it a thought. What if this support from the occipital areas (used for visual tasks) brings visual capacities to support creative thinking, resulting in greater visual thinking in divergent properties? It is a possibility, in my opinion! 

Allow me to summarise everything real quick. So far, we have identified greater cognitive flexibility, originality, and semantic distances due to working memory deficits, easier new meaning-making due to decreased latent inhibition, and potentially greater visual divergent thinking due to neuroplasticity of the occipital lobe. This sounded like an outro, didn’t it? But we haven’t finished yet!

So, let’s end with something even more interesting – buckle up, people. The REBUS model (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019) is known to address psychedelic experiences, explaining the altered state of mind in people under the influence through bottom-up processing and decreased significance of prior beliefs. The paper also describes how the model can account for different experiences in neurodivergent people. Sadly ADHD was not mentioned, but psychosis was. As we have seen above, ADHD shares low latent inhibition with psychotic syndromes, which is strongly related to decreased prior beliefs about familiar stimuli. The model accounts for how an altered state of mind can occur in psychosis due to reduced weight for prior beliefs. Coincidentally, these decreased prior beliefs were also identified in ADHD above (Abraham, 2006), hinting at the generalizability of an altered state of mind to ADHD. The main difference identified is that decreased prior beliefs resulted in new meanings in a more crystallised way in psychosis (e.g. delusions). These new meanings are partly attributed to identifying reward-relevant information differently from neurotypical people (Kapur, 2003), which is another possible similarity between ADHD and psychosis. In contrast to crystallised new meanings in psychosis, the new meanings or perspectives are seemingly more fluid and ever-changing in ADHD. This leads us to conclude that ADHD could be seen as an altered state of mind because it differs from neurotypical minds in experiencing the world around them.

Now that we are nearing the end, ADHD doesn’t sound like a disorder anymore, does it? More like a superpower, I’d say. Although it has limitations in everyday life, we uncovered substantial aspects that may be leveraged to their benefit. Therefore, without minimising the impact of ADHD on one’s life, it is essential to understand why and how people with ADHD can excel in creative tasks, using their strengths to their advantage. <<