Attention deficit disorder is all about distraction…until it’s not! One of the most surprising aspects of ADHD is hyperfocus—a person’s ability to home in on a specific task, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else.
Someone with an interest in computer programming may happily hunt for a bug in thousands of lines of code, regardless of the fact that he usually can’t sit still. A musician may write a symphony in only a few weeks.
A Blessing and a Curse
Unfortunately, hyperfocus can’t be reliably sustained or controlled. When parents tell me how their daughter breezed through a challenging science fair project only to settle into a spotty classroom performance, I know that she was hyperfocusing. Adults can find that kind of focus in a new job—working intensely for a year, say, to fix major problems in their department. When things finally run smoothly, they lose interest and move on.
"Why does being bad feel so good?"
Studies of brain response to various situations may provide important insights to this question.
