ADDventures As a Space Cadet

I'm a Trekkie from way back, all the way to the first episode of Star Trek Original Series. I love sci-fi TV and movies. Maybe that's because I've always been a bit of a space cadet myself. That is a common trait with ADD. It's actually called distractibility and hyper-focus.

The ADD/ADHD brain is in Warp Drive most of the time. Even when we are supposed to be quiet for the night, and sleeping peacefully, our turbo-charged minds keep on be-bopping around the universe. That makes for some rather interesting dreams sometimes. Some of the major creative achievements in history and some of the major scientific discoveries happened that way, in the brains of some very famous people with ADHD/ADD. That's not to say I'm one of those with major discoveries, or creative achievements. But, I have had my share of interesting dreams. Maybe that's why I've always been fascinated with UFOs and paranormal phenomena.

Distractibility and hyper-focus are really two edges of a sharp sword that cuts deeply into time and space in the ADD universe. Distractibility causes a loss of focus, which can be annoying to people when you are having a conversation with them, and then suddenly are miles away on a tangent, and disastrous in a work situation when you are trying to keep up with a phone call from an angry, upset customer, and then lose track of the figures you are trying to find to help solve his problem.

More than once, I found myself staring at the phone, not knowing what the next step was. On the other hand, hyper-focus often kept me from going on to the next step in the problem, while the customer and I went off on a tangent, talking about the weather or politics, or some other mundane topic. In the telephone customer service industry, when every call counted and average handle time was the most important thing in the world (seeming to me, at times, to be even more important than really helping the customers), my hyper-focus could be a problem, causing me to go over the allotted time while I made sure I had fully taken care of the customer's issues, and then carefully dotted every I and crossed every T on the documentation notes. Too often, I was too slow in pausing my phone, and got stuck with back to back phone calls, a disaster in the making for someone with ADD like me.

This isn't to say hyper-focus is all bad. It's probably one of the most important abilities for a creative person, whether a writer, musician, artist, scientist, or chef, or inventor. Hyper-focus is what keeps a person in the zone, engrossed in whatever project he is working on, or playing with. This is why the Internet Age has been so great. It's been a wonderful playground for the creative geniuses of our time. The greatest discoveries, cutting edge technologies, and, on a more light-minded and light-hearted tangent, entertaining games, social networks, and videos have been created by people hyper-focusing on their pet projects. Many of these creative geniuses have the hyper-focus to the extreme, because they have ADHD/ADD. So do many more ordinary, creative people.