Have you ever wondered why some people have to be mobile when they’re on their mobiles, or doodle in meetings, or continually play with a stress ball? You might think that they are not paying attention, but, in fact, the opposite may be true. The reason may be linked to a disorder commonly associated with kids but rarely applied to adults’ behaviour, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD / ADD).
The term ADHD is a misnomer. It is not really a deficit of attention, and not all sufferers are hyperactive. It would be better described as an executive disorder. People who suffer from ADHD do not have a deficit of attention; they just have a problem controlling their attention and their working memory (the memory that we all use to buffer information while we process it) and can be very easily distracted. This leads to a loss of focus and poor organisation skills. However, regardless of the accuracy of the name, as many papers and books have already been written on the subject it isn’t going to change any time soon so ADHD it is.
ADHD is not a binary condition it is a spectrum disorder. That means that everyone, you included, has ADHD to some degree. Look at the following graph. It’s a fairly standard bell shaped curve commonly used to plot statistical distributions.
Bell Curve
If you take the horizontal axis as ability to focus and the vertical axis as number of people with that given ability then, over to the extreme right of the graph you have the ultra-organised; we’ve all met these people, the Project Manager who effortlessly juggles several projects at the same time and never seems to drop the ball or the incredibly efficient PA who’s always on top of the boss’s diary or even the programmer who can code for hours on end seemingly without the need for breaks or food. At the other end of the scale, on the far left, we have ADHD sufferers. They can focus, but they are very easily distracted and struggle to maintain focus consistently. This leads to learning difficulty and poor organisational skills. In the middle, you have the rest of us. We can mostly manage to organise our lives and work, we can mostly focus reasonably well. Some of us are over to the right and manage a bit better, some of us are over to the left and don’t handle it so well.
Importantly, there is no hard and fast cut-off point at either end of the scale. It is, as I previously mentioned a spectrum. We all fit somewhere on that spectrum and, often, depending on how we feel, we can move left or right along the horizontal axis.
So, what does this have to do with productivity?
Researchers studying ADHD children have discovered that some of the so called hyperactive behaviours of ADHD kids; fidgeting, swinging on their chairs, playing with pens or pencils etc. are actually their unconscious way of maintaining focus and keeping their working memory on track.
The theory is that nobody can focus 100% of their working memory and attention to a single task, there is always a little bit of floating attention keeping a watchful eye on the surroundings. This floating attention is a safety feature that probably dates back to prehistoric times when the ability to focus 100% on a single task was not entirely desirable and would result in a person missing the large ravenous beast hiding in the bushes, the result being that the ravenous beast would become somewhat less ravenous.
These days, in the classroom or the workplace, large ravenous beasts are thankfully extremely rare, but, we all still have that little area of floating attention keeping a look out for us and distracting us whenever possible. Some of us are better at keeping that floating attention under control than others and some, the ADHD sufferers, have virtually no control over it at all.
Researchers have found that one way that ADHD children cope with these distractions is to unconsciously give their floating attention a nice mindless task, like fidgeting, swinging and fiddling to keep it occupied allowing the rest of their working memory to get on with the task at hand, learning, uninterrupted.
This is not so easy for adults. With maturity come expectations. Our peers expect us to sit still in meetings, to give some semblance of paying attention to what’s being said. It’s considered bad practise to sit doodling in your notebook when the CEO is addressing the meeting and could signify a sudden career change. However, we could all be wrong, the person doing the doodling may be the most focussed of us all.
So, the next time you’re in class and one of your students is seemingly more interested in re-organizing their pencil case, or you’re trying to concentrate in your cubicle while your colleague holds a mobile phone conversation in the corridor outside, or you’re addressing a meeting where one of your colleagues seems more interested in his Blackberry than the annual budget, cut them some slack, it may be their way of concentrating their focus.
In fact, why don’t you try it for yourself. Make a point of getting up and going for a short walk around the office or school when you need to think, get yourself a stress ball, don’t be ashamed to doodle in meetings, try using a standing desk. Do anything to get your floating attention busy and free you up to be a more productive and focussed person.
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Can you share more specifics regarding the research you cite in your post? I’ve seen this trend to be true in my own classroom experiences, it would be great to have see some scholarly discussion on the topic.
My friend, the special education teacher, calls my knitting during meetings my self-regulating behavior. It certainly makes it a lot easier for me to focus on what’s being said. And I get sweaters and socks.
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The idea from this article came out of a talk given by Dr. Jadis Blurton ( http://www.talhk.com/ ) at a SEN conference run by the British International School Shanghai last April. This was backed up by research carried out by Dr. Mark Rapport at the University of Central Florida ( http://www.psych.ucf.edu/faculty_rapport.php ).
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I’m with Lemon on this one – I really think that this piece would be significantly improved if you provided a link to the actual study that you’re talking about, not to mention explaining it, or quoting from it, the page link you’ve provided lists five papers, which one did you mean?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not simply getting at you – this is a widespread issue I have with science journalists/bloggers, and I pull them all up about it. As a research psychologist, I need to see references or links to the original paper, simply mentioning ‘researchers’ doesn’t cut it.
Hi Ciarán,
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
As I mentioned in my earlier answer, most of this article stemmed from Dr Blurton’s talk. I did a some web searches when I was preparing the text which backed up Dr. Blurton’s comments. I discovered Dr. Rapport’s paper via an article in Time Magazine here, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1887486,00.html . As I’m not an academic and the target audience for this article wasn’t really academics either, I didn’t cite the research. In fact, I was just trying to link the ADHD research on children with adult behaviour in a, simple, I hope, thought provoking form. Anyway, for your reference, Dr. Rapport’s study is at this link. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19083090
Fraser
I make my living “doodling” in meetings, and most especially when the CEO is presenting. As a result, I’ve found a niche working as a “visual practitioner” (you can find more of us at http://www.ifvp.org/ ).
So taking my natural tendency to “visually process” information (and doodle it all over notebooks, clipboards and other media – in real time during meetings and presentations), I find that I am both helping myself absorb/understand the information, as well as creating preliminary sketches for “conceptual” illustrations that eventually become models of the ideas and information that is presented.
This eventually leads to the creation of formal learning or information “maps” (big drawings typically printed out on engineering plotters) then passed around and discussed by everyone touched by the discussion. Generally people respond and there is sort of a learning oriented dialogue that emerges, where deeper understanding or related information and ideas surface (not to mention the discoveries and correction of “holes” or gaps in the thinking behind the original presentation).
Helps a certain “organizational learning” thing happen, and some of the discoveries and invention that come out of it have been amazing.
Rather than attempt to “muzzle” my otherwise frenetic and seemingly distracted behavior, it has instead been recognized, understood and put to work for the benefit of the whole group.
So I appreciate this article, since it validates what otherwise could have been regarded as a “happy accident” of having this “odd” but otherwise useful and talented individual contributing to the mix. Rather than trying to push people with this perceived dis-ability (and calling it ADHD) back into conformance with what seems to be “the norm”, it would pay to explore and develop these skills (and begin to see them as skills to begin with) and put them to work. I should not be the only one in my company doing this – since there is so much to be gained by “looking at things – a different way”…
Roland Rotz, PhD wrote a great book on this topic called “Fidget to Focus” and gave a teleclass series on the topic last year for the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (www.NSGCD.org). I think the big nugget I got from it is that everyone “fidgets” differently – doodling, pen tapping, even listening to background music can be distracting to one person, but may help the person sitting next to them to maintain focus on the bigger task at hand.
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I have a response to part of your closing remarks,”So, the next time you’re in class and one of your students is seemingly more interested in re-organizing their pencil case,….., cut them some slack, it may be their way of concentrating their focus.”
Are you honestly trying to say that teachers should allow ADHD children to engage in behaviors that may infringe on the rights of the teacher and the other students??????
If that’s not what you are saying, then I think your point would be made much clearer had you used an example of a quiet non-disruptive behavior.
Simply cutting the student some slack sounds like a great idea, but lets get realistic here–if the teacher also has ADHD and the student is distracting her (or him), then that one student would be taking instructional time away from the entire class. Even if the teacher doesn’t have ADHD, a student re-organizing their pencil case would probably distract another student. If the student was doing something quiet and non-disruptive, then obviously there would be room for lot a more leniency.
I have learned the hard way that the other students will resent you for putting their education on the back-burner or seeming inconsistent just because there are one or more students with ADHD in the class. I have always thought that people only have rights up to the point that they begin to infringe on the rights of others.
I wonder if the fidget-to-focus technique can be redirected into a “useful fidget”. For example, as Michael above said, doodling to create maps about the information that’s being learned/ presented. I suppose also knitting is a sort of useful fidget, albeit usually it’s useful in a way that is not connected to the non-knitting task you are concentrating on. How great would it be to make all nail-biters/ finger tappers and stress-ball squeezers into useful fidgeters! They would suddenly boost their productivity by tons! Although perhaps the highly individual nature of the fidget (eg some people like knitting, others prefer tapping) means that what works as a useful fidget for one person may be difficult for another person to do. hmm – there may be a mini-research project in there!
I have struggled with ADD for most of my teenage and adult life. I am very functional and when needed I can be very organized. Unfortunately, it takes a enormous amount of energy to be functional. From my own experiences, I determined that there is not an attention deficit and that it is not a disorder. A person with ADD is paying attention to EVERYTHING. So it should be worded something like AED or Attention Excess Disorder. The reason why ADD patients fails school, does not prevail at work, or is disorganized is because they have a hard time stream lining the mental efforts into one area. I do not call ADD a disorder because a highly active or reactive body in nature is a evolutionary plus. On a battle field or a soccer field a ADD patient would thrive.
At the current time people do not normally go to work on the battlefield. So I have recently discovered that “fidgeting” really helps. A normal human has X amount of mental resources. As a person with ADD those resources are being squandered on periphery stimuli. I have found that if you dedicate some of those resources to a fidgeting action it can focus the main portion to the task at hand. I believe that there are many different kinds of fidgeters. Some fidgeters are soothed by a audio response, certain smells, or touching/manipulating. I tend to bounce my leg or chew on a bottle cap.
This is an observation of my own life and I am not a medical authority. I believe fidgeting is a partial solution. The rest of solution depends on the individual.
Great information