Is creativity a feature of ADHD?

Kris Jones is, and always has been, a maker.

As a kid, she created trifold vacation brochures for fun and, as an adult, she’s worked as a graphic designer for big brands like Nike and Guinness. Now 51, Jones runs her own Portland, Oregon-based marketing business and paints and plays ukulele on the side.

“Inherently,” she said, “I just love creative expression.”

In Jones’ and some experts’ views, then, it’s no surprise Jones also has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a condition traditionally marked by serious impairment in executive functioning but also increasingly discussed as a different way of thinking. And what’s creativity if not a different way of thinking?

“Many times, whether it’s because of the way that the brain is wired initially for people with ADHD, or just because of their life experience of, ‘Well, let me try to improvise because the normal way of doing it doesn’t work well,’ people with ADHD tend to be a little more comfortable with taking a risk and trying something new and maybe even have that preference toward testing limits,” said cognitive psychologist Dr. Holly White. “So it’s kind of an attitude as well as a cognitive bent that really contributes to this creative edge.”

But the research is mixed. Depending on how you define creativity and identity people with ADHD, studies show positive, negative, and no relationship between the two.

“The bottom line is that there is no one clear line of evidence that says people with ADHD are more creative or creative people have more ADHD,” said psychiatrist Dr. Sid Khurana, medical director of outpatient services at Nevada Mental Health in Las Vegas. Still, he added, there’s enough of a signal to warrant further research—and conversation.

A fuzzy link  

According to Dr. White, who studies the intersection of ADHD and creativity, three aspects of creative cognition are most relevant to ADHD: divergent thinking (inventing new uses for everyday objects, for example), conceptual expansion (how out-of-the-box someone thinks when imagining an animal living on another planet, for instance), and overcoming knowledge constraints (coming up with something novel by thinking beyond what’s known to be true).

She has found links between ADHD and all three. One of Dr. White’s studies, published in 2018, for instance, found that college students with ADHD scored higher on an alien-fruit creation task involving conceptual expansion as well as a product-label naming task involving overcoming knowledge constraints.

“Uncensored thinking, wild imagination type thinking, are definitely an easier task for people that have attention deficits,” said Dr. White, an independent researcher and consultant who collaborates with the University of Michigan and has published mainstream articles about ADHD in Scientific American.

But most journal articles on the subject aren’t particularly conclusive. In one 2020 review out of the Netherlands, researchers looked at 31 behavioral studies on ADHD and creativity and found that rates of self-reported creative abilities and achievements were high among people with both clinical and subclinical levels of the condition. The study also found that divergent thinking was only elevated in people with high ADHD scores but no diagnosis.

Similarly, a 2022 study found that adults with combined-type ADHD, meaning that they’re both inattentive and hyperactive, rated themselves as more creative and drew more original pictures than controls without ADHD. People with inattentive-only ADHD, however, didn’t score any higher than other groups when it came to divergent-thinking tasks, perhaps because the time-bound nature of the activity didn’t capitalize on their propensity for mind-wandering the way some might expect, the researchers theorized.

“ADHD presentations are associated with different sets of behavioral symptoms, and some appear to contribute better than others to certain facets of creativity,” the study authors wrote. For instance, convergent thinking, or more goal-directed creativity, might be hindered in people with ADHD due to their challenges with inhibitory control, other work from Dr. White suggests.

“In conjunction with any other types of learning impairments or maybe anxiety or any number of things, ADHD could definitely be disadvantageous in certain contexts,” Dr. White said. “But also, these very same things kind of give an edge in a lot of others.”

ADHD expert Dr. Russell Barkley, a retired neuropsychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, said he interprets it all like this: “If you have some symptoms of ADHD…you’re a little impulsive, a little disinhibited—you might be more creative, particularly if you have an above-average IQ,” he noted in a YouTube video on the issue. “On the other hand, if you’re clinically diagnosed with the disorder—which means you’re being impaired by your disorder; you have significant, inappropriate symptoms—then you’re not going to see any relationship with creativity. And, if the disorder is severe, you might even see a negative relationship.”

Impulsive—or bold? 

Clear scientific conclusions aside, it’s easy to find creativity in an ADHD mind—or vice versa—if you look for it. Plenty of highly successful creatives, including comedian Trevor Noah, singer Renee Rapp, director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig, and quarterback-turned-commentator/actor Terry Bradshaw, have been open their diagnoses.

“Being adventurous, being nonconforming…kind of explains the traits of ADHD of being impulsive, being distracted, being disorganized,” Dr. Khurana said.

It’s situational: Taking a risk on the road is dangerous, but taking a risk in a corporate brainstorm might be celebrated as bold.  What is perceived as inattention in the classroom could be interpreted as brilliance in a novel. What one person calls “zoning out,” another might call being “in the zone.” For Jones, the designer in Portland, work would be a lot more, well…boring if she didn’t have ADHD. “I’d probably be employed by some corporation and I would just be, like, doing the job,” she said.

Indeed, some work suggests real-world, rather than lab-test creativity, is related to something cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Darya L. Zabelina calls “leaky attention.”

Highly creative people “seem to incorporate information that clearly would be irrelevant to the task at hand, but they don’t seem to be super distracted by it—they process it, they notice it, they pay attention to it,” said Dr. Zabelina, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas. “That’s where I think there might be some overlap between people who have ADHD symptomatology” and creatives, she says.

Similarly, how ADHD affects the default mode network—or the parts of the brain that are active when you’re daydreaming or otherwise not focused on the outside world— may help explain why some imaginative brains also have ADHD.

The concept of the default mode network, developed by neuroimaging expert Dr. Marcus Raichle in 2001, describes how parts of the brain light up while daydreaming or otherwise not focused. By contrast, the task-positive network lights up when the brain is engaged in a focused task.

“In people who do not have ADHD, these networks are reciprocal: As one increases in activity, the other declines,” explained psychiatrist Dr. Edward Hallowell in an ADDitude magazine article. “In ADHD, however, the DMN remains active while the TPN is active. This competition provides a neurological explanation for what those of us who have ADHD feel so often—a persistent, magnetic pull away from the task at hand into distraction.”

But it may also explain the pull for some into creative endeavors, said Dr. Lindsey Holbrook, a clinical neuropsychology fellow on the East Coast.

“That’s why you can get more distracted, but the default mode network is also thought to play a role in creativity because it’s associated with…just allowing your mind to wander and think of different things,” she said.

At the same time, people with ADHD also commonly report a tendency to “hyperfocus,” or to get completely enraptured by a task or project that interests them. While that becomes problematic when more important needs like eating, sleeping, and taking out the overflowing garbage go unmet, in the right situation it looks a lot like what some scientists call a creative “flow state.”

Jones said she suspects that aspect of ADHD has supported her career. “I ended up doing really well because creativity is all I’ve done for 40 hours a week for my entire life, so you end up just getting really good at getting into the flow,” she said. “If anything, it’s hard to pull me away from work.”

What’s important for people with the condition and their providers, then, both for people with ADHD and for their doctors, is finding treatment and management techniques that maximize people’s creative potential while minimizing the disorder’s distress. Fortunately, the 2020 meta-analysis found that stimulants for ADHD didn’t inhibit people’s creativity. And avoiding help entirely can backfire, with some research demonstrating that, at their more extreme, mental health conditions including ADHD are associated with impaired creativity.

“You can have both—you can maintain your creativity and get your ADHD optimally treated,” Dr. Khurana said. “You can still do what you love to do, whether it’s your theater or music or dance or art, but then be able to have meaningful employment and relationships and just feel right.”

Or, as Dr. Zabelina put it, if your attention is too leaky, “you can just kind of sit on the sofa and get lost and be very, very creative—but never do anything with it.”

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