Children, the Internet and ADHD

 I have four active windows on my computer right now. But I can't find my house keys and I keep re-reading the same page in one of the three books I'm reading on my iPad. Everyone in my family says I'm terrible at multi-tasking but I think I'm superb at it, gifted even. Do I wish I had ADHD?On the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, developed by the World Health Organization, I failed mercilessly. I did not qualify for having ADHD. All right, I don't have it, but the internet is helping me get there.Why is this important?Little children, even those under two, even before language develops, are handling smartphones and tablets like little geniuses. Is that going to bring out the ADHD in them or especially reward those who do have it? The verdict, of course, isn't in yet.ADHD is a genetically based hereditary variable with as yet no clearly defined genomic cause.  Because the condition is widespread and medications have been discovered that treat most of the key symptoms and more medications are in development, big pharma funds research that has yielded data on brain mechanism that is associated with ADHD. Functional magnetic imagining and PET scans have shown that the management of dopamine in key parts of the brain — specific sites between nerves called synapses — are corrected by ADHD medications, chiefly stimulants such as ritalin and amphetamine..

"There is some evidence that ADHD may be accompanied by an increase in creative potential."

.There are two main types of brain function that are the source of symptoms in ADHD: attention and hyperactivity. Attention problems encompass problems with maintaining focus, distractibility,  rapid loss of interest, disorganization; hyperactivity includes restlessness, intrusiveness, difficulty taking turns. ADHD negatively impacts on the standard requirements for high scholastic performance. Studies show that untreated individuals with ADHD do not achieve as high scholastically or vocationally, earn less, and change jobs and partners more frequently, and have more car accidents than matched peers without ADHD.Since ADHD confers so many maladaptive features, why does it remain in the gene pool? There is some evidence that ADHD may be accompanied by an increase in creative potential. As reported in Scientific American, "...the ability to keep your inner stream of fantasies, imagination, and daydreams on call can be immensely conducive to creativity." A study of gifted (academically advanced) children with and without ADHD in a summer program looked at: (1) fluid reasoning, the ability to identify relations and new, complex patterns with minimal prior knowledge or expertise; (2) working memory: the ability to manage attention while simultaneously maintaining multiple bits of information in mind; (3) creative cognition:  students produced novel drawings that had to include an oval shape, incomplete figures, or two straight lines.Although those students with ADHD had scored more poorly on working memory, they were on a par with the non-ADHD students and surpassed them in creative cognition!Creativity is the deep mental structure that has fueled the progression of modern humans over the past hundreds of thousands of years. As the human population has grown and educational instruction, in multitudinous forms, allowed the sharing of new information and new techniques from generation to generation, that progress has proceeded almost geometrically apace.The internet seems almost harnessed to that deep creative structure. It holds a near infinity of information of all kinds and is almost instantaneously available to anyone with internet access. The internet is its own form of working memory. It also divides into various programs and mobile applications that challenge attention, almost sponsor distraction and even employ it for salesmanship.Since the internet is now firmly ensconced (until something somehow more advanced, maybe biologically enrooted, replaces it) we must accept it for the values and challenges it presents. As evidenced by the current FBI investigations into the potential manipulation of public opinion and possibly public behavior, the internet can be a powerful tool for propaganda. And it is already a powerful tool for research and the sharing of scientific data across almost all boundaries.The internet, especially for our aging population, is a ready recall assistant, a resource to retrieve words, names, information known but momentarily irretrievable.For all who worry about the fate of children in the millennial age of the internet and social media, we must be vigilant about how and when children put it to use. Parental knowledge and familiarity with the internet place new responsibilities on parent's shoulders.The internet is a burden that enlightens.No good deed goes unpunished.