“We found strong support for the hypothesis that youths with high IQ who meet diagnostic criteria for ADHD tend to have significant weaknesses in working memory, processing speed, and auditory verbal working memory relative to their own cognitive abilities and that they tend to report more impairments in executive functions (EF) than are reported for a comparable age group in the general population. While some of these relative impairments may be within the average range of scores on an absolute scale, they represent significant difficulties for these very bright individuals who tend to have great difficulty in achieving at the academic level generally expected from those with such high overall cognitive abilities. Our analysis of the percentage of individu- als with these impairments may be a more useful measure for clinicians than group means because group means tend to submerge individual variabilities.”
This is something my dad sent me based on me saying I have bad working memory. He also said he does as well. He has a IQ of 160 and was diagnosed with ADD when he was in school. I am also diagnosed and treated for it.
I went through it, and it really wasn’t a hassle. But it also wasn’t super valuable. Just a slip of paper that allows insurance to cover certain medications that are contra-indicated for 90% of people on this site.
One way to improve your attention span is to use mnemonics. Mnemonics are memory techniques that associate information with something that’s easier to remember.
One memory technique is called chunking. Chunking breaks down large amounts of information into more manageable pieces, or chunks. An example would be your social security number (don’t write your social security number). People chunk their SSN (an acronym–which is another mnemonic technique) and phone numbers. If your SSN is 123456789, you very likely would not say it that way. You would say 123-45-6789
As mentioned, acronyms are also a mnemonic technique. I remember the colors of a rainbow by the acronym Roy G. Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet).
Another mnemonic technique is word association. If I meet a man named Edward, I look at his face and say (in my head,lol) Edward Scissorhands.
That was very interesting. In the last few months I’ve had several members of FB’s high IQ community, who themselves have ADHD, suggest I have the inattentive type. I have more than mild difficulties when it comes to organising and planning , and the prioritising of multistep tasks. School reports often mentioned how disorganised and messy I was. In this article it’s suggested that academic achievement in those of school age is more highly correlated with EF than with IQ. I seriously underperformed academically at school.
Do you prefer to do the difficult tasks first, or the least difficult tasks first? I like to do the difficult tasks early in the day because I have the most energy.
Have you tried setting deadlines on the tasks? Maybe that will help you focus on each task instead of all tasks at once, which will make you feel overwhelmed.
I think ADD may have caused me stress which led to schizoaffective.
The reason being that, when I was in College, and if I had some homework to do, or study for an exam, I couldn’t just get started to focus. Along with that, I have always avoided tasks that require mental effort. These two things caused me significant fear of failure right before the exams, and in those emergencies, I was able to study.
I would be staring blankly in the classroom, being the inattentive type, during lectures, and couldn’t therefore extract much from them either, it all came right down to before the exams to get anything done.
But, it was fast becoming too much, to study 3-4 hours right before the exam in fear of failure only. I was doing grad school at Columbia, and studying that much for my exams…it became impossible, and slowly and gradually, the psychosis I was enduring from before became worse, and led to hallucinations and a full blown manic episode. After that, there has been no looking back: It got worse and worse, until a few years ago it started getting better on Abilify.
Cognitive issues persist though, I can’t even focus on news on television now.
I probably prefer to do the easier tasks first. I say ‘probably’, because I’ve never thought about that question. I just know I get flustered if an answer to a question doesn’t spring to mind quickly/very quickly. Most of the things I struggle with, like cleaning and tidying, I get help with. I’m OK at money management, that’s by far my best practical skill.
I prefer to have written instructions I can look at when needed, rather than verbal instructions.
