Description"ADHD is characterized by three key groups of symptoms: hyperactivity (e.g., being fidgety or restless), impulsivity (e.g., interrupting or grabbing things from others), and distractibility (e.g., forgetting things or having difficulty organizing life tasks)."
Individuals with ADHD are very good at paying attention to what interests them (hyperfocus) which helps with concentration. In this sense, individuals with ADHD have a different attentional style than neurotypical individuals: "They have a 'roaming" attention that can notice many different things in a short period of time and a 'homing" attention that can fasten on one thing of great interest and stay with it for a long period of time. It does a great disservice to those diagnosed with ADHD to say that they have a deficit in attention, when they are actually good at two different forms of attention and have problems primarily with one other form, sometimes referred to as 'central-task' attention, where sustained attention must be paid to routine (and often boring) events that have often been externally imposed."
People with ADHD benefit from learning and working in environments with physical movement, hands-on-activity, high stimulation and change.
Source: Armstrong, Thomas. Neurodiversity Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences. First Da Capo Press edition. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Lifelong, 2010.
