Research Recap with Skye: Intersection of Creativity and ADHD During Adolescence

Summary

Podcast Summary: Hacking Your ADHD – Research Recap with Skye: Intersection of Creativity and ADHD During Adolescence

Host: William Curb
Guest: Skye Waterson
Date: October 17, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Hacking Your ADHD, hosted by William Curb with guest Skye Waterson, dives into the relationship between creativity and ADHD during adolescence, centering the discussion on the 2006 research paper: Creative Thinking in Adolescents with Attention Hyperactivity Disorder. The episode explores how ADHD may foster creative strengths, what the research says about these abilities, and how to leverage creativity while being mindful of ADHD-associated challenges. The conversation is aimed at helping listeners recognize, contextualize, and make practical use of creative tendencies in ADHD.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to the Paper and Context

• Importance of the Study:
  • The research paper is highlighted as one of the earliest to discuss ADHD in terms of potential strengths, rather than only framing it as a deficit.

    "Only 20 years ago did we start seeing papers talking about ADHD as a strength rather than as a deficit model." — William (03:42)

  • Skye mentions this paper was influential for professionals assessing the positive qualities of ADHD (02:58).
• Study Design:
  • Three groups: Adolescents with ADHD, those with conduct disorder, and neurotypical “normal” controls.
  • Small sample size, labeled as "preliminary exploratory study" (04:29), but findings were considered reliable.

2. Study Methods and Major Findings

• Key Tasks Used:
  • Recently Activated Knowledge Task: Participants asked to invent a creative toy after seeing a few examples.
  • Alternate Uses Test: Exploring how many uses someone can imagine for an object.
  • Creative Imagery Task: Creating novel, useable items from geometric shapes (05:26–08:15).
• Main Results:
  • Adolescents with ADHD were less likely to copy given examples, more likely to generate original ideas (05:33).

    "People who had ADHD were less likely to draw the same thing...more likely to...do something 100% different." — Skye (05:33)

  • ADHD group showed "conceptual expansion," thinking more broadly and fluidly, often making distant associations (07:26).
  • Functional quality of ideas sometimes suffered—objects invented were more novel but less practical; described as "hasty or erratic" with less goal-directed planning (08:46).

3. Implications of ADHD Creativity

• Broad Associative Thinking:
  • ADHD brains often draw distant connections; a trait mirrored in conversational style.

    "In our brain is a clear relation. But for neurotypical people that is a stretch 100%." — William (06:53)

• Originality vs. Practicality:
  • Strong drive for unique ideas, but sometimes at the expense of functionality (08:46).
  • Skye notes this can translate into real-world challenges with planning and implementing big ideas.

4. Practical Takeaways

• Teamwork and Strength-Based Roles:
  • People with ADHD excel at ideation and "out-of-the-box" brainstorming, but benefit from collaborating with detail-oriented, practical partners (10:22).

    "We should also pair them with someone that's a little bit more grounded and make a practical solution." — William (10:22)

• Leaning into Strengths:
  • ADHD individuals often succeed as entrepreneurs or "idea people" in organizations (09:35).
• Strong Strengths, Strong Weaknesses:
  • Both unique cognitive advantages and matching execution challenges exist. The “superpower” framing isn’t universally helpful; better to recognize the interplay of strengths and weaknesses (10:38–12:08).

    "We don't need to look at superpowers. We need to look what are we good at, what are we not good at? And how can we leverage that to be...the best version of ourselves?" — William (11:52)
    "You don't have to be super. You can be super cool. Real pretty cool." — Skye (12:08)

5. Medication and Creativity

• Research Findings:
  • Most ADHD participants in the study were medicated; no clear evidence that medication diminished creative output (12:12–13:04).
  • William and Skye question the common belief that ADHD medication reduces creativity, emphasizing that, at least in this study, creativity persisted (12:43–13:04).

    "According to this paper, which is very small and we'd love to see more of, looks like there is creativity regardless." — Skye (12:43)

6. Research Gaps and Future Directions

• Desire for Further Studies:
  • Both William and Skye express a wish for research on adults and for studies looking at a wider array of creative domains (13:29–13:43).

    "The more stuff we do with adults, the better it is...people believe that adults have ADHD and it's...more complex to study but it is very helpful." — Skye (13:43)

  • Recognition that much of the literature is still focused on children/adolescents and that research is quickly evolving (14:26–14:52).
  • Skye invites listeners to share new research for future episodes.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We tend to call them strong strengths, strong weaknesses. We have both.” — Skye, addressing the complex picture of ADHD (04:03)
• “We are very creative...Sometimes that is something I will doubt for myself because...my levels of creativity feel like that's how everybody's brain thinks. Apparently not.” — William (09:12)
• "We should also pair them with someone that's a little bit more grounded and make a practical solution." — William (10:22)
• "We're not all good at a hundred percent. And that's where the strong strengths, strong weaknesses conversation comes in." — Skye (10:38)
• "You don't have to be super. You can be super cool. Real pretty cool." — Skye (12:08)
• "The more stuff we do with adults, the better it is." — Skye (13:43)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:08 – Introduction to the episode, new Research Recap series
• 02:58 – Introduction to the 2006 research paper
• 04:03–04:29 – Study’s groups and methodology
• 05:26–06:02 – Main creative tasks explained
• 06:53–07:26 – Creativity and conversational style in ADHD
• 08:46 – Functional challenges of ADHD-generated ideas
• 10:22 – Importance of teamwork and leveraging strengths
• 12:08 – Study limitations, medication, and creativity debate
• 13:43 – Call for more adult-focused research and feedback request

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Actionable Insights

• If you have ADHD: Recognize and embrace your originality—especially as an idea generator. Seek collaboration for completing and grounding big ideas into action.
• For educators/employers: Balance teams to harness both creative ideation and practical follow-through. Place ADHD individuals in roles where broad thinking and innovation are assets.
• Further reading and interaction: Skye invites listeners to share additional studies for future discussion (13:43).

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End of summary.

Transcript

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[William Kirp]

Welcome to Hacking your ADHD I'm your host, William Kirp, and I have adhd. On this podcast, I dig into tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our Research Recap series. And today we're going to be discussing a paper called Creative Thinking in Adolescents with Attention Hyperactivity Disorder. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper, dive into what the paper says, how it's conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways for you. This is a new series. I do want to make sure that, hey, if you have thoughts, let me know. You can go over to hackingyouradhd.com contact and send me a message and I will try and figure out how we can make this series the best for everyone listening and I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten far. If you have anything else to say, I'd love to hear it. New episodes of Research Recap will be coming out every other Friday and with that, let's get on with the show.

[Sky Waterson]

Awesome. I'm excited about this one. This paper is an older paper. It's 2006, which is way older than we usually do. But this paper is one of the first papers that I ever read about benefits of adhd, about the strengths. And it came up recently because I was talking with a professor who was also an MD who has ADHD and works in New York University, and they were talking about the good papers that look at the strengths of adhd, referenced this paper as one of them. I thought it was worth bringing up again when we talk about the strengths.

[William Kirp]

Of adhd, because it's very interesting that, especially in today's landscape where you have all these ideas of adhd, superpowers and all these things. And I don't love that model of thinking about it. It is going to only 20 years ago did we start seeing papers talking about ADHD as a strength rather than as a deficit model.

[Sky Waterson]

And it was, it was interesting. I agree with you. I tend to call them strong strengths, strong weaknesses. We have both. And this paper is called Creative Thinking in Adolescence with adhd. And it really, it looked at three groups of people, which I thought was really interesting. Coming back to it now, it looked at people who had adhd, people who had conduct disorder, and people who were, quote, unquote, normal controls.

[William Kirp]

Essentially it is a bit of a smaller size than we typically like, but with three groups. I understand because they had 11 kids with ADHD, 12 with the conduct disorders, and then 21 in that control, they.

[Sky Waterson]

Called it a preliminary exploratory study, which is academic for we barely made this one across the line. But they wanted to look at these groups and they did say they were able to find some pretty reliable findings which, which they did. And they had a few materials and procedures. They did an animal task, they did another task. But the one that I wanted to focus on today was they called it the recent activated knowledge task, which is a boring way of saying we want you to come up with a creative new idea for something and we're going to show you a few examples of what other people have done in that area. In this case, it was a creative idea for a new toy.

[William Kirp]

What they were looking is if we show, if we prime you with showing you these other examples, are you going to draw the same thing?

[Sky Waterson]

That was interesting because they go into a little bit about why. But what they found was significantly speaking, people who had ADHD were less likely to draw the same thing than the control group or even the conduct disorder group. They were more likely to say that's cool, thank you for that example. I'm now going to do something 100% different. And it reminded me of the how many uses for a piece of string.

[William Kirp]

Tests which it was one of their. The alternate use test was one of the other tests that does even more. Let's see what you can come up with.

[Sky Waterson]

How, how broad can you go. And this paper was the first time I'd ever done what I, what I now love to do, which is take a paper that isn't necessarily about this topic but, but glean from it what we can about ADHD and how we work. Because what they're essentially saying, what they argued was that there might be something in how our brains work where we don't really hold on to a lot of the new stuff. We have this short term memory active contextual effects they called it. We think about things in a more broader perspective that allows us actually to be more creative.

[William Kirp]

This is also reminding me of things I've heard about people with ADHD in their conversational style and where they're relating one thing. But then they might three items into the relation where they're thinking they will ask you how much did you like that new shirt you got? And they're. We were talking about bees and they're. I was thinking about it because last time I got a bee sting I was at a picnic and then we were at a picnic two weeks ago when you had that shirt. And it's how, how did that relate and in our brain is a clear relation. But for neurotypical people that is a stretch 100%.

[Sky Waterson]

And that really relates here to this idea of what they call conceptual expansion. Not being as zoned in on what is happening right now and thinking about it in this more broad conceptual way.

[William Kirp]

I feel like it's. This is often how I do a lot of my creative projects is I'll have see something and be. I know how I can relate this to something I want to do. Again, not directly related. And although it does make me often feel I'm plagiarizing from this person even though I'm five steps away from what.

[Sky Waterson]

They said, which I wonder comes into it. There is a interesting. When they have some examples and us ADHD people, that's cool. But I want to be completely original. There's no studies on that. That's a strong thing that I've heard from a lot of people.

[William Kirp]

I think it was really interesting too. One of the other tasks was this creative imagery task where they're trying to make usable but novel objects from geometric shapes. What. While we did make novel objects, they were not very functional.

[Sky Waterson]

That's what made me sad.

[William Kirp]

It made me think about how we do our planning often too where we're often big thinkers and we're going to make this really cool thing. Then when it comes down to the functionality of it it's a little. Needs something to be desired.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah. The practical element. And this is maybe a warning to those of you who are. That's amazing. I'm going to go super broad. When they did the example of what that looks like in practice, they said hasty or erratic responses and the resulting lack of appropriate goal directed planning could have resulted in the creation of inventions that were less functional and practical than otherwise. That was a little bit damning.

[William Kirp]

I do think it's. We. We are very creative in there. There is definite data that shows that ADHD does come with creativity and sometimes that is something I will doubt for myself because I don't. I can't think with someone else's brain. My levels of creativity feel like that's how everybody's brain thinks. Apparently not.

[Sky Waterson]

No. No. If you think about practical uses for this, if you are in a team situation, you do better being the person who comes up with original solutions. One of the places that I often see people who have ADHD is obviously either they're running their own businesses because you can be at the helm and you can navigate what's coming or sometimes they'll be that person that businesses will Call in and say, look, are they the perfect executor? No. But life is changing so fast. Life is moving so fast. We've got so many things coming in. AI, all this other stuff. We need somebody who can think outside of the box, really outside of the box and navigate us through obstacles and situations that are coming our way. Based on this research, people with ADHD are primed to do that.

[William Kirp]

We should also pair them with someone that's a little bit more grounded and make a practical solution. I do think that's really important to be. You don't have to do everything. This is what I love about looking at a strength based approach is what can I do that will contribute to the group? Rather than what can I do that will I need to be. I need to be good at everything.

[Sky Waterson]

We're not all good at a hundred percent. And that's where the strong strengths, strong weaknesses conversation comes in. Because we have these strong strengths, which is really cool. Then we have the associated strong weaknesses of activating and making it happen, which is cool because what tends to happen is that person who's got the strength also has your weakness. We tend to match each other as people.

[William Kirp]

Every time I've worked with other people on doing something, doing these things feel like either of us doing this individually would not have anywhere close to having as good a result.

[Sky Waterson]

It's nice to do these kinds of projects with somebody else and I've seen that again and again with clients. It's often that people will do better. Had one client who was an academic and we ended up saying, guess, is this the smartest thing to do? Maybe you should do some independent writing. But in reality you're only finishing team projects where you're multi, you're one of a couple of authors and those solo projects where you're the only author, although they feel a bit more prestigious, they are not getting done. For the practical reality of getting papers out, you're going to have to focus on the group stuff because of exactly what, what is written here.

[William Kirp]

It is something where this is going back to say we don't need to look at superpowers. We need to look what are we good at, what are we not good at? And how can we leverage that to be our best, the best version of ourselves?

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah, you don't have to be super. You can be super cool. Real pretty cool.

[William Kirp]

For this study we did discuss, hey, it was limited in size. They did find pretty good results that I would love to see follow ups that were as we said, this is from 2006 we're probably not going to see one from these people. There's something I would love to see more of and that was interesting too is this of the ADHD group almost everyone was medicated and that would be interesting. I. Cause I know a lot of people that talk about I don't want to take any ADHD medication because it makes you less creative. I don't agree with that assessment. That is something a lot of people feel.

[Sky Waterson]

I did find that very interesting in the medication non medication conversation because I've heard that from people. I myself am not medicated but that isn't why and it's, it's, it's an interesting conversation here because it's. I don't know what you think is going on but according to this paper, which is very small and we'd love to see more of, looks like there is creativity regardless.

[William Kirp]

And for me what I find too with creativity is I can make that next logical leap. If I'm focused on the problem, I'm doing stuff with it and I'm going through. If I'm unmedicated, I am not doing anything for my adhd. It will be something where I'm those words. And that's about as far as I get with that idea.

[Sky Waterson]

And some people didn't even write anything down and that, that, that happen to 100%.

[William Kirp]

Also would love to see in these studies stuff that's more looking at different realms of creativity because. And as I always want stuff with adults.

[Sky Waterson]

Yes, always, always. I know how easy, I appreciate how easy it is to get a group of kids in a room because technically that's already what they do. But the more stuff we do with adults, the better it is. The better it is, the more people believe that adults have ADHD and it's, it is going to look different. It's more complex to study but it is very helpful. If anybody has, by the way, if anybody does have a paper or something that they're saying actually this, this study came out and you should talk about it. You can always message me at Unconventional organization on Instagram. I love, I love ideas about these kinds of papers. It's possible that there was a follow up paper to this that got missed that we could talk about.

[William Kirp]

That would be cool because it is hard to look at all of the research. There is a lot of it and some of it is very bad and some of it is very good and a lot of it's in the middle.

[Sky Waterson]

We have, I have a researcher on my team whose job it is to look at research. That's what she does in her life. And it's still hard. We still miss things because there's a lot of papers, especially now there's more and more and more ADHD papers coming out all the time.

[William Kirp]

Yeah. And it's great to have this early paper to have something that other papers can build off of. And I do, I do, would love to see more strength based stuff too because I, while I do think that I don't want to be right off the difficulties of adhd, I think looking at the strength is also an incredibly important aspect.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah, yeah. You can figure out where you fit.

[William Kirp]

Hello.

[Sky Waterson]

So you were just listening to a research recap. I'm Skye Waterson of Unconventional Organization. If you like that there's lots more information about ADHD and support for [e-mail] you can go ahead and check that out. Lots of free resources, lots of strategies and if you want to join our programs, you can do that as well. And we'll see you there. Uncontrolnisation hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's Premium Wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk.

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