Section I
Many revolutionary figures have gone down in history and paved the way for future innovations. The greatest thinkers of all time, from Renaissance men like Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Isaac Newton to today’s founders of multi-billion dollar companies: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, I’ve always pondered the way their mind works. Their success equated by their creative ability and their intelligence. What if they were limited and their revolutionary findings and ideas never came to light? Then, I think about today’s world where the ones diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, are medicated so they would be less menacing to others. Are their ideas, if developed into a premeditated plan, able to contribute to the greater good of society? Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Does the medication given by doctors to help people focus really work? Is it worth it, to destroy a child’s originality for a homogenous cognitive classroom for a teacher and other students? As I pondered this topic to a greater extent, further questions started to develop. In the workforce, individual thinking, spontaneity, and many other traits are valued among employers. Are these valuable traits inhibited early in a person’s life? I wanted to see how what we call a “mental disorder” be attributed to a person’s success rather than a hindrance. I wanted to explore how a person’s unique thinking style could promote future success. A person with a more unique approach at a problem could solve it better than by just going by the books, but those people are
suppressed by medications. This comes to the idea that working smarter not harder is the best approach to any problem. What if the art created by some of history’s renowned artists were to never exist? The music composed by musicians of the classical era were to never be made, today’s art would progress in a significantly different way. What about the many inventions of Thomas Edison that we use today? If creativity is lost, I wonder if we would have the innovations and ideas we have today, and if further developed inventions to solve problems we face would be created. Could a mental disorder be considered giftedness?
Section II Doing research between the correlation between creativity and ADHD, I had to find a way to quantify the results. I found a chart from the article Uninhibited imaginations: Creativity in adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder that compares people diagnosed with ADHD and people who don’t; the char t compares their academic performance, symptoms of ADHD, and their creativity. The person’s creativity is measured by how the person handles a task, by fluency, flexibility, and originality.
From table 1 you can see that people diagnosed with ADHD perform at a lower level than people not diagnosed with ADHD, but in table 2 it shows that people diagnosed with ADHD demonstrated more fluency, flexibility, and originality in handling unusual tasks. This led me to think that a person’s creativity really is suppressed by the effects of ADHD medication. Is it really worth it for prescribing medication to get better test grades or the autonomy of an innovative thinker? I thought it was a complete generalization that ADHD children were troubling in the classroom when they could contribute a wide range of ideas and different approaches to other students. Doctors prescribe medication to keep a child calm and focused, rather than let them ask questions and learn in their own way, why do they do it? An author by the name Conot wrote, “Young Thomas Edison ‘asked questions when [the teacher] expected him only to listen, and was not listening when she asked questions,’ and ‘had no patience with his classmates. . .
