no sense of the passage of time, gets obsessed over weird and small details, and suffers from both hyperfocus and an utter lack of focus, depending on the task

That... sounds rather like me. Hm.

That sounds like ADD. t /notadoctor

It's sometimes more complex than just being too gifted to think in standard ways. I have a definite mathematical learning difficulty. I am practically innumerate, and not great even with mathematical concepts that don't involve arithmetic. I had four years of one-to-one math lessons, and I still can't calculate change. You can imagine what statistics classes are like for me. I'm also dyslexic (in particular, I read at about half the average speed, and the words move around on the page, although a green transparent overlay helps with that a bit), and borderline Asperger's (with all the literalism, poor social skills etc that goes with that). Yet I was always the first in my class at many subjects, I'm on course for a distinction in my MA (not easy to get, at all) and I have verbal reasoning capabilities that totally floored the psychologist who assessed me (which was only two years ago, incidentally).

But, yeah - it's definitely two sides of the coin. Neurological diversity is cool.

Hil, re writing by hand, hypermobility can cause issues with the motor skills involved with writing. I couldn't write by hand for years, still find it painful, but I can type for hours.

Twice edited for spelling. Not ironically.

I also utterly confused teachers my first few years of elementary school by being able to read several grade levels ahead, but being completely incapable of sounding out words. Ask me to spell a word that I'd seen written before and I'd have no problem. Ask to to spell a word that I'd only heard but never seen, and I wouldn't know where to start. Same thing with reading -- I read books by recognizing the shapes of the words, and I had a good enough memory that I could recognize the shapes of a whole lot of words. But a word I'd never seen before, I couldn't look at the individual letters and remember "every letter makes a sound" and figure out what it was. Eventually, I just got old enough that teacher were no longer focusing on the mechanics of reading and just didn't notice that I didn't read the "right" way. This caused a ton of problems when I got to high school biology and was confronted with a textbook full of words I'd never seen before.

That sounds like ADD.

What? There was a cat outside -- oh, hey, Antiques Roadshow is on. I ought to get that old oak table -- What? I'm supposed to be working? It's been three hours already? Oh.

Yeah. Well, you might be right.

Hil, re writing by hand, hypermobility can cause issues with the motor skills involved with writing. I couldn't write by hand for years, still find it painful, but I can type for hours.

Yeah, it was partially the physical issues, and partially that I'd just lose my train of thought because I had to concentrate so much on remembering how to form each letter.

Hil - Ooh, ooh, me too. I was recognising words visually, like the 'Kelloggs' on the cereal box, aged under 2 - but standard ways of learning to read were useless. My creative parents still had me reading before school, via flashcards and Mr Men books and the like.

That sounds like ADD.

What? There was a cat outside -- oh, hey, Antiques Roadshow is on. I ought to get that old oak table -- What? I'm supposed to be working? It's been three hours already? Oh.

Yeah. Well, you might be right.

I live with it every day. The hyperfocus/extreme distractability, the way time is not a fixed measure, the way little fiddly details are suddenly the most important thing in the world ever and have to be taken care of right now or OMG the fucking world will END.

I know that not all people with those characteristics have ADD. But Occam's razor suggests that it just might be. t /stillnotadoctor

When we were required to write everything in cursive in third and fourth grade (and maybe fifth, too?) I would avoid words with certain letters because I could never remember how to write them. If what I wanted to write began with a capital Q, I would find some way to rephrase it so that the word beginning with Q was somewhere in the middle of the sentence, because I could remember lower case q. I reluctantly used lowercase r, because there was no real way to avoid it, but I did not like it. Capital M and N could each have anywhere from one to three humps. And then once I'd stopped to remember how many humps the letter I wanted had, I had no idea what word I was planning to write anymore, let alone what sentence.

Also, the library has new giant trash and recyclable cans, with spectacularly bad placement right below the elevator buttons. I had to stand on my toes and stretch my arm to be able to reach the button, and that hurt. Someone a few inches shorter than me, or someone in a wheelchair, probably wouldn't be able to reach it. I looked around for someone to tell about this, but the only person who seemed to work there was the work-study undergrad who was checking out books, who I know has no power over anything.

I live with it every day. The hyperfocus/extreme distractability, the way time is not a fixed measure, the way little fiddly details are suddenly the most important thing in the world ever and have to be taken care of right now or OMG the fucking world will END.

Sounds like my DH. I drives me crazy. I love him, but it drives me crazy. And yeah, no ADD diagnosis for him, but I often suspect that's because when he was younger they usually only pinged hyperactive kids, and hyperactive he's not.