A writer sits down at her desk. She knows where the scene is going. Or at least she thinks she does. Her character will leave the room, meet the man waiting in the corridor and, before the end of the chapter, reveal the secret she has kept for years. The route is clear. The sentence is ready. Yet before the first paragraph is finished, the writer’s mind has gone elsewhere.
First to an old song. Then to a yellow door she saw as a child and cannot explain why she still remembers. Then to the hurried walk of a woman who passed her in the street that morning. None of it has anything to do with the scene she is writing.
Five minutes later, one of her characters says something that was never in the outline.
The scene changes.
And here is the curious part: perhaps the writer’s attention did not wander at all. Perhaps it widened.
We have spent years being told to concentrate. Look at one thing. Turn off the notifications. Keep the mind on the line. Focus has become more than a cognitive skill; it is treated almost as a moral virtue. A mind that drifts is undisciplined. A person who leaves the desk, looks out of the window or strays into an unrelated thought is failing to do the work.
But what if, at certain moments in creative thought, the opposite is required?
A Perspective published in iScience in March 2026 approaches the relationship between attention and creativity from just this direction. It is not the report of a new experiment. Rather, it brings together existing research on attention, creative thinking and ADHD to propose a framework. It does not offer a neat prescription. It does something more useful: it reminds us that attention does not operate in only one way during creativity.
In the early stages of a creative act, a looser, broader field of attention may be helpful. Details we would normally dismiss as irrelevant are allowed in. Distant memories, images and ideas find themselves at the same table. Instead of taking the shortest route, the mind turns down side streets. Sometimes it finds not the thing it was looking for, but the thing it did not yet know it needed.
Creativity, however, is not simply a matter of opening doors. At some point we must decide which doors lead somewhere. Selecting an idea, testing it, developing it and bringing it to completion require a more controlled form of attention. Creativity may therefore depend not on abandoning focus, but on moving between two mental gestures: widening and narrowing.
This is why there are two people inside every writer.
One opens the doors.
The other decides which ones to walk through.
The second is not an enemy. Without that internal editor, a piece of writing can become a heap of possibilities that brush against one another but never arrive anywhere. The problem is not that the editor exists. The problem is that the editor sometimes turns up too early.
While the first sentence is still trying to become itself, a voice is already asking: Where is this going? What does it mean? Can’t you do better? In its eagerness to reject weak ideas, it may also shut out good ideas that have not yet found their shape.
Research into ADHD makes this question particularly interesting, but it also demands care. The evidence does not support the bright, easy claim that ADHD simply makes people more creative. Clinical ADHD can create serious difficulties in everyday life. The costs of struggling to plan, manage time, complete tasks or hold attention where it is needed should not be romanticised.
The findings themselves are not one-directional either. A review of 31 behavioural studies found that an advantage in divergent-thinking tasks — those that ask people to produce many different ideas — appeared more often among people with high ADHD traits who did not have a clinical diagnosis. Among clinical ADHD groups, the picture was far less consistent. Nor was there a general advantage in convergent thinking, where the task is to arrive at a single workable answer.
That distinction matters because creativity is not merely the production of many ideas. It also involves choosing among them, testing them against reality and giving them form. A widened field of attention may bring us more material. Turning that material into a piece of work requires the mind to gather itself again.
Perhaps, then, the question is not whether a person is attentive or inattentive. It is whether the mind can adjust: widening at one stage, narrowing at another.
And this is not only a question about ADHD. The scientist trying to solve a problem, the designer searching for a new form, the musician following a melody and the writer attempting to rescue a lifeless scene all encounter the same tension. Productivity prefers a straight line. Creativity often begins with noticing what lies just beyond it.
Still, we should not declare every wandering thought an act of genius. Sometimes attention really does scatter. The destination disappears, the thought remains unfinished, hours pass and nothing is made. Science has not drawn a perfect boundary between distracted attention and widened attention. From the outside, the two may look remarkably alike. The difference may become visible only in the mind’s ability to return — and to use what it has found.
The writer at her desk knows none of this. She cannot explain why the yellow door appeared, or what connection the old song made. She knows only that the scene she planned has changed, and that its new version is more alive.
Perhaps creativity is not always a matter of learning to focus better.
Perhaps part of it is learning when to let the mind wander.
