I&#x27;m not sure ADHD, as commonly diagnosed, usually presents as anything other than &quot;being a boy in elementary school&quot;.  I am sure that there are lots of people that actually have ADHD, but there are huge numbers of little boys that get labeled as ADHD because you&#x27;re trying to make them sit in a chair and pay attention to quite boring material for 8 hours a day, with maybe a 15 minute break to get outside and run around - except they can&#x27;t wrestle, play tackle football, or often do anything very strenuous that would burn off the excess energy.<p>I&#x27;ve known quite a few people who would snort adderall and other amphetamines-based analogs as a study drug - they reported being able to remember things better, and to get into a single-minded, grinding mindset that sounds a lot like what we programmers strive to achieve as <i>flow</i>.  Various mathematicians (notably Erdos) have used amphetamines as a nootropic.<p>As a counter thought experiment, what if we are giving amphetamines to one subset of the population at a much higher rate than the other, and these drugs act as a force-multiplier for effort directed towards flow-dependent activities, like programming, science, and mathematics?