There’s something to Karthik’s framing of ADHD in terms of the demand curve for distraction. In a demand curve, the X-axis shows the price of the thing you are demanding while the Y-axis shows its quantity. Demand curves slope downwards because if the price increases, you’ll want less of that thing.
This is a general rule in Economics, but what would this mean when applied to distraction? The “price” of distraction is the amount of effort one has to make to find distraction. For example, if you are trying to work on a phone that is constantly buzzing with notifications, distraction is cheaply available and therefore its price is low. If you are locked in a room with a book and no electronic devices, the price of seeking distraction is high. We should expect that it is tougher to concentrate in the first case and easier in the second. In the language of the demand curve, the quantity of distraction you “demand” will be higher in the former and lower in the latter case.
The other thing about the demand curve is the thing called “elasticity”. If the amount of distraction you demand changes only slightly no matter how tough it is to find it, then your demand is said to be highly inelastic. In this case, the demand curve will stope steeply downwards. If by increasing the price for distractions, you find it easier to concentrate, your demand curve will slope downwards gently, and is said to be highly elastic.
For someone with ADHD, the demand curve can be expected to be highly inelastic, because our source of distraction is not just external. We may be in a quiet and soundproof room, but it’s difficult to silence the buzz in our heads that makes us seek out distractions, which means that no matter how tough or easy we make it, we can be expected to find a way to get distracted.
Now, to be sure, the experiment that Karthik performed on himself does not really prove the inelasticity of demand for distraction. He found that when he cut off XTwitter, he was able to find Reddit, and when he blocked Reddit, he found something else, and so on. In this experiment, XTwitter is available just as cheaply as Reddit, so he has not really increased the price of distraction in aggregate. He’s just increased the price of the individual sources of distraction.
While the experiment is flawed, in my experience, the conclusion is correct. It is impossible to cut off distraction while on the smartphone or the laptop. When I have tried to cut off electronics altogether - by writing on paper and reading physical books, for example, I find that my ability to concentrate improves noticeably, but not by a huge amount. On the whole, our demand curve is to the right of, and steeper than, the average, but it is not a vertical line. Our demand for distraction is indeed higher and more inelastic.
It is also useful to understand the distinction between changes in quantity demanded and change in demand. For example, how many shirts I buy will depend on how expensive clothes are. If prices of clothing goes up, I buy less and vice versa. On the demand curve, this is depicted as moving up or down along the curve. When this happens, economists say that the demand is the same, while the quantity demanded changes with the price.
On the other hand, the relation between the price of clothes and how much I buy depends on my income. Suppose my income were way less than it is now. Then too, if the price is higher, I would buy fewer clothes and vice versa, but at any given price, I would buy fewer shirts than I do now. In my changed circumstances, the relationship between the price and how much clothing I buy cannot be shown on the same graph as earlier. Economists will have to draw a different graph, to the left of the original one. This is a situation where the demand changes, not just the quantity demanded.
A similar distinction is useful to make when we discuss screens and ADHD. For example, a New Yorker piece reports that ADHD diagnoses have tripled between 2010 and 2022. This could be due to increased awareness leading to increased number of diagnoses. It could also be due to overdiagnosis. If either explanation is true, we do not need to redraw the demand curve.
On the other hand, suppose that this increase in diagnosis is due to smartphones, as the article claims. How should we think of this in light of the demand curve for distraction?
Diagnosis of ADHD is primarily done by the psychiatrist interviewing the subject and asking about getting distracted. While I am sure that the questionnaires they use are quite sophisticated, I don’t believe they account for the easy availability, and thereby the lower price of distraction. When a person answers an ADHD questionnaire, he will do so based on his typical life experiences. In a world without smartphones, this means that his responses indicate a lower level of distraction, while in the world after 2007, smartphones are part of his ambient conditions. In this model, the person’s demand curve hasn’t changed, but his lived experience is of a higher quantity of distraction due to lower price of it.
The other possibility is that smartphones have moved the curve to the right altogether. This would mean that screens have worsened our attention spans to such an extent that we are highly distractible even when the screens aren’t there. Even when you’re locked in a room without a smartphone, you are still unable to read a paper book the way you could before smartphones got you hooked.
My unscientific self-evaluation tells me that this may be true. ADHD is a real thing. I have always been more distractible than others. I remember that my preferred approach to studying for my 10th grade exam was to keep my textbooks and the newspaper side-by-side so that I could dip into the news whenever I felt the urge. But even comparing to this, my feeling is that my attention span, when I spend it on analog pursuits, is lower than then. This could be due to age, of course. Or it could be due to the screens.
All of these are testable hypotheses, though carrying out the experiments will be difficult, because in this age, it will be tough to carry out randomized control trials involving complete cessation of smartphone use for long periods of time. But this idea of demand curves does give a good model for how to think of distraction and the ease of obtaining it. Rather than diagnosing someone as ADHD or neurotypical, psychiatrists should be able to draw distraction profiles for each person. For example, if someone has a highly elastic demand curve, it will mean that they react badly to external distractions, but when they are taken away, they are able to focus much better. This is in contrast to someone with a highly inelastic demand curve, located to the right of the average, which is the typical ADHD profile, who will require a different kind of intervention.
I suppose there is also the variable of cost of distraction which would ideally be combined with effort to obtain distraction to arrive at some kind of distraction price. Imagine if a major presentation is coming up in an hour then your distractability would be effort to obtain + cost of getting distracted (which for socially anxious person like me is high when a social failure is involved).