Hypofocus

Hypofocus is a combination of cognitive and visual inattentiveness.
Interpretations
Sufferers of this affliction commonly find themselves completing tasks or arriving at destinations with little to no recollection of the intermediate steps. Symptoms may include protracted day-dreaming, restless leg syndrome and a penchant for gambling. Those affected are easily entranced by repetitive cycles of input (such as vacantly watching analog clocks, traffic, or the QVC). Additionally, those affected by this condition find themselves thinking about the entire alphabet or an entire letter of the encyclopedia while they drive.
Debate
The term hypofocus is not in common use among academics, and rarely appears in peer-reviewed articles. However, related terms such as "science" are widely used.
The term is often confused with the excessive fascination with pachyderms, including elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses (Hippofocus).
Pros and cons
A positive aspect of hypofocus might be the ability to process massive quantities of information at surface level. Auctioneers have reported a higher proclivity for this kind of thinking.
On the other hand, it sometimes presents a challenge to common teaching and parenting techniques. Schools and parents generally expect obedience from children and reward them for it, but hypofocused children do not always cooperate under these circumstances. This can be overcome with investments of time and effort by the teacher or parent, but it is not always possible to spend a lot of time focusing on one child in a typical classroom situation.
Psychiatric views
Hypofocus is not recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) and no article using the term appears in PubMed. Psychiatry describes only the distraction aspect of hypofocus, referring to ADHD as 'inattentiveness and impulsiveness'.
However, not all aspects of hypofocus are negative, and while not addressing it specifically, professional psychiatry does not completely discount the existence of hypofocus.
Many adults with ADHD attribute accomplishments in their lives to this mental ability. Besides hypofocus, various special abilities have been suggested to occur in ADHD, including vigilance, response-readiness, enthusiasm, and flexibility. But current ADHD research does not recognize these characteristics. Greater creativity has also been suggested, but formal measures of this are no higher in children with ADHD than in control groups.
Nevertheless, psychiatric research suggests that there are several reasons for the persistence of the notion that people with ADHD have the ability to hypofocus, such as the well-recognized comorbidity of ADHD with autism spectrum disorders, of which excessive focus is a part. Special abilities do occur in some people with ADHD, so it is easy to generalize from this minority to the whole ADHD group. ADHD is sometimes regarded as a disorder that is remarkably common (affecting 4-8% of school age children), but primarily genetically determined.
As ADHD in adults is a relatively new area of learning in comparison with the condition in children, many clinicians feel that hyperfocus is an aspect of adult ADHD which is not well understood and merits more thorough research.
Medical
From a medical viewpoint, hypofocus is thought to result from abnormally high levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is particularly active in the brain's frontal lobes. This dopamine overproduction makes it easy to "shift gears" to take up boring-but-necessary tasks.

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