By skyforbes If you’re in the ADHD world long enough, you’ll hear the warnings on repeat: social media is destroying attention spans, TikTok is digital crack, and doomscrolling is the enemy of executive function.
Now, to be clear — none of those claims are without merit. ADHDers are often painfully aware of how quickly a five-minute break turns into a two-hour swipe session.
But what if…just for a moment…we stepped back and asked a different question?
What if, instead of assuming harm, we asked: what are the cognitive conditions under which attention actually thrives?
And could it be that certain digital spaces — yes, even TikTok — might be giving us clues?
A recent study out of Curtin University in Western Australia attempted to do something different. Instead of relying on self-report measures of social media use (which are notoriously unreliable), the researchers tracked real-time mobile phone use and paired it with a validated attention task: the antisaccade test. This task measures inhibitory control-our ability to suppress distraction and shift focus deliberately, something that’s often impaired in ADHD.
An antisaccade is a type of eye movement task where a person must inhibit a reflexive gaze shift (prosaccade) towards a visual stimulus and instead look in the opposite direction. It’s a measure of inhibitory control and voluntary eye movement.