A couple of the concepts were very interesting when I considered them in terms of gifted misdiagnosis:
Cognitive inhibition and cognitive flexibility, and the idea that high levels of creative achievement may be strongly related to having solid skills in manipulating these.
Could you please explain this more?
Roughly through my lens: Cognitive inhibition is the mind's ability to filter out excessive information such as minute details to create an approximate view of the world (tree is a circle with a stick.) This keeps people on task and undistracted, and helps avoid the mental bunny trials.
Creativity, particularly at the idea generation works from unexpected connections, skipping past assumptions, etc. Or following the bunny trails.
Cognitive flexibility is changing of mental states and adapting to new scenarios or modes of thought.
Productive creativty needs the uninhibited cognition to be flexibly available on demand, but then needs to be pulled back when it is time to select a solution/idea and further altered to implement/follow through.
Some gifted kids may have low cognitive inhibition and are ideally following a path to learning the flexibity and inhibition. This demonstrates as creative, easily distracted, aware of a crazy amount of details (and remembers many of them,) their unconstrained thinking can easily develop new strategies for problem solving, learn deeply through discovered connections, etc. All in a package that reads uninhibited and distracted.
From there my thinking is they are likely to be misdiagnosed with all sorts of things when they are beginning the path of learning to flexibly manage their inhibitions. Done right you get a intelligent, creative, flexible problem solver in the end. I think you can nurture that transformation, but you can't force it.
(Portia, pm returned)
