Sherlock Holmes and ADD

I've been putting together a collection of posts on my own blog on my experience of ADD. I don't meet the hyperactive markers that one might typically think of.  I identify with the "excessive daydreaming" kind. The attention to the outside world deficit.  In me, that translated--some five decades later--as Psychic according to the local community college career center.  Imagine that!

I was watching the PBS special on the new Sherlock Holmes series with Mssrs. Cumberbatch and Moffat.  It traced the history of the character and his peculiarities. But it's not the historical Holmes that got my interest.  It is how he is being presented in the current production--how his attention flits from element to element as he puts the whole picture together. 

I got to wondering what that might have felt like as a kid. As a kid in the American school system that asks for right answers based on step-by-step movement through a series of programmed movements. At least that was it when I was growing up.  I just waited until everyone else got to the end of the steps before I joined in.  I'd most of the time got to their conclusions already. Put it together from other pieces having nothing to do with the current lesson.  Weird.  And I didn't get it right all the time, but I had fun getting there.

In another PBS special I discovered how much the story of Sherlock Holmes inspired modern forensics.  That means there are a lot of people who identified with him or thought that how he behaved was alright.  I mean their teachers. Yes, Holmes was logical and studied.  But how much of how he started out was the more daydreamy kind of behavior, taking in information and putting it in a new context? 

Anyone else have new insights into odd behavior?  This is spec fic.  Seeing the world through the eyes, the perceptions of those whose perceptions are considered faulty.   Sometimes they are called artists.   Do you know anyone who perceives the world so differently that you are encouraged to change your own perceptions?