[Catherine Muhly]

Cynthia - it is indeed possible to be right-brain dominant and be in computers. If you use the "messy desk" test, you can spot them easily. My desk was always messy, and so was my mentor's. He said he had a "feminine" style of programming, which was to write all the code and then use iterations to hone out the bugs.

There was another guy whose desk was so messy, it almost got a health department violation. This guy was a real "cowboy" at the keyboard. For him, rules were to be broken, and he found ways of getting around security. His flowcharts, when he bothered to write them, looked more like street maps of Paris than a single line of boxes. By way of craving stiumulation, he also was a volunteer fireman in his community, plus he moonlighted by driving trucks of hazardous materials. The company should have fired him, but he was too brilliant.

Think of the hackers - brilliant, non-conformist, creative (and how!). I think the leaps of genius, the "thinking outside of the box" are right-brained traits, which can be possessed by people in any field.

Valerie - I had the diagnosis of ADD when I was a kid, and when given the option of prescribing Ritalin, my parents opted against it. The only handicap I felt I had was that I found it necessary to write out everything that I was reading in my studies. I took copious notes in class. It's as if my fingertips were the repository of my memory. It was going to get impractical to keep this up when my reading load got very large. Math and science became attractive, because the readings were short, illustrated with pictures, and followed by exercises.

I was recently diagnosed with adult ADD; ADD doesn't actually get 'outgrown'. I was prescribed Adderall, a stimulant like Ritalin. I tried it, and didn't care for it. It made me squirrely. So that left me with learning to better structure and organize my time and space.

If you search google with keywords like "procrastination" "adult add" there are a number of informative and helpful sites out there. There are also tests to determine if you have ADD by the score on the web. But 'right-brain-dominant' describes many of the same things that 'ADD' does according to what I've seen and read and experienced so far. And the recommendations given in the book, Organizing for the Creative Person are nearly identical to the suggestions that have been written in books and websites addressing non-medicinal remedies for ADD.