You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, ShoreWavers, Regina Barber here.

And Burley McCoy.

With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the Mary Louise Kelly, of all things considered.

Hi, I hear we are going to talk about, among other things, the accuracy of TikTok videos about ADHD.

And how life may have come from little bits of lightning. And why parakeets might be a good

model for studying human speech. I feel like there's some kind of joke about bird brains in there,

but here we go. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, let's tackle them in order, which means we're starting with ADHD, so attention,

deficit, hyperactivity, disorder. I mean, I'll start by asking, is that actually a common topic of discussion on TikTok? Yeah, it's super common.

So here's just a little sampling of what you might hear.

For those of you who have ADHD, who is your favorite?

Five less well-known ADHD behaviors with doodles.

Let's go.

Number one.

ADHD behaviors, you didn't know about part two.

Yeah, and researchers wanted to take a closer look at some of these videos to see how

accurate they were.

And how did they go about doing that? So they had clinical psychologists rate the 100 most

popular ADHD videos at the time on accuracy, and they found less than half of the claims made

in these videos aligned with the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, or the DSM.

This is a tool that mental health experts use to help diagnose and treat their patients.

...