Can you talk us through that research? What, what does that study involve?

Yeah, we've done lots of studies.

Having studied hundreds of kids, thousands of kids with very different cognitive behavioral skills and strengths and difficulties, my experience is that whether you've got a bit more or less gray matter here or there doesn't really make much of a difference.

But what does make much more of a difference is the way the thing is wired up.

But the reason that that is kind of surprising is because the way that we first thought about differences between kids, especially kids who are struggling in some way, was sort of borrowed from classic neuropsychology, so an adult who's got brain damage of some kind, like a stroke maybe.

And so when someone has a stroke, they might have difficulties in language or difficulties in executive function.

And so people sort of saw that and thought, well, kids who have difficulties in language, they must have damage in that part of their brain, which of course can happen, but it's extremely rare.

Wow.

And how accurately then does the diagnostic label predict the findings you will make in the lab about where they sit on various dimensions?

Great question.

So we have done studies where we recruit hundreds of children with a diagnosis, with multiple diagnoses or no diagnoses at all, and then we spend four or five hours doing our own assessments of cognition, behavior, and so on.

And then you can ask the question, if the kids come with a label, and depending on what that label is, does it predict the measures that we have taken? And the answer is no.

And there's all sorts of reasons for that, in part because, uh, the assessment, the ADHD assessment, doesn't involve anything to do with cognition.

There's no cognitive kind of psychometric assessment.

It's really going through a list of symptoms and seeing whether the child has them in everyday life.

Duncan, I feel like the place you've got us to is really, really helpful, where we've got this idea that neurodiversity is a fact and that it is terribly important that the world accommodates a wide range of brains.

Is it an attention thing, or is it a matter of interest in the subject?

So there are a whole other set of mechanisms to do with kind of curiosity that we know are really important for learning, and I don't think that's specific to individuals who struggle with attention.

I think that's true for all of us.

And so, so one recommendation that some people have made is that for those kids who are really struggling to maintain attention, trying to organize activities and lessons around what you know to be areas of interest.

For those individuals, such that you can kind of draw upon mechanisms, um, like novelty seeking, curiosity, and there's been some kind of nice experimental work showing that our retention of information, even, um, incidental information that's given to you whilst you're in this kind of exploring this thing that you're curious about tends to be much better retained.

Um, even though it wasn't originally the thing that you were curious about, it's just something introduced, um, whilst you're exploring it.

So I don't think that's something that's specific to individuals with attention.

Does the diagnosis predict the specific difficulties that a child or a grown-up will have? If you say someone has attention deficit, can you then put them through a battery of tests and go, "Yes, this is what we expect this person to struggle with"?

How should we think about our different abilities to have our attention dragged to other things?

Yeah, so there are very large individual differences.

In our research, we typically study kids, mostly kids in primary school, and we tend to study kids who are finding school tricky and inattention, so that struggling to direct your attention to things in order to complete tasks, to achieve your goals, is such a common experience.

We could say that's a symptom, and we could kind of view it through that lens, but it's such a common characteristic.

of kids who are finding school tricky.

And so it alerted me very quickly to the idea that how we allocate our attention and our ability to control our attention is such an important skill for navigating all sorts of environments, including kind of busy, noisy classroom environments.

And actually, the more rigid we make that environment, I think the more apparent the those differences become.

Is it a skill that we can hone? I

Why make that one category?

Yeah, so just to say, we didn't decide any of these categories.

You know, we were completely agnostic as to whether there would be turning points or where they might be.

But the, the point is that they are there, and so...

And you're right, you know, we're not suggesting that a 10-year-old's brain and a 30-year-old's brain are the same, even though they're in the same category.

The way to think about it is that what we're saying is that the way that the brain changes is relatively consistent through that time period.

It's continuous.

What do you mean?