Nonlinear Thinking

From ~10 years of coaching undergraduate and high school students in math/physics, I’ve noticed that students with ADHD will take 1 hour to learn what neurotypical students take 10 minutes to learn – but it isn’t because students with ADHD are “slow”.

Students with ADHD often go off-roading with their brains – repeated nonlinear thinking. To visualize this, imagine a hike up a mountain. The start of the trail is at the base of the mountain and the end of the trail is at the summit. A neurotypical person starts at the base and walks along the main trail path, to the summit.

A person with ADHD starts at the base and walks along the main trail for ~10 minutes. Then, they see an off-trail veering off of the main path. Driven by curiosity, the person with ADHD follows the off-trail, reaches its end, and takes a picture of the view from there. Then they return back to the main trail and keep walking up the mountain until they hit another off-trail veering off to the side. Again, out of curiosity they decide to take the off-trail until its dead end, where they take a photo from that vantage point. Then they return to the main trail, and hike uphill until they see the next off-trail. The neurotypical and neurodivergent paths look like this:

The neurodivergent person takes 3 hours to reach the summit while the neurotypical person takes only 1 hour. However, the neurodivergent person has way more pictures from so many cool vantage points on the mountain, and has a richer, more beautiful experience of the landscape. Sometimes it’s better to get to the summit fast. Sometimes it’s better to experience as much of the mountain as possible.

Successfully completing the trail is analogous to successfully understanding a physics concept. A neurotypical student will not get “distracted” by off-trail thoughts and thus understands a concept in 10 minutes. A student with ADHD has recurrent off-trail thoughts and thus takes 1 hour to understand the same concept. Each time the student with ADHD goes mentally off-trail, they are actually remembering something in their own life that is similar to the concept that I am trying to teach them. If they feel safe enough, they will tell me what their off-trail thought is, and then I point out that that is a really good thing to notice, and that we should note it down in the student’s actual notes. This is because when the student is studying for their final exam at 2 am, exhausted and overwhelmed, we watn the notes to help them understand the physical situation with the lease amount of struggle possible. What is intuitive to the student, is what sticks. So we write it down.

Because the student with ADHD goes off-trail every 5 to 10 minutes, it takes a while to finish the lesson for that day. While it make have taken a neurotypical student 10 minutes to understand that lesson and move on, the neurodivergent student took1 full hour. However, by the time that hour is up, the student with ADHD has richer depth of intuition for the concept than a neurotypical student ever does. This is because the neurodivergent student has connected so many different things in their own life, to the new concept that they are learning.

In my experience, because neurotypical students do not go off-trail with their minds they do not make so many intuitive connections. I usually have to offer neurotypical students analogies (e.g., the hiking trail) to explain physics concepts and to build intuition. I use the same analogies to explain concepts to neurodivergent students, but then they come up with a series of their own analogies to help make sense out of the physics situation. I never realized that making up analogies to explain things is an ADHD trait – it explains why I use it so extensively!

Students with ADHD are really good at noticing patterns, hyper-observation, long-term memory recall, and seeing connections that are neurotypically overlooked.