Hello! My name is Mayuri.

It’s pronounced Maa-yoo-ree. My name means peacock in Sanskrit.

Over the last 6 years I was working on NASA research – I was a planetary scientist studying how magnetic fields are generated inside of planets. Before that, I was a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography studying how Earth’s magnetic field changes over time based on measurements made above Earth’s surface using tools like navigational compasses.

I found out recently that I have ADHD and it made my whole life finally make sense. I want to introduce myself based on that, since it’s relevant here.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an artist. My dad made me practice math for two hours after school every day because I almost got help back in first grade when my teacher thought I didn’t know how to add. I was 6 years old when my came home grumpy and said,

“Why does your teacher think you don’t know how to add? She wants to hold you back!”

“I don’t add.”

“What do you mean you ‘don’t add’? You don’t know how to add?”

“I know how to add. I just don’t add. It’s boring”

I feel like this response itself indicated that I probably have ADHD.

I also proceeded to explain to my father how I thought the way my teacher taught us to add was not great. She would have a box of ~50 popsicle sticks and distributed them evenly across all of the students in the class to share. When we needed to add:

6+5

she would have us count 5 sticks, separately count 6 sticks, and then count the total to get the sum. I told my father that this was a dumb way to add because what if we had to add:

50+11?

We only had a total of 50 popsicle sticks so how were we supposed to all 11 to it? Even little-kid me realized that this method of adding was not “scaleable” long term, so I refused to do this method altogether.

My dad stared at me for a while and didn’t say anything, but then the next day he went to my teacher and convinced her to let me pass. From that day on, my dad made me practice math every day after school for two hours. We started at multiplication and division first, and then I augmented that with addition and subtraction.

The only part of doing math every day that I liked was getting permission to sit in my father’s gigantic, rolling, spinning, swivel chair. I hated the rest of it because I actually found math quite boring at the time.

When I got to physics in high school, I still wanted to be an artist. Physics problems involve first visualizing the physical situation we are presented with, and then drawing the situation in a cartoon. Next, it helps to describe the situation in words. Finally, we figure out what kind of math would be useful to describe the situation as well. I realized that every single physics problem first involved drawing and only then doing math. I thought this was kind of cool because I was good at math and I loved to draw and I was willing to be bored by the math for short bursts of time if it meant I could draw for long stretches of time.

I didn;t score as high as I wanted on my first physics exam, so I asked my teacher what I could do to score higher on the next exam. He looked at me funny and said “You didn’t get many things wrong that you did finish – you just didn’t finish the test, and I noticed that for every problem you spend almost 2 minutes drawing the situation and then maybe 20 seconds doing the math or the rest of the problem, whatever it is. If you don’t draw all of the details so thoroughly, you would have enough time to finish the test.”

I remember that I looked at him and said “but the drawing is the only part of the problem that I enjoy.”

And he agreed that it was okay to draw, but that was the first cause of my slow-down that he could think of. I thanked him and went home, still uncomfortable with the solution he had proposed. At home, I asked my parents what they thought I could do to improve my score, and both of them chimed,

“Do more problems, Do 20 today, do 20 tomorrow, do 20 the next day, and keep ding that until the next test. And then come back and tell us what you score.”

I think that probably, to a normal person, doing 20 physics problems a day might sound like overkill. But to 13-year-old me, I immediately though “that works, because I get to draw more if I do 20 problems!”

The idea of doing more labor didn’t deter me, and I think a lot of my peers in my classes would have opted to stop drawing so much because it is less work. But at the time, I knew I would be miserable in the physics class if I stopped drawing.

As an adult, I now think I was dopamine hunting. Dopamine, a neurochemical that our body naturally produces, is nicknamed the “happy hormone” because when it floods our brain it helps us to feel contented and happy. ADHD brains naturally have less dopamine than neurotypical brains do, called a dopamine deficit. Individuals with ADHD rely on sensory experiences (e.g. eat chocolate, swim in the ocean, nap in the sun, drink a smoothie, go for a run, hike, sing, dance, surf, skate, draw, paint, sculpt, etc.) to help their body produce more dopamine.

Neurotypical individuals naturally produce enough dopamine to be happy that they were alive. Those with a dopamine deficit naturally feel depression until they find an activity or sensory experience that helps them bump up their brain dopamine levels to those of a neurotypical brain. When I was a kid, I got dopamine from drawing but not from doing math. When someone suggested that I remove the source of my dopamine altogether, as a solution to a problem, I could feel that that solution was not going to work for me.

Alternatively, when my parents suggested that I get 20 times the dopamine into my brain, I could feel that this solution would work for me. And yes, I would have to do 20 times the amount of math. But it only took me ~20 seconds to do the math! I could spend 2 minutes charging up on dopamine in my brain by drawing, and then ride that dopamine high for 20 seconds while doing math that didn’t give me any dopamine, and then I would start charging up again on the next problem.

So of course, if I was hunting for dopamine and I just wanted to do something that made me feel happy over and over again, I was going to choose to do 20 physics problems rather than fewer of them with no drawing at all.

I’ve so far described only two ADHD-linked behaviors that I exhibited as a kid. There were thousands, obviously. I didn’t know how to explain it back then, but I could feel it – and it guided a lot of my decision making. As a result of this, I have learned that:

there are a lot of ways to study a subject

there are a lot of ways to learn a subject

there are a lot of ways to explain a concept

etc.

When I coach students who have ADHD through physics specifically, I have developed an arsenal of ways to approach the situation and so I use that to my advantage.