Proud Dyslexic, But Ashamed ADHDer? Chasing squirrels in neurodiversity.

Proud Dyslexic, But Ashamed ADHDer? Chasing squirrels in neurodiversity.

Dr Ross Cooper, February 2025

Those who know me have seen me championing dyslexic strengths for the last 30 years (eg, Cooper, 2006). For me, identifying dyslexia positively has two aspects. The first is that dyslexia is not an add on, or something I’ve caught, it is an intrinsic part of who I am. It reflects how I make sense of the world holistically (making connections) and visually (seeing underlying patterns). The second component is recognising that dyslexia comes with predictable strengths. Without dyslexia I would simply not be me.

In 2010, I gave the 8^th Annual Disability Lecture at St John’s College, Cambridge University that introduced my Bagatelle Model of SpLDs (Cooper, 2012). This was my attempt to integrate our understanding of neurodivergence and how the various categories develop and are interrelated. We know that many of the diagnostic criteria for specific categories of neurodivergence are in common. For example, around half of the criteria used for dyslexia are identical to those used for diagnosing dyspraxia. We also know that it is very common to identify as more than one neurodivergent category. Indeed, in our questionnaire produced for the Westminster AchieveAbility Commission Report (2018), respondents identifying with merely one form of neurodivergence are quite rare; and increasingly so, while people start to realise that their experience is not contained by single categories. In one respondent, 14 categories of neurodivergence were claimed. While most respondents named two or three.

As a dyslexic academic, I have felt very comfortable with recognising and owning my dyslexia as a positive, and enjoy my abundant creativity immensely. But the truth is, it doesn’t stop there. There are numerous aspects of my experience and capabilities of which I remain ashamed, and which I have always done my best to hide. So a new realisation for me is that rather than actually being confidently upfront about my dyslexia, I have been selective in what I do and don’t share, or ‘own’.

So what do I remain ashamed about? These are mostly related to time and attention. For example:

I generally have a very poor sense of the passage of time and when I hyperfocus on a task, all sense of time disappears. This means that it is difficult to keep appointments. I tend to stress so much about being late (I was always late as a child and often punished for it) that the sheer stress I feel bumps me out of the hyperfocus, but not in any way reliably, or constructively.

My hands do things that I have no awareness of, so if I lose something (which I do a LOT), I rarely have a way of tracking back to where I have put it. Not knowing what day things were done in (or more specifically, the order in which I have done them) makes retrieving things difficult.

I am extremely distractable. I frequently lose attention in the middle of someone talking to me, then have to play catch up. I have rarely admitted, for shame, that I missed something they said despite knowing that that is simply the best way of catching up.

I lose attention on what I myself am saying. This can be difficult to hide, so I tend to joke about it.

My attention can be scattered during everyday tasks, which leads to leaving lights on, taps running, gas jets left on, etc.

In fact the more I write these things down, the more horrifying it feels!

I’m sure that many readers will recognise that these difficulties I experience are common among dyslexics, but they are also, almost exclusively, indicators of ADHD. I have not been diagnosed with ADHD (unlike dyslexia), but looking at the World Health Organisation

Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, I score ‘very often’ for 5 out of the 6 top indicators, 9 out of the remaining12, and ‘sometimes; for the other 4 questions. So I feel confident that I could get a formal diagnosis should I choose to approach medical professionals. Does it make a difference whether these difficulties are labelled dyslexia or ADHD? Not to me, but it is very interesting to me that those aspects of my lived experience of dyslexia that still cause me shame, are all specific to ADHD. Does this make me a proud dyslexic, but an ashamed ADHDer? It would seem so.

As a child, when I couldn’t read until 10 years old, I was ashamed of it. Particularly as a sister, three years younger than me, taught herself to read at 4 years old before going to school (this happens a lot in dyslexic families). It impacted my self-esteem and self-confidence. I learned to focus on those things I was good at (art, sport, acting well in emergencies, and maths as it happened). It was only later that I challenged that sense of shame and revisited my history to gain pride in what I did well. And beyond that, what I now do well in literacy. For example, my dyslexic thinking enables me to make connections across academic divides, and to write creatively, generating new ideas and new ways of seeing things. But to be frank, it is a lot easier to overcome shame when you’ve overcome the difficulties, unlike when you are still experiencing them.

Contemplating these matters, I realised that there is much fuzzy thinking about attention. It seems self-evident to me that working memory and attention are interrelated. In their paper, McCabe (et al, 2010) point out that working memory and executive function come from different professional traditions and practices. Working memory was a concept developed by psychologists, whereas executive function was developed by neurologists. There has been considerable research into both along with a welter of metrics.

When we attempt to measure a psychological ability, we can rarely measure it directly, like we can, for example, with height. We can’t actually see the psychological ability, the executive function, or working memory itself. So we have to set up scenarios where we might see the effect of the ability or capacity, on behaviour we CAN measure. So if we wanted a measure of auditory working memory, for example, we might ask someone to hear a sequence of numbers and repeat them back in reverse order. This digit span test is, in fact, the most common test of auditory working memory. However, we find that 2/3rds of learners visualise the numbers they hear and read the visualisation back (Cooper, 2009). This totally invalidates the test as a test of auditory working memory, and yet testers are not generally taught to ask testees HOW they did the task. In McCabe’s (et al) research, they use several methods of measuring working memory and executive function. Sadly, they did not appear to ask their testees how they did the tasks, so we do not know what errors the researchers baked into their analysis. Nevertheless, they made a significant discovery.

“Our results show that working memory measures and executive function tasks share a large proportion of common variance. We suggest that work from these two traditions may be profitably wedded by focusing on a single underlying construct of executive attention, which we define as the common attention component required to maintain task goals and resolve interference during complex cognition.”

McCabe (et al) found that the test results for executive function and test results of working memory were ‘almost perfectly correlated’, which gives rise to the possibility that they are measuring the same underlying thing. This in turn directly links poor working memory and attentional difficulties.

Since having a poor working memory is a defining characteristic of dyslexia (and most other categories of neurodivergence), we can therefore predict that all dyslexics will have some attentional difficulties. Sarah Templeton (2025), an ADHD specialist counsellor, recognised this when people were coming for therapy with dyslexia and one by one she realised all of them had ADHD. She then started to monitor the situation over a 15 year period and claims that she is still yet to meet one person with dyslexia who doesn’t also have ADHD.  The pattern is the dyslexia has been spotted and then all subsequent struggles have been attributed to that one diagnosis - missing the ADHD.

“This was hugely prevalent in females, Many couples would come to therapy with the male diagnosed with ADHD and the female with dyslexia. It always transpires that the dyslexic female had had their ADHD missed.” (Personal message).

The extremely close correlation found by McCabe (et al, 2010) between the test results for working memory and executive function scores led to posit that working memory and executive function cannot be meaningfully separated out, which is why they preferred the combined term ‘executive attention’.

Similarly, Francesco’s (et al, 2016) meta research paper, which reviewed 26 published research papers about executive function deficits in autism spectrum disorder and ADHD, found that that both autistic subjects and ADHD subjects had very similar poor working memory and executive function.

“…deficit in attention, WM (working memory), preparatory processes, fluency, and concept formation does not appear to be distinctive in discriminating from ASD, ADHD, or ASD+ADHD group.”

This provides further evidence for the interpretation that attentional differences underpin neurodivergence.

I was literally doing a final edit when what should appear on my LinkedIn stream, but this interesting paper by Ciulkinyte et al (2025) Genetic Neurodevelopmental Clustering and Dyslexia, which found an additional 40 genes linked to both.

“Our study confirms the increased genetic relation between dyslexia and ADHD versus other psychiatric traits and uncovers novel pleiotropic variants affecting both traits. In future, analyses including additional co-occurring traits such as dyscalculia and dyspraxia will allow a clearer definition of the attention and learning difficulties latent factor, yielding further insights into factor structure and pleiotropic effects”. Abstract.

This suggests that they expect to find similar overlaps between ADHD and both dyspraxia and dyscalculia. Since I would argue that both dyspraxia and dyscalculia are underpinned by poor working memory, or poor ‘executive attention’, this would be a logical expectation.

It is my view, based on my own experience and years of working with dyslexic adults, that limited auditory working memory underpins problems with phonological awareness and difficulty with phonics. Decoding letters and blending sounds is working memory intensive and means that there is little attention left to understand what they are ‘reading’. In my Bagatelle Model of SpLDs (2012), I argue that neurodivergent people have a strong intrinsic preference for making sense of the world holistically; and how underlying structures (patterns we can visualise) inform what we can perceive. But we live in a world that demands we learn sequentially and understand the world through language rather than what we can see and feel. When inappropriate linear sequential strategies are imposed on us, it can lead to traumatic failure to learn. I expect that every neurodivergent adult can remember the burning humiliation of being treated as stupid in the classroom. Trauma locks the problem in. I argue what particular problem that is, is fairly arbitrary, initially, but could be to do with reading, maths, spelling, phonics, the need to move, communication, hand writing, etc. But whatever the focus of the difficulty, the difficulty is usually a consequence of trying to sequence 3D data in linear order.

So where does this leave me? Once I realised that I had been ‘masking’ (and I had always believed that this was primarily an autistic strategy), I decided to own it and tell people when I have been distracted. I had thought this could lead to better understanding of my daily navigation of life. I thought I could show that it wasn’t that I wasn’t listening or was uninterested, but that I just got distracted. It turns out that there is a fundamental problem with this openness. Most of the attentional issues I experience can be categorised, if you wish, as ‘memory’ problems. At my age (73 at time of writing) memory problems can flag dementia. So I perhaps should not have been surprised to be told I must have dementia by a very close family member. I’m pretty sure I know the difference between working memory issues and dementia, but it is chilling to hear the accusation. Which really brings me to my last question, which is what is the relationship between neurodiversity and dementia? Another ‘squirrel’! Actually, in truth, I am far more interested in where squirrels end up, what they can tell us about the workings of the whole ecology. It is, after all, the interconnections that give our perceptions and experiences meaning. We’re getting better at chasing squirrels.

References:

Cooper, R (2006), A Social Model of Dyslexia, Language Issues, Vol 18, No 2

Cooper, R (2009) Dyslexia, in Pollak, David (Ed.) Neurodiversity in HE; positive responses to learning differences, Wiley

Cooper,R.(2012), The Bagatelle Model of Specific Learning Differences, Patoss Bulletin, Vol 25 No.2 Winter 2012 pp27-31Cooper, R (2008) The Bagatelle Model of SpLDs, Patoss Journal

Cooper, R. (Ed.), Hewlett,K. Jameson, M. (2018), The Westminster AchieveAbility Report; Neurodivergent voices Opening Doors to Employment.

Ciulkinyte, A. Mountford, H. Fontanillas, 23andMe Research Team, Bates, T. Martin, N. Fisher, E. Luciano, M. (2025) Genetic Neurodevelopment Clustering and Dyslexia, in Molecular Psychiatry, 30:140-150; https://doi.org/10238/s41380-02649-

Francesco Craig, Francesco Margari, Anna R Legrottaglie, Roberto Palumbi, Concetta de Giambattista & Lucia Margari (2016) A review of executive function deficits in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, , 1191-1202, DOI: 10.2147/NDT.S104620 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S104620

McCabe, D.P. Roediger,H.L.III, McDaniel, M.A. Balota, D.A. & Hambrick, D.Z. (2010) The relationship between working memory capacity and executive functioning: Evidence for a common executive attention construct. Neuropsychology, 24(2), 222-243. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017619

Templeton, S (2025), personal communication, 2 February, 2025

WHO, Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS-v1.1) Symptom Checklist1