Neuro News
- Cassandra Nicholson
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Neuro News
Week of 6 July 2026 | Neuroinclusion for workplaces and individuals
Happy Tuesday!
It's the middle of the year where the days are short and wind is cold! I love Brisbane winters, I hope you're keeping cosy where you are.
If you’re curious (or know someone who is) to learn how leverage neurodiversity into a competitive advantage, please come to the Brisbane Business Hub next week! You can register for your free ticket here. It starts at 9:30 on Tuesday 14 July - Level 20 / 69 Ann Street Brisbane City.
If this week's "hidden curriculum" piece landed, it's usually because someone in your org has been quietly penalised for not knowing rules nobody ever wrote down. That's a fixable, structural problem — not a personality one. I run workshops for P&C teams that map the hidden curriculum in your specific workplace and turn it into onboarding material every new hire can actually use, neurodivergent or not.
Book a time to talk about what that could look like for your team.
Cass
Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
0419 423 746
Neurodivergence Voice | Empowering Inclusive Workplaces
Neuro at Work
The Hidden Curriculum
Every workplace runs on two sets of rules. One is written down: policies, position descriptions, KPIs. The other isn't written anywhere — how to phrase an email to your manager, when a "maybe" from a director actually means no, how much small talk is expected before a meeting starts, who needs to be looped in before a decision is made. Neurotypical staff tend to absorb this "hidden curriculum" by osmosis, through years of pattern-matching social cues. Neurodivergent staff are often just as capable technically, but haven't been handed the same implicit map — and get read as unprofessional, abrasive, or "not quite fitting the culture" as a result. That's not a competence gap. It's an information gap.
What P&C leaders can do: audit how much of your workplace's real operating rules exist only as tribal knowledge. Document the things everyone assumes are obvious — meeting etiquette, escalation pathways, who has authority over what, how feedback actually gets delivered versus how the policy says it should. Put it in onboarding material. Making the curriculum explicit costs you an afternoon of documentation. Leaving it hidden costs you good staff who never work out why they're not advancing.
Neuro Hacks
Borrow the ADHD Brain's Actual Fuel Source
Most productivity advice assumes tasks get done because they're important. For an ADHD nervous system, importance alone rarely moves the needle — the system runs on a different fuel.
Dr. William Dodson's framework (sometimes shortened to INCUP) names the five things that reliably recruit an ADHD brain's attention: Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, Passion. If a task isn't naturally interesting or urgent, it often doesn't get started — no matter how much it "should."
The hack: before a task you're avoiding, ask which lever you can attach to it. Can't make it interesting? Manufacture urgency with a real deadline or a body double watching you work. Can't make it urgent? Add a challenge — beat your own time, turn it into a game. Can't gamify it? Try a genuinely novel method — different app, different location, different order of steps. This isn't a discipline problem you're failing to solve. It's a dopamine-recruitment problem, and it has a mechanism you can actually work with instead of fighting.
Neuro and Cass
AuDHD: When Autism and ADHD Show Up Together
Estimates vary depending on how they're measured, but recent research puts the overlap between autism and ADHD at roughly 40–70% of autistic adults also meeting criteria for ADHD, with growing evidence that the two share genetic and neurobiological ground rather than being unrelated conditions that happen to coincide.
A 2025 neuroimaging study found the combined profile shows distinct brain structure and connectivity patterns — not simply "autism plus ADHD," but potentially its own neurodevelopmental profile.
What makes AuDHD hard to spot is that the two conditions frequently pull in opposite directions inside the same person: autism's preference for routine and predictability against ADHD's craving for novelty and low tolerance for sameness; sensory overwhelm that says "stop" fighting a nervous system that says "I can't slow down." Clinicians pattern-matching to a textbook presentation of either condition can miss it because the traits partially mask each other.
For late-diagnosed adults, this is often the missing piece — you don't fit the autism checklist or the ADHD checklist cleanly, because you were never meant to fit just one.
Cheers,
Cass Nicholson | Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
Brisbane QLD, Australia +61 0419 423 746
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