Neuro News
- Cassandra Nicholson
- Aug 10
- 3 min read
Neuro News
Week of 10 August 2026 | Neuroinclusion for workplaces and individuals
Happy Tuesday!
I've been watching with joy my friends business, Inner City Maintenance take off! Whilst I still watch tumble weeds passing me by.
I know there is a need. I know there will be a moment where hard work and luck collide. So I keep moving through and learning.
I often think of the image below. I listen to the "We Regret to Inform You" podcast. It's not rejection, just redirection. The right time will come, I believe it.
The Neurodivergence Voice works with P&C leaders and Australian corporates to close the gap between "we're neuroinclusive" and what actually happens in a workplace. If this newsletter flagged something worth a closer look in your organisation, reply to book a conversation — no pitch deck, just a honest conversation. With me, someone with both lived experience of neurodiversity and different workplaces.
Cass
Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
0419 423 746
Neuro at Work
Your job ad is screening people out before the interview Most hiring bottlenecks for neurodivergent candidates get blamed on the interview. The job ad is doing damage first. Long lists of "essential criteria," vague soft-skill lines like "excellent communicator" or "strong multitasker," and jargon-heavy phrasing all filter out capable candidates before an application is even opened — because many neurodivergent job-seekers won't apply unless they meet every listed requirement, and vague traits are impossible to self-assess against. The market is moving, slowly. Indeed Hiring Lab's March 2025 analysis found the share of US job postings mentioning neurodiversity-related keywords roughly tripled between 2018 and 2024 outside care-related occupations — but still sits under 0.5% of all postings. Inclusion at the ad stage remains the exception, not the norm. The fix is not a diversity statement bolted onto the bottom of the listing. It's editing the ad itself: separate "must-have" from "nice-to-have" and mean it, replace vague traits with the actual task ("coordinates three concurrent projects," not "strong multitasker"), and cut jargon that filters for cultural fit over job fit. For P&C leaders: audit your last five job ads. If you can't point to evidence a candidate needs each "essential" item on day one, it's not essential.
Neuro Hacks
Put the phone somewhere you can't see it Not on silent on the desk — out of the room, or face-down in a drawer. Notifications don't need to be checked to cost you attention. Research on smartphone interruptions (Kushlev et al.) found that even the presence of alerts increased inattention and hyperactivity-type symptoms in participants, independent of whether they responded — because the brain registers the interruption before you consciously decide to ignore it. Each switch away from a task and back also carries a documented cognitive cost: working memory has to reload the context you were holding before the ping. For an ADHD or autistic brain already spending more executive effort to sustain a task, that repeated reload adds up fast. The hack isn't willpower. It's removing the stimulus from the room during focus blocks, not just muting it.
Neuro and Cass
Dyscalculia
Third in this series on profiles beyond autism and ADHD, after dyslexia (27 July) and dyspraxia (3 August).
Dyscalculia is a specific difference in number sense, calculation, and mathematical reasoning — not a general intelligence issue, and not "being bad at maths" from poor teaching. Estimated prevalence sits around 3–7% of the population, comparable to dyslexia and dyspraxia, and it's commonly under-recognised in adults because school systems often absorb the difficulty into a broader "struggled with maths" narrative rather than assessing it directly.
In adult and workplace settings it shows up as anxiety around unexpected mental arithmetic, difficulty tracking time or budgets, trouble reading graphs or spreadsheets at speed, and running consistently over on tasks involving quantities or scheduling. It frequently co-occurs with ADHD, which complicates self-recognition — people attribute the difficulty to distractibility rather than a distinct processing difference.
Diagnosis for adults typically involves testing specific numerical skills against general cognitive ability and ruling out anxiety or ADHD as the sole explanation. For someone who has spent years assuming they're "just not a numbers person," a diagnosis reframes the story — and opens the door to workplace accommodations (calculators, extra time on numerical tasks, visual rather than mental tracking tools) rather than continued masking.
Cheers,
Cass Nicholson | Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
Want some more reading? Here are some of the sources I used:
- March 2025 US Labor Market Update: Neurodiversity Inclusive Postings Are Rising, but Untapped Potential Remains — Indeed Hiring Lab: https://www.hiringlab.org/2025/03/18/neurodiversity-inclusive-postings-are-rising
- "Silence Your Phones": Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms — Kushlev et al.: https://www.kushlev.com/s/Kushlev-et-al-Silence-Your-Phones.pdf
- UVA Today — Study: Smartphone Alerts Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity: https://news.virginia.edu/content/study-smartphone-alerts-increase-inattention-and-hyperactivity
- Dyscalculia in Adults: Symptoms, Signs, and Statistics — ADDitude Magazine: https://www.additudemag.com/dyscalculia-in-adults-symptoms-signs-and-statistics
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