Through the Thicket: Understanding AuDHD Attention
When we think back on childhood, many of us remember moments of wandering, not always lost, but absorbed. For some, it might have been sitting in the garden tracing patterns in the dirt, or building elaborate imaginary worlds from sticks and stones. For others, it was the electric hum of curiosity, following a sound, a shimmer of light, or an idea until everything else fell away. These moments of absorption , and the sudden jolts that pulled us out of them, trace the beginnings of an attentional rhythm that many of us now recognize as distinctly AuDHD: deep, divergent, and sometimes disorienting.
Our minds often feel like dense forests, layered, alive, and full of competing sounds. There are days when we move with fluid grace, following one clear path through the undergrowth. Then there are days when every twig seems to crackle at once, each rustle demanding our attention. Focus becomes a kind of navigation, an act of orientation in shifting terrain. We learn to move through it not by silencing the noise, but by learning the landscape, by understanding how our minds light up, drift, return, and rest.
When we speak of attention in AuDHD experience, we are really describing a pattern of movement. It is not a deficit, though the world often calls it that. It is an ecology, a living system of depth and divergence, tuned by both curiosity and sensitivity. In some moments, it pulls us deep into flow, what psychologists like Csikszentmihalyi once called “optimal experience”, that immersive, effortless state when the mind and world seem to sync. In others, it floods outward, capturing too much, too soon.
The paradox of AuDHD attention is that it is both anchored and untethered, capable of extraordinary focus, yet easily undone by the weight of too many inputs. Some of us experience it as a pendulum: swinging between stillness and scatter, between deep absorption and restless scanning. Others describe it as layers of sound, melodies of thought and sensation that sometimes harmonize and sometimes collide. Whatever metaphor we use, the experience feels like living between two distinct but interwoven systems of attention: the autistic pull toward depth, and the ADHD pull toward motion.
In neuroscience, these two pulls mirror distinct but overlapping networks. Autism research has long described monotropism, a tendency for attention to narrow around a single channel of interest, creating the deep, immersive focus so many autistic people know well. It is the feeling of falling into a subject, a project, or a sensory experience so completely that time seems to dissolve. In contrast, ADHD attention tends to move outward, driven by novelty, emotion, and reward. It is the mind’s way of seeking stimulation to stay engaged, a pattern shaped by the brain’s dopamine and motivation circuits.
When these two systems coexist, as they do in AuDHD minds, attention becomes both highly tuned and easily flooded. Studies using brain imaging show that when autism and ADHD occur together, they do not simply “add up”; they form a distinct attentional pattern, one with its own neural fingerprint. Researchers like Berg and colleagues have found differences in the way regions responsible for emotion, reward, and executive control communicate. These differences can amplify both the strengths and the struggles of our attention.
In everyday life, this can look like deep, vivid focus that suddenly unravels. We might spend hours tracing an idea or organizing information until the world narrows to a pinpoint, only to be startled by an unrelated sound or thought that yanks us out of that tunnel. The transition between states can feel abrupt, even jarring. It’s not that focus disappears; it simply fragments, scattered among too many signals that the brain struggles to rank in order of importance.
This fragmentation often feels like standing in a forest clearing during a sudden wind. Every leaf moves. The eye catches one, then another, then a flash of movement deeper in the trees. The sensory world expands faster than we can process it. For many of us, this is where regulation begins to slip. Attention and emotion are never separate in AuDHD experience, they co-regulate each other. When focus holds, our nervous system steadies. When it breaks, chaos follows, and the mind floods with sensation and thought that cannot easily be sorted.
Over time, we learn that our focus is not random; it is relational. It follows meaning, emotion, and safety. We focus best when something feels alive when it connects to our values, our curiosity, or our sense of belonging. This emotional link helps explain why the AuDHD brain often resists focusing on tasks that feel dull or imposed, even when we “know” they’re important. The brain’s reward pathways prioritize interest and relevance over obligation. What engages us isn’t always what’s demanded of us.
To understand how this plays out neurologically, it helps to think of attention as a system of coordination rather than control. Decades of research, from Posner and Petersen’s early models to contemporary imaging studies, suggest that attention relies on three interacting systems: alerting, orienting, and executive control. Each one is like a part of our inner navigation a radar, a compass, and a guide.
The alerting system keeps us ready, scanning for new input. It involves areas of the brainstem and frontal cortex that regulate arousal. For many of us, this radar runs hot. It stays tuned to subtle changes in the environment, shifts in light, tone, or temperature, and often detects potential “threats” before our conscious mind does. This vigilance can be adaptive, but when it remains on high alert, the result is sensory fatigue. The radar never sleeps. It scans for safety even when no danger is present, leaving us tired and easily overstimulated.
The orienting system decides where to place that attention, the compass that turns toward what feels most salient. In autism, this system tends to be guided by sensory or emotional detail; in ADHD, it’s influenced by novelty and reward. Together, they can create a compass that swings widely, drawn toward whatever feels most alive, interesting, or emotionally charged in the moment. We might shift rapidly between stimuli, a sound, a thought, a conversation, not because we lack focus, but because everything lights up at once.
Finally, the executive system acts as our internal guide. It prioritizes, filters, and shifts between tasks as needed. For AuDHD individuals, this guide is often both highly skilled and easily overwhelmed. Studies suggest that the very regions meant to manage attention, like the prefrontal cortex and salience network, are more tightly linked to sensory and emotional systems in AuDHD brains. This means our internal guide is flooded with too much information from the world and the body. It is trying to direct traffic in the middle of a storm, hearing every signal at full volume.
This neurological entanglement helps explain why transitions can feel so hard. We’re not just switching tasks; we’re reorienting entire neural networks that process emotion, perception, and control. The effort of redirecting attention can be physically exhausting. Many of us describe it as a kind of cognitive drag, as if moving from one focus to another requires pushing through heavy air.
Yet within this complexity lies immense potential. When the systems align, when the radar calms, the compass steadies, and the guide finds a clear path, attention becomes fluid, even transcendent. Many of us know this state instinctively. It’s the moment when we lose ourselves in a project, a creative process, or a line of inquiry that feels inexhaustible. The world narrows to one thread, and everything else fades.
Researchers studying autistic and ADHD forms of flow describe this experience as distinct from typical engagement. It is not simply concentration; it is connection, a felt sense of coherence between thought, body, and environment. Autistic flow, in particular, tends to be less about challenge and mastery (as traditional flow theory suggests) and more about deep resonance and meaning. We enter flow when the world meets us at the right depth, when we are allowed to move at our natural pace and pattern.
But flow has its shadows. The same deep absorption that brings peace can also blur the boundaries between focus and fatigue. Without external cues to rest or shift, we may remain in a task long past the point of regulation, only realizing afterward that our body has gone numb, our shoulders tense, our stomach empty. This isn’t hyperfocus as pathology, it’s the cost of immersion in a world that rarely meets our internal rhythms.
At the other extreme, when the systems misfire, when the radar spikes and the compass spins, focus fragments into overwhelm. This is not inattentiveness; it’s hyper-attentiveness without coherence. Everything is noticed, and nothing can be ignored. Sound, motion, thought, and feeling arrive all at once. The mind tries to grasp it, but the branches of the forest close in too tightly. We call this “meltdown” or “shutdown,” but underneath those words is often the experience of attentional collapse, a system trying to protect itself by shutting down the flood.
For many of us, understanding this pattern is deeply validating. It reframes what we’ve been told is failure, distraction, inconsistency, overfocus, as the natural rhythm of a brain balancing two powerful drives: to explore and to stabilize. The AuDHD mind is not broken; it is adaptive. Its attentional patterns evolved to notice nuance, to find links, to feel meaning deeply. The cost is that in modern environments saturated with information and demand, these strengths can turn against us.
The question then becomes: how do we navigate the thicket without losing ourselves in it?
One way is through awareness, learning to map our internal landscape of attention. We begin to notice when we are pulled too wide or too deep, when the radar hums too loud or the compass fixates on a single point. Some of us find grounding in sensory anchors, texture, rhythm, or breath. Others use external scaffolding: timers, visual maps, body-doubling. These tools are not crutches; they are navigational aids, helping us orient when the forest thickens.
Equally important is compassion. Many of us carry years of self-criticism for not being able to “focus like everyone else.” But understanding our attention through the lens of neurodivergence allows for gentler interpretation. We are not lazy or inconsistent; we are responsive. Our focus is relational, emotional, and embodied. It is guided less by command and more by connection.
When we begin to see attention this way, not as obedience, but as orientation, it becomes easier to value its rhythm. The AuDHD mind moves through the world like a network of rivers: some streams run deep and narrow, others wide and shallow. Together they form a landscape of cognition that is rich, fertile, and alive. The goal isn’t to force stillness but to learn the tides, to know when to ride the current and when to rest on the shore.
This reframe has implications beyond the personal. In workplaces, classrooms, and relationships, we are often asked to conform to attentional norms designed for neurotypical brains: linear, sustained, task-focused. But many of us think and work cyclically. We need space for incubation, divergence, and return. When environments allow for this, when pacing, sensory conditions, and expectations are flexible, our capacity for innovation and deep insight flourishes.
There is growing recognition in research that attention is not a single skill but a signature a personal rhythm of engagement shaped by brain networks, emotion, and environment. In AuDHD experience, that signature is especially dynamic. It can’t be standardized, but it can be understood. Recognizing our attentional signature helps us design lives that fit our cognitive contours instead of fighting them.
As we learn to understand this rhythm, we begin to notice its beauty. The moments of deep flow are not accidents; they are the natural expression of a brain that loves coherence. The moments of scatter are not failure; they are signals of overload, reminders to pause, to rest, to recalibrate. Both are part of the same system, one that, when supported, offers creativity, empathy, and an unusual capacity for pattern recognition.
We are not meant to prune our attention down to a single thread. We are meant to cultivate the forest, to know it’s clearings and its thickets, it’s seasons of growth and rest. Our focus is not a flaw; it is an ecosystem.
When we learn to walk it with awareness, noticing when the light changes, when the path narrows, when the wind shifts, we begin to find steadier ground. And from that place, we can build lives that honor both our curiosity and our calm, our depth and our movement.
Each of us carries a distinct constellation of attention. Some stars burn bright with focus, others flicker with curiosity. Together they form patterns of perception that shape how we see and how we are seen. Understanding that constellation, mapping it with care, is not just a cognitive exercise. It is an act of self-recognition.
As we continue exploring this terrain, we might remember that the goal isn’t to tame the mind, but to know it. Attention is not something we master; it is something we move with. The thicket may be dense, but within it lie paths of extraordinary insight, ways of seeing that the world deeply needs.