NEURODRIFTING
Neurodrifting is a term I created in 2025 as part of my practice-based research.
It describes the shifting movement of attention, presence, perception, and thought experienced by many people with ADHD.
- It is not a medical diagnosis.
- It is a lived experience term.
Neurodrifting helps describe how ADHD attention is not absent or lazy. It is moving. This page shares the writing, research, and lived experience behind Neurodrifting. It is part of my A Hybrid Nation practice-based research project.
Since 2025, Neurodrifting has been shared through conferences, workshops, seminars, public talks, printed materials, artistic research contexts, and online platforms.
What Neurodrifting Means
Neurodrifting is the word I use to describe the shifting and drifting movement of attention, presence, and thought that many people with ADHD experience.
Clinical words such as “inattention” or “executive dysfunction” do not always describe what this feels like from the inside. Neurodrifting is not a replacement for the words “neurodivergent” or “neurodiversity”. It sits alongside these ideas. It helps describe how some ADHD minds move through thoughts, sensations, emotions, and time.
Why I Created The Word
I created this term because many people with ADHD describe their attention as fragmented, moving, uncontrollable, or disorientating.
Many of us experience:
- sudden changes in focus
- the feeling of being in several thoughts at once
- drifting between tasks without meaning to
- moving between memories, ideas, feelings, and sensations very quickly
Existing language does not always explain them clearly.
Neurodrifting gives us a more accurate way to speak about this movement.
Why Neurodrifting is important, because it helps people with ADHD recognise themselves without embarrassment.
Many of us have lived for years with language that focuses on what we fail to do:
- “Pay attention”
- “Stay still”
- “Stay organised”
- “Finish one thing at a time”
- "Day dreaming"
- "Not listening"
These words do not fully describe the movement, depth, or complexity of ADHD experience. By naming Neurodrifting, I am highlighting the shifting and drifting quality of attention that many ADHD people recognise in themselves.
This movement can be:
- confusing,
- creative,
- overwhelming,
- or powerful.
It can disrupt daily life, opening up unexpected insight and imaginative ways of thinking. Neurodrifting gives us a way to acknowledge both sides without being embarrassed of our diagnoses.
Helping Others UnderstandTeachers, employers, colleagues, clinicians, and family members can sometimes misread drifting attention as laziness or disinterest. Neurodrifting helps explain that our attention is not absent.
It is active.
It shifts across thoughts, emotions, memories, and sensations in ways that do not always follow neurotypical patterns. Naming this can reduce misunderstanding, supporting better communication.
Is Neurodrifting A Diagnosis? No.
Neurodrifting is not a medical term or a clinical diagnosis.
It is a lived experience concept. It describes the movement of attention and presence often reported by people with ADHD. It sits alongside existing language, not in place of it
Does Neurodrifting Replace Neurodiversity? No.
Neurodrifting does not replace “neurodiversity” or “neurodivergent”. It describes the natural variety of minds. Neurodivergent describes people who think, feel, or process in ways that differ from dominant norms. Describing how attention and experience can move within those differences.
How Is It Different From “Inattention”?
“Inattention” can sound as if nothing is happening inside the mind. Neurodrifting describes movement, drifting, reorienting, confusion, flow, and sudden shifts in thought. Recognising the depth, complexity, and pace of ADHD experience. It does not reduce ADHD attention to failure.
Is There Research Behind It?
Neurodrifting is a lived experience term. It is not a scientific label. However, it connects with research into ideas such as representational drift and neural variability. This research shows that the brain is not fixed. Patterns of brain activity can shift over time.
ADHD research also shows that attention and brain activity can vary more from moment to moment. Neurodrifting connects these ideas to lived experience. Science can describe patterns in the brain. Neurodrifting describes what this movement can feel like from the inside.
The Brain Is Not Static nor is it a stable machine. It does not hold information in one fixed pattern. Neural activity shifts and changes over time, even when behaviour looks the same. This natural movement is sometimes called representational drift.
Representational drift means that the brain’s “map” of a memory, place, or task can change from day to day, or even from minute to minute.
The brain keeps working, but it does so through changing patterns. This tells us that movement and change are not always signs of failure. They are part of how the brain works. ADHD And Neural Variability Research on ADHD often shows greater variability in how the brain activates from moment to moment. It means the brain is constantly active.
In ADHD, this can include:
- attention changing quickly
- reaction times varying
- focus shifting suddenly
- different brain areas becoming active at different moments
- the mind-wandering system becoming more active or easier to re-enter
Our attention drifts, jumps, or reorients itself without warning.
How this connects to A Hybrid Nation
Neurodrifting comes from the same practice-based research that informs A Hybrid Nation. It reflects the lived texture of shifting identity, movement, and transformation within the wider project. A Hybrid Nation explores costume, performance, identity, and becoming.
Neurodrifting gives language to the internal movement that shapes both the work and the thinking behind it.
Can Other People Use The Term? Yes.
Neurodrifting is intended to support anyone who recognises this movement in themselves. It is especially meaningful for ADHD experience. It may also resonate with others whose attention does not sit still.
Conclusion:
Neurodrifting gives a clear and grounded way to describe the shifting movement of attention experienced by many people with ADHD.
- It brings together lived experience, creative practice, and emerging scientific understanding.
- It offers language that is truthful and humane.
By naming this movement, we create space for recognition, understanding, and dignity. Neurodrifting does not replace existing ideas within neurodiversity. It supports them by giving voice to a pattern of experience that has long been felt, but rarely named.
Further references:
Neurodivergent definitions:
https://neurodivergentcompendium.org/
Neural Variability https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627321000453
Representational drift:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438822001039