Ticket to Ride and the ADHD Mind: How Cognitive Flexibility Turns Obstacles into Pathways

Why Some Games Are Hard with ADHD

This afternoon, we sat down to play Ticket to Ride. The box looked cheerful — colored trains, bright cards, family laughter in the background. It was supposed to be one of those peaceful weekend moments that make you forget work and screens. But as soon as my husband opened the rulebook, I felt something shift inside me. Line after line, the instructions multiplied: colors, destinations, scoring methods, bonus cards, exceptions. Before even entering the game, I had to understand it — and that’s where the trouble began.

He read the rules carefully, his tone calm and patient. I nodded, smiled, pretended to follow. Inside, though, a storm was building. Every new rule erased the one before it. My working memory — the fragile space where information is temporarily stored and manipulated — was already full. I could feel it slipping away, like trying to hold water in my hands. And yet I couldn’t show my frustration. That would have ruined the family atmosphere, the very joy of the moment. So, I waited.

When you have ADHD, moments like these are invisible battles. On the surface, you seem distracted or disinterested. In reality, your mind is overloaded. You are not choosing to disconnect; you’re forced out of the moment by the cognitive weight of too many instructions, too many layers of abstraction. What others process naturally — “draw a card, place a train, calculate your route” — becomes a mental labyrinth. The harder you try to follow, the more your brain rebels.

Researchers call this the working memory bottleneck. It’s one of the most consistent findings in ADHD studies: between 62% and 85% of people with ADHD show significant working memory deficits. That means tasks requiring multiple steps, mental sequencing, or temporary rule storage — exactly what most modern board games demand — become disproportionately hard. Yet this isn’t about intelligence. It’s about cognitive load: the number of items the brain must hold at once before action can occur.

By the time my husband finished explaining, my mind had already escaped. The words sounded familiar, but they no longer carried meaning. I smiled again, waited for the first turn, and hoped I could learn “on the go.” Fortunately, he knows my ADHD well enough to bridge the gap — to re-explain, model, and let me play within the flow rather than before it. That act of quiet adaptation changed everything: from frustration to connection, from being “behind” to being with.

For many adults with ADHD, this small domestic scene is a mirror of daily life. The challenge is not the lack of will or curiosity; it’s the architecture of tasks that assume a linear, uninterrupted memory. Games, meetings, instructions, even recipes — they all test the same hidden muscle. And when that muscle tires, the joy fades, replaced by shame or impatience.

Yet, as I learned today, the problem is not that our minds are broken — it’s that most games, like much of modern life, are not designed for minds that think in motion. And maybe the first step toward inclusion is not simplification, but compassion — the ability to let someone learn by doing, rather than by remembering.

Working Memory and ADHD: A Fragile Balance Inside the Brain

Understanding Working Memory

Working memory is the mental workspace that allows us to hold and manipulate information for a few seconds while we think or act. It is what lets a person remember the beginning of a sentence while listening to its end, keep track of multi-step instructions, or plan a sequence of moves in a game. In everyday life, working memory is constantly at work—bridging the gap between perception and action.

For most people, this system functions efficiently: new information is encoded, maintained for a few seconds, and then replaced when no longer relevant. But for individuals with ADHD, this workspace behaves differently. The “mental notepad” is shorter, and what is written on it tends to fade too quickly. The brain receives the information but cannot hold it long enough to connect it to the next step. It is not a lack of understanding, but a loss of continuity—a momentary disconnection in the cognitive thread.

The Prefrontal Cortex and Its Fragile Coordination

Neuroscientific research over the last two decades has identified the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) as a key hub in working memory. This region coordinates the temporary storage and manipulation of information and maintains mental representations that guide behavior. In individuals with ADHD, functional MRI studies consistently show reduced activation of the DLPFC during tasks that demand sustained attention or multi-step reasoning.

According to Willcutt et al. (2019), between 62% and 85% of people with ADHD exhibit measurable deficits in working memory performance. These deficits are not random lapses but reflect an underlying inefficiency in the neural circuits that support attention regulation and cognitive persistence. The brain understands each instruction, but it struggles to keep the sequence alive long enough to act upon it.

This weakness becomes especially apparent in tasks that rely on sequential learning or delayed action—reading instructions before playing a game, listening to a set of directions, or holding onto abstract concepts without immediate context. In such cases, the brain cannot maintain the mental representation needed to link what it hears to what it must later do.

What Medication Can and Cannot Do

Medications like Concerta (methylphenidate) are highly effective at improving some aspects of attention. By increasing the availability of dopamine and norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex, they enhance the brain’s signal-to-noise ratio—making it easier to filter distractions and stay focused. Controlled studies have shown that methylphenidate improves task engagement, response inhibition, and sustained vigilance by 20–40% on average (Faraone et al., 2021).

However, medication is not a total solution. While stimulants optimize the brain’s capacity to focus and persist, they do not fundamentally restructure the neural networks responsible for working memory itself. The DLPFC, the parietal cortex, and the basal ganglia form a complex dynamic system that coordinates not just focus but cognitive sequencing. Medication can make this system more stable, but it does not lengthen the mental timeline that working memory depends on.

This is why many individuals on Concerta describe feeling calmer, clearer, and more able to sustain effort—but still struggle to follow complex instructions, long explanations, or rule-heavy games. The medication stabilizes the engine, but it does not rewrite the map.

Why Information Slips Away

To understand this more deeply, neuroscientists speak of dopaminergic tone—the baseline level of dopamine that regulates motivation and cognitive persistence. In ADHD, this tone tends to be lower and more variable. The brain therefore depends heavily on immediate feedback or emotional engagement to maintain focus. When information arrives without emotional charge—like abstract instructions, long readings, or verbal rules—it fails to activate the reward system that sustains working memory activity.

This explains why a person with ADHD may grasp each sentence of an explanation but lose the overall sense by the end. The mind isn’t drifting out of laziness or lack of effort; it is disengaging because the cognitive reward loop isn’t being fueled. Without emotional resonance, the dopamine signal declines, the neural representation decays, and the person’s awareness “falls out” of the sequence.

A 2022 study in Cerebral Cortex showed that working-memory performance in ADHD correlates strongly with fluctuations in dopaminergic activity, not just task complexity. In other words, the more emotionally flat or abstract the material, the more likely the brain is to disengage—even under medication.

Emotion as an Anchor for Attention

Emotion, in this sense, is not a distraction for ADHD—it is an anchor. The prefrontal cortex, when supported by limbic engagement, can sustain working memory far more effectively. That is why learning or understanding through direct experience often works better than through reading or listening.

When someone with ADHD learns a game like Ticket to Ride by playing instead of by memorizing rules, they are engaging a different circuit: the motor, visual, and emotional networks reinforce the prefrontal system. The act of “doing while understanding” transforms the abstract sequence into embodied memory. Dopamine levels rise, attention stabilizes, and comprehension follows naturally.

This phenomenon also explains why relational or cooperative learning environments are often more successful for ADHD adults and children. The presence of another person—especially one offering encouragement or shared focus—creates emotional context. That context activates limbic-prefrontal pathways that extend the lifespan of working memory traces. In simple terms: being accompanied in understanding allows the information to stay alive longer in the mind.

What This Means in Everyday Life

Even with effective medication, individuals with ADHD often continue to face cognitive overload in situations that demand sustained abstraction: reading detailed manuals, processing multi-step verbal instructions, or listening to long explanations before acting. The challenge is not willpower or attention span—it is the architecture of the task.

Tasks that rely on “holding before doing” put an unnatural demand on a brain wired for immediacy and context. The key, therefore, is not to push harder but to adapt the way information is presented: to reduce cognitive load, to visualize sequences, and to allow real-time learning.

From a neuroscientific perspective, this adaptation works because it distributes the task across multiple sensory and emotional networks instead of overloading a single verbal memory system. When visual, auditory, and kinesthetic cues align, the prefrontal cortex can maintain coherence with less effort. This is why visual scaffolding, embodied practice, and relational feedback consistently outperform rote memorization in ADHD learning research.

Ultimately, working memory challenges in ADHD are not a sign of brokenness but of a different temporal rhythm of cognition. The ADHD brain processes the world dynamically, needing immediacy, movement, and meaning to sustain coherence. Medication helps align the rhythm; environment and empathy sustain it.

The Deeper Lesson

What the neuroscience of ADHD teaches us is that attention is not a static resource—it is a living relationship between emotion, memory, and action. A person with ADHD may have the same intelligence and insight as anyone else, but their working memory system is less tolerant of delay and abstraction. That fragility is not a flaw; it’s a call for design and understanding.

When we build environments—whether classrooms, workplaces, or games—that respect this cognitive rhythm, the difference is extraordinary. Rules become learnable. Sequences become intuitive. The mind, no longer struggling to retain the impossible, finds peace in participation.

The goal is not to “fix” the ADHD brain, but to speak its language: one of immediacy, meaning, and compassionate structure. Even in the era of neuroscience, that remains the most human truth of all.

Learning Through Living: When Experience Becomes the Only Path to Understanding

The Small Vessel and the Vast Desire to Understand

For many people with ADHD, thinking feels like holding a small vessel under a waterfall. The thirst for understanding is immense—almost existential—but the mental container that holds information feels too small for the flow. This is not a matter of intelligence or motivation. It is the result of a mismatch between an intense cognitive drive for meaning and a limited working memory capacity.

Neuroscientific research shows that adults with ADHD typically score one to two standard deviations below the mean on working memory tests (Martinussen et al., 2005). Yet paradoxically, they often exhibit above-average levels of curiosity and creative reasoning. Their brains absorb information rapidly, but they struggle to hold it long enough to integrate it fully.

This creates a deep inner tension: understanding becomes a form of survival. The mind craves coherence, but it can only receive it in fragments. Knowledge must be embodied, not merely explained—it must be lived before it can be understood.

Embodied Cognition: Learning by Doing

Neuroscience increasingly supports what many ADHD individuals intuitively know: we understand best through experience.
Embodied cognition theory, developed by researchers like Lakoff, Barsalou, and Glenberg, shows that learning is not just a cerebral process—it is grounded in bodily action and sensory engagement. When we move, manipulate objects, or emotionally engage with content, we activate sensorimotor and emotional networks that help anchor learning in long-term memory.

Functional MRI studies have demonstrated that learning-by-doing activates both the motor cortex and the hippocampus, creating multiple neural “hooks” for later recall (Glenberg, 2010). This is particularly critical for ADHD brains, which rely on distributed activation to maintain focus.
In other words, the more channels of perception are involved, the easier it becomes for the brain to sustain attention and store meaning.

This is why a person with ADHD may struggle to follow verbal instructions but thrive when allowed to experiment. They learn not by hearing what should be done, but by trying, adjusting, and feeling the feedback loop of experience.

The Need for Transformation, Not Just Information

Behind this experiential mode of learning lies something more profound than curiosity: a need for transformation.
People with ADHD rarely seek knowledge just to possess it; they seek it to be changed by it. Their cognitive motivation is existential rather than utilitarian—they do not want to “know about” a concept; they want to become one with it.

This need for transformation is reflected in the neural architecture of ADHD. Dopamine—the neurotransmitter of motivation and learning—is released not only by external rewards, but also by the moment of insight or discovery. In neurotypical individuals, dopamine levels rise gradually with sustained progress. In ADHD, dopamine release is phasic, meaning it surges during discovery and novelty, then drops rapidly (Volkow et al., 2011).

This pattern explains why exploration, curiosity, and emotional engagement feel so essential: without them, the cognitive drive collapses. Information alone does not “stick” because it fails to activate the brain’s reward-learning circuitry. Only experiences that generate meaning—those that engage both intellect and emotion—produce lasting understanding.

The Neurobiology of Curiosity and the Dopamine Loop

Curiosity operates as the brain’s natural reinforcement system, especially in ADHD. When a person explores, questions, or searches independently, the ventral tegmental area (VTA) releases dopamine into the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, improving focus, memory, and cognitive flexibility.

A study published in Neuron (Gruber et al., 2014) found that during states of high curiosity, participants showed 65% better recall of unrelated information learned immediately afterward. This demonstrates how emotional-motivational arousal enhances learning consolidation. For people with ADHD, whose baseline dopamine activity is 30–40% lower (Volkow et al., 2009), curiosity acts as a pharmacological substitute: it temporarily restores balance and engagement.

This is why searching for answers independently can feel almost intoxicating. The ADHD brain, when allowed to explore freely, enters a state of hyperfocus—a neurological flow where dopamine and norepinephrine align perfectly. But this same brain, when forced to absorb information passively, shuts down within minutes.

Understanding, for someone with ADHD, is not a passive event—it is a physiological awakening.

Experiential Learning as a Form of Regulation

When learning is embodied, the ADHD brain self-regulates naturally. The motor system, the limbic system, and the prefrontal cortex synchronize through rhythmic feedback. Movement, emotion, and cognition reinforce each other, stabilizing attention without external control.

This explains why tactile engagement, role-play, or real-world experimentation often outperform conventional instruction. A child or adult with ADHD who learns mathematics through physical manipulation or business strategy through real scenarios is not avoiding abstraction—they are anchoring it in sensory and emotional memory.

Studies in educational neuroscience confirm this: when action is integrated into learning, retention increases by up to 35%, and anxiety decreases significantly (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). For ADHD learners, such embodied experiences also reduce hyperarousal by grounding attention in the present moment.

Learning becomes not an act of memorization, but a process of alignment between the body, the mind, and meaning.

The Emotional Cost of Disembodied Learning

However, when learning is imposed in abstract or linear formats—long instructions, theoretical lectures, or written rules before practice—the ADHD brain encounters a kind of cognitive suffocation.
The prefrontal-parietal network, responsible for holding sequential data, begins to overload, while emotional frustration rises. The result is not mere distraction but a physiological mismatch: the brain is ready to act, but the environment demands delay.

This disconnect often triggers shame. Adults with ADHD frequently report feeling “stupid” or “lazy” in such contexts, despite being cognitively gifted. Yet what they experience is not a failure of discipline—it is a failure of design. The task is not built for a brain that needs movement, emotion, and immediacy to thrive.

Creating spaces that allow exploration, feedback, and experiential testing does not infantilize the learner—it respects the neurobiology of understanding.

Experience as the Language of the ADHD Mind

The ADHD brain speaks the language of experience.
It translates emotion into memory, action into thought, and discovery into meaning. It cannot fully grasp what it has not felt, seen, or touched. This does not make it less rational; it makes it deeply embodied.

The German phenomenologist Edith Stein once wrote that the soul “knows through empathy.” The same could be said of cognition in ADHD: knowledge is not acquired—it is encountered.
In this sense, each moment of understanding is also a moment of relationship: between self and world, between curiosity and coherence, between chaos and integration.

When the environment allows such encounters—when learning becomes participatory and emotionally alive—the ADHD mind reveals its true capacity: a form of transformative intelligence that unites sensitivity, curiosity, and embodiment.

Toward a New Pedagogy of Presence

Professionally, these findings call for a shift in how educators, therapists, and organizations approach ADHD cognition. Rather than seeing impulsivity or restlessness as barriers, we can recognize them as signals of unmet experiential need.

A learning environment that embraces exploration, autonomy, and emotion can dramatically improve outcomes. According to research in Frontiers in Psychology (2021), ADHD adults who engaged in experiential learning programs reported a 40% increase in task persistence and a 50% reduction in cognitive fatigue compared to those in traditional formats.

This shows that the key to learning with ADHD is not control but alignment—aligning the mode of instruction with the brain’s natural language of curiosity, embodiment, and transformation.

Understanding, for an ADHD mind, is never passive. It is an act of living, of being moved, of touching meaning with both hands.
It is, in the deepest sense, the meeting point between cognition and becoming—where learning ceases to be information and becomes experience.

Conclusion: When Adaptation Becomes the Real Game

Fortunately, my partner was patient that afternoon. He read the rules with kindness, explained each step again without judgment, and let me join the game through action rather than instruction. As the play unfolded, something shifted. I began to understand—not through memorization, but through movement, choice, and discovery. And in the end, I almost won.

Ticket to Ride turned out to be far more than a board game. For a brain wired like mine, it was a lesson in how cognition and adaptation coexist. Each time a route was blocked, I had to imagine a new one; each obstacle became an invitation to rethink the map. What could have been a source of frustration became a quiet triumph of neurodiversity: the ADHD mind, when allowed to act freely, doesn’t collapse under constraints—it reinvents pathways.

Neuroscience has a name for this: cognitive flexibility. Studies from the University of Cambridge (2020) show that individuals with ADHD often outperform neurotypical peers in divergent thinking tasks, especially under pressure or when goals shift unexpectedly. This flexibility is not a byproduct of impulsivity—it is a form of adaptive intelligence born from navigating constant inner and outer chaos.

In Ticket to Ride, this flexibility is rewarded. When one route closes, another opens. Success depends not on rigid planning, but on fluid strategy—a perfect metaphor for life with ADHD. The same mental structure that struggles with linear rules thrives in dynamic environments where improvisation is key.

And yet, behind that adaptability lies a truth we rarely name: for ADHD profiles—especially those who combine attentional divergence with psychomotor intensity, hypersensitivity, or heightened sensory processing—each new route comes with real effort. The brain must rebuild its internal map again and again, finding meaning where the path keeps disappearing. It is not restlessness; it is survival. The obstacles are not only on the board—they are present in school systems built for linear thinkers, in workplaces designed around cold executive functions, in environments where sensitivity is seen as noise rather than information.

Which is why the lesson of the game extends far beyond the table.
What we observe in UNO or Ticket to Ride mirrors what happens in education and professional life.
Some environments nourish ADHD cognition; others quietly suffocate it. And thriving is not a question of willpower—it is a question of choosing the right ecosystem.

For many of us, the real victory begins when we stop forcing our “UNO brain” into “Ticket-to-Ride careers,” and start orienting ourselves toward studies and workplaces that match our natural tempo: emotionally intelligent roles, dynamic tasks, short feedback loops, relational depth, creative problem-solving, embodied thinking.

Choosing the right board to play on changes everything.

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Maybe that is the quiet victory of ADHD: not in following every rule perfectly, but in finding new ways to move when the track ends.