The Cognitive Skill That Makes Kids Smarter Than AI

"Lucca walked into my classroom on the first day of school with a reputation that preceded him. A behavioral file the size of a book. Diagnosed with ADHD, he'd given teachers trouble every year. The pattern was always the same. He'd refuse to follow group activities, start fits during lessons, and generally disrupt anything resembling traditional learning. But within the first week, I noticed something the behavioral reports had missed entirely."

"When he built a tower with KEVA blocks, he told me it was the Doarchi spiraling tower. I looked it up later because I had never heard of it. His recreation was remarkably accurate. Some weeks later, he asked about why his dad was always talking about inflation. So I taught him to compound inflation or interest. He grasped it quickly. He was only seven."

"All of Lucca's "behavioral problems" stemmed from one source. The traditional classrooms he was a part of in China demanded compliance. This often looked like sitting on the carpet, following predetermined lessons, moving through the curriculum at the pace set by others. For Lucca's brain, this environment was frustrating and toxic. Schools, and often parents, want kids to learn compliance, meaning proper socialization within institutional environments. But some children's brains simply don't work that way."

Lucca's repeated behavioral labels arose from classroom demands for compliance rather than inherent misconduct. He gravitated to hands-on, exploratory activities—KEVA blocks, LEGO, microscope slides—that revealed accurate pattern replication and rapid conceptual learning. He recreated a Doarchi spiraling tower and quickly grasped compound interest at age seven. Compliance-focused classrooms produced frustration and acting-out by suppressing divergent thinking. ADHD cognition often enables conceptual expansion, divergent ideation, and questioning of assumed constraints. Distinguishing attention-seeking destructive questioning from constructive creative disruption allows channeling these strengths into solution-focused improvements that complement AI rather than compete with it.

Read at Psychology Today