As much as I love the idea of saying that the brain is not "damaged", it is unfortunately untrue that the ADHD brain is developed the way it is "supposed to".

ADHD is in fact a neurodevelopmental disorder, which means that during key stages of development both before and after birth brain growth and connectivity was impaired and that leads to lifelong developmental and practical issues with the brain and central nervous system.

Even though we can't point to a single cause for the major known neurodevelopmental disorders, we can compare neurodevelopmentally disordered brains to brains that developed without major (or minor) disruptions to development.

For example, with ADHD, brains show less matter overall, especially in the prefrontal cortex (controlling executive function), amygdala, (emotional regulation), hippocampus, (memory and emotional regulation), basal ganglia (emotion, movement, intention and action) as well as poorer connectivity through multiple different structures of the brain. This isn't an exhaustive list of the regions that are affected, since there are multiple factors that affect development, some genetic, some epigenetic, some environmental, and on and on.

In addition, the chemical differences with dopamine and norepinephrine are less efficient, which adds to the executive function challenges and adds to the learning time needed.

Our brains weren't supposed to develop this way - many of us can trace very well what the likely factors were when we look at our family history. For example, my mother and grandmother both were heavy smokers while pregnant, and both experienced some fairly severe trauma when they were younger.

The result, for me personally, was that my mother's smoking resulted in me being born premature and underweight with trauma at birth, and poorly developed brain and lungs. I have ADHD with many of the resulting comorbidities from poor brain development that I can actually pinpoint. I have poor gross motor control, emotional regulation challenges, a learning disability, and the regular basket of ADHD symptoms.

My brain is developmentally abnormal. You can compare it to a brain that developed without the interference of smoking and trauma and genetic causes in the same way that you can compare my hands, which are developmentally normal, to hands that developed abnormally, say, with webbing or an extra finger. You can make the same comparison between a heart that developed normally to a heart that developed abnormally with a hole in it.

When it comes to "repairing" what we're talking about is building new connections in the brain to compensate for the deficits of abnormal development, which is where educators and therapists (emotional, speech, occupational, etc.) come in.

For example, the parts of my brain that control gross motor function, vision, numbers, spatial awareness - they suck. This translates, for me, into having a hard time judging speed, distance, counting, maths skills, and movement. However, through targeted, informed learning understanding my brain differences, I have been able to learn maths, play sports, learn to drive, and play piano. However, for me to learn these things, I needed a higher number of repetitions than the average learner, needed multisensory approaches, needed to engage different parts of my brain, and had to build different connections to "repair" the faulty connectivity that I came with.

In maths, for example, I really struggle with number concepts. For me to understand division conceptually I had to learn it with visual and verbal processing rather than just numbers alone; I didn't understand that 30/2=15. I had to first see it with a group of 30 split into two physical groups using manipulatives, then understand that when we say "thirty divided 'by' two", the "by" actually means "into two equal groups" and/or "if thirty is divided into groups with two each in them, you will have 15 of those groups". I had to literally write out those sentences to understand that 30/2=15.

And I have to do that for every maths concept, from division to fractions to algebra to factors - if not, the information will not stay in my long-term memory. I have uneven cognitive development, whereby my verbal processing and intelligence is much higher, so I built pathways to conceptual understanding through those areas of my brain to compensate for the damaged developmentmal areas that could not function normally. So in a sense, I have "repaired" my brain's number sense to that of a neurodevelopmentally normal brain at this point. Now I just know 30/2=15.

People with major neurodevelopmental disorders need to do this is many areas for many different skills and functions, and do all the time.