Lateral Thinking and Neurodivergent Students: What the Research Actually Says

In short: Lateral thinking means solving problems by an indirect route. Edward de Bono coined the term in 1967. His version was never rigorously tested, but a closely related idea, divergent thinking, has a real research literature. The evidence on neurodivergence and creative thinking is mixed: promising for ADHD, strong for autistic perceptual strengths, and weaker than the popular story suggests for dyslexia. We tell you all of it honestly, because the strongest evidence of all is for something else: explicitly teaching students strategies for their own thinking. That is what specialist mentoring does.

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What is lateral thinking?

Lateral thinking is a way of solving problems using an indirect, creative approach.

The term was coined in 1967 by Edward de Bono (1933–2021), a Maltese physician and psychologist, in his book New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking.

You may have seen this definition online, often presented as a De Bono quote:

“Lateral thinking is a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach via reasoning that is not immediately obvious.”

A note on honesty: that wording is a summary from Wikipedia, not De Bono’s own sentence. It circulates widely misattributed to him. It captures his idea fairly, but accuracy matters, so we’re telling you.

Here is something De Bono genuinely did say:

“You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”

That image is the heart of it. Most problem-solving digs the same hole deeper. Lateral thinking chooses to dig somewhere else.

Is De Bono’s lateral thinking scientifically proven?

Honestly: no.

De Bono was hugely influential. His methods are used in schools and businesses worldwide. But his core ideas were never rigorously tested in controlled research, and critics have called the concept pseudo-scientific.

However, that is not the end of the story.

Academic psychology has its own, well-studied version of a very similar idea: divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking: the research-backed cousin

Divergent thinking means generating many possible answers to an open-ended problem. Convergent thinking means narrowing down to the single best answer.

This distinction comes from psychologist J. P. Guilford, and it has been studied for decades using standardised tasks. The best known is the Alternate Uses Task: “think of as many uses for a brick as you can.”

Researchers score answers for:

Fluency — how many ideas you generate
Flexibility — how many different categories your ideas span
Originality — how unusual your ideas are

So when we talk about “lateral minds”, the scientifically respectable version of that claim is about divergent thinking. Here is what the research says about it, condition by condition.

ADHD: promising evidence, honestly mixed

A series of studies by psychologists Holly White and Priti Shah compared adults with and without ADHD.

Their headline findings:

Adults with ADHD scored higher on divergent thinking tasks (generating unusual uses and original ideas)
The same adults scored lower on convergent thinking tasks (narrowing to one right answer)
In a 2011 follow-up, adults with ADHD also reported higher real-world creative achievement

One proposed explanation: ADHD involves lower inhibitory control. Ideas that other brains would filter out get through. That hurts focused, single-answer tasks, and helps open-ended idea generation.

The honest caveat: the wider literature is mixed. Some studies find no divergent thinking advantage in ADHD at all, and results vary with the task used and how ADHD is identified. This is an active research area, not a settled fact.

But the trade-off pattern — stronger idea generation, weaker filtering and finishing, matches what we see in mentoring sessions constantly. And it points directly at what support should do: not suppress the idea generation, but add tools for capturing, selecting, and completing.

Autism: real, replicated perceptual strengths

The strongest evidence of strengths in this area concerns autistic perception.

The Enhanced Perceptual Functioning model, published by Laurent Mottron and colleagues in 2006, describes a detail-focused processing style. Autistic superiority on certain perceptual tasks, visual search, finding embedded figures, and pitch discrimination, is a widely replicated group-level finding.

Related work by Simon Baron-Cohen’s team describes strong “systemising”: a drive to work out the rules of how systems behave.

The honest caveats:

These are group-level averages. No individual autistic student is guaranteed any particular strength.
Perceptual and pattern strengths are not the same thing as “creativity” in the divergent-thinking sense.

What this research does support: the autistic student who notices the detail everyone else missed, or works out the underlying rule of a system, is showing a documented cognitive style — not a fluke, and not a deficit.

Dyslexia: the popular story is not supported

You have probably heard that dyslexic people are more creative. Famous entrepreneurs are cited. It is a comforting story.

We would love to tell you it is proven. It is not.

Two recent meta-analyses (studies that combine all the available research) — Majeed and colleagues in 2021, and Erbeli and colleagues in 2022, both found no overall difference in creativity between people with and without dyslexia.

Two smaller footnotes from those same analyses:

Adult samples showed a possible creativity advantage that child samples did not — but the authors describe support for the idea as limited
Dyslexic participants tended to do relatively worse on verbal creativity tasks and relatively better on visual ones

Why do we tell you this, on a website for neurodivergent students?

Because our students deserve the truth, and because the myth carries a hidden burden. If you are dyslexic and do not feel especially creative, you have not failed at being dyslexic. Dyslexia is a difference in reading and language processing. It does not need a compensating superpower to deserve support and respect.

The strongest evidence of all: teaching thinking explicitly

Here is the finding with the most robust support — and it is about what mentors and teachers do, not about what any brain is.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) reviews education research for UK schools. Its Teaching and Learning Toolkit rates metacognition and self-regulation, explicitly teaching students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning, as one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost approaches known, worth roughly an additional seven to eight months of progress per year when used well.

Metacognition means thinking about your own thinking.

This is, in essence, what De Bono claimed decades ago: thinking is a skill that can be deliberately taught. He was probably right about that; the evidence just arrived by a different route than his own methods.

And it is exactly what DSA specialist mentoring is. (DSA stands for Disabled Students’ Allowance, the UK funding scheme that provides study support for disabled and neurodivergent students in higher education.)

What this looks like in a mentoring session

Putting the research together, evidence-informed mentoring for a laterally-minded student means:

Planning with the grain of your thinking. If you think in webs, we plan essays as webs first. We only turn the web into a linear structure at the end, once the thinking is done.
Making your strategies visible. This is metacognition, the approach with the strongest evidence base. We help you trace your own reasoning, so you can show your working in the format universities expect.
Treating tangents as raw material. The divergent thinking research suggests idea generation and idea selection are different skills. We do not suppress the generation. We add tools for capture and selection.
Adding structure for finishing. The ADHD research shows the trade-off clearly: strong generation, harder filtering and completing. Prioritising, deciding, and finishing are learnable strategies, and lateral thinking works alongside step-by-step logic, not instead of it.

Different, not deficient — and honestly described

Universities are mostly built for linear, convergent thinking. Linear essays. Sequential modules. Step-by-step marking criteria.

Students who think indirectly can look less capable than they are within those structures. The research above says their thinking styles are real — and it also says the popular strengths narrative is sometimes overstated. Both things are true.

Our promise is to work from the evidence, tell you the truth about it, and help you build deliberate strategies on top of how your mind actually works.

That is why we are called Lateral Minds.

Lateral Minds provides DSA specialist mentoring and study skills support for neurodivergent students across the UK, online and in person. If you are a student, needs assessor, or university looking for specialist one-to-one support, get in touch.

Sources

De Bono, E. (1967). New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking.
Guilford, J. P. (1967). The Nature of Human Intelligence. (Divergent thinking; Alternate Uses Task.)
White, H. A., & Shah, P. (2006). Uninhibited imaginations: Creativity in adults with ADHD. Personality and Individual Differences, 40, 1121–1131.
White, H. A., & Shah, P. (2011). Creative style and achievement in adults with ADHD. Personality and Individual Differences, 50, 673–677.
Mottron, L., Dawson, M., Soulières, I., Hubert, B., & Burack, J. (2006). Enhanced perceptual functioning in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36, 27–43.
Baron-Cohen, S., et al. (2009). Talent in autism: hyper-systemising, hyper-attention to detail and sensory hypersensitivity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 1377–1383.
Majeed, N. M., et al. (2021). Developmental dyslexia and creativity: A meta-analysis. Dyslexia, 27, 187–203.
Erbeli, F., et al. (2022). No evidence of creative benefit accompanying dyslexia: A meta-analysis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 55, 242–253.
Education Endowment Foundation. Metacognition and Self-Regulation (Teaching and Learning Toolkit) and Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning (Guidance Report).
The popular “definition” discussed above originates from the Wikipedia article “Lateral thinking”.