Daniel sent us this one — he's asking what fidget spinners actually are, where they came from, and more importantly, why fidgeting shows up so prominently in certain developmental disorders. What's the mechanism behind it? Is it just a stereotype or is there real neuroscience here?
Oh, this is a fantastic question. And the fidget spinner piece is actually the perfect entry point because the history of that toy is way weirder than most people know.
Most people think fidget spinners just appeared out of nowhere in twenty seventeen and became this global phenomenon. But the original patent was filed in nineteen ninety-three by a chemical engineer named Catherine Hettinger. She was visiting her sister in Israel, she had an autoimmune disorder called myasthenia gravis that caused muscle fatigue, and she couldn't play with her young daughter. So she started sticking things together with newspaper and tape to create something her daughter could spin.
Wait, so it was originally a parent-child bonding invention?
She got the patent in nineteen ninety-seven. But here's the tragic part — she couldn't afford the four hundred dollar patent renewal fee in two thousand five, so the patent lapsed. She never made a cent off the global craze that happened a decade later.
That is genuinely heartbreaking.
It really is. And the toy itself is deceptively simple — a central bearing with weighted lobes that spin with almost no friction. You flick it and it just keeps going. The physics is basically angular momentum with low-friction ceramic or steel bearings.
That's the what and the where-from. But the why-fidgeting question is where this gets interesting. And I think a lot of people have this mental image of fidgeting as just... kids who can't sit still. A behavior problem.
Right, and that framing misses the entire point of what's happening neurologically. There's actually a really important distinction here between fidgeting and something called stimming — self-stimulatory behavior. They overlap but they're not identical.
Break that down for me.
Stimming is a broader category. It's repetitive physical movements or sounds that provide sensory input. Hand flapping, rocking, humming, spinning objects, rubbing textures. It's most commonly associated with autism spectrum disorder, but it also appears in ADHD, anxiety disorders, and even in neurotypical people under stress. The key difference from regular fidgeting is that stimming tends to be more rhythmic, more repetitive, and it serves a very specific regulatory function.
Regulatory meaning what exactly?
And this is where the neuroscience gets fascinating. The prevailing model for autism involves something called atypical sensory processing. Basically, the brain's filtering system for sensory information works differently. Some inputs that would be background noise to a neurotypical brain become overwhelming — fluorescent lights, certain textures, ambient sounds. And some inputs that should register as important get dampened.
Stimming is the brain trying to fix the volume knob.
That's actually a really good way to put it. There are two main theories here. One is the overstimulation model — when the environment is too much, stimming provides a predictable, controllable sensory input that drowns out the chaos. It's like creating your own signal in a noisy room. The other is the understimulation model — the brain isn't getting enough sensory feedback from the body, so stimming provides that missing proprioceptive input.
Proprioceptive — that's the sense of where your body is in space, right?
Your joints and muscles constantly send signals to your brain about position and movement. Some researchers think that in autism and ADHD, that system is underactive, and repetitive movements compensate by generating stronger signals.
It's not a behavior problem at all. It's a self-regulation tool.
And this is what most popular coverage misses entirely. A two thousand seventeen study in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology looked at children with ADHD and found that their fidgeting — leg bouncing, chair shifting, doodling — actually improved their performance on cognitive tasks. The more they moved, the better they performed on working memory tests.
That seems counterintuitive. Shouldn't movement be a distraction?
That's the assumption, and it's wrong. The leading hypothesis is that fidgeting increases cortical arousal. In ADHD, the prefrontal cortex — that's the part responsible for executive function, attention regulation, impulse control — is chronically under-aroused. It's not getting enough dopamine and norepinephrine to stay engaged. Physical movement stimulates the release of these neurotransmitters. So the fidgeting isn't the distraction. It's the compensation mechanism that prevents distraction.
Telling a kid with ADHD to stop fidgeting is like telling someone with poor eyesight to stop squinting.
That's precisely the analogy. And there's a researcher named Julie Schweitzer at UC Davis who's done some of the best work on this. She used motion-tracking devices on kids with ADHD during cognitive tests and found a direct correlation between movement intensity and correct responses. The kids who moved more got more answers right. The kids who sat perfectly still did worse.
That has massive implications for how we design classrooms and workplaces.
And it connects to something called the optimal stimulation theory, which goes back to the nineteen seventies. The idea is that every brain has an optimal level of arousal for cognitive performance. Too little stimulation and you're bored, inattentive. Too much and you're overwhelmed, anxious. Fidgeting and stimming are ways of tuning that arousal level up or down.
Where do fidget spinners fit into this? Were they actually useful or just a fad?
There was a study in two thousand eighteen that found fidget spinners actually impaired attention in some classroom settings because the visual-spinning component distracted other students and, in some cases, the user themselves. The issue is that fidget spinners are visually engaging — you want to watch them spin. That pulls your attention toward the toy and away from the task.
As opposed to something like a stress ball or a fidget cube that you can manipulate without looking at it.
Tactile fidgeting — squeezing, pressing, rubbing — tends to work better for attention because it engages a different sensory channel than the visual one you're using for the task. There's a company called Fidgetland that makes these little bike-chain-like rings that you can roll between your fingers without looking at them. Teachers report much better results with those than with spinners.
Okay, so let's go back to the autism side of this. You mentioned stimming as sensory regulation. Is there a consensus on that, or is it still debated?
The sensory regulation model is the dominant framework, but it's not the only one. There's also a communication hypothesis — that stimming is a form of nonverbal expression, especially in people who are minimally verbal. Excitement, distress, overwhelm — the stimming conveys it. And there's a self-calming hypothesis that's slightly different from the arousal model. Instead of tuning arousal up, some stimming may be activating the parasympathetic nervous system — that's the rest-and-digest system that counteracts stress.
It could be doing different things at different times for different people.
That's almost certainly the case. And this is where I want to be careful about over-generalizing. The autism spectrum is incredibly heterogeneous. What's true for one autistic person may not be true for another. There's a saying in the community that gets quoted a lot by researchers — if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person.
That's a good reminder. I want to push on something though. You mentioned dopamine and norepinephrine with ADHD. What's the neurochemical story with autism and stimming?
It's less clear, honestly. Dopamine is definitely involved — there's evidence of dopamine system differences in autism, but it's not as straightforward as the ADHD case. Some research points to GABA, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. The theory is that the balance between excitatory and inhibitory signaling is disrupted, and repetitive behaviors help regulate that balance. But I'd say the neurochemistry of autism stimming is still an open research question.
We know more about why fidgeting helps in ADHD than we do about why stimming helps in autism.
That's fair. In ADHD, we have a pretty clean story — underactive prefrontal cortex, movement boosts dopamine and norepinephrine, cognitive performance improves. In autism, the sensory processing piece is well-established, but the precise mechanism linking stimming to regulation is still being worked out.
What about anxiety disorders? You mentioned those earlier.
Anxiety is fascinating because fidgeting there seems to serve a different function entirely. It's often about grounding — providing a physical sensation that anchors you in the present moment when your mind is spiraling. The sensory input competes with the anxious thoughts for cognitive bandwidth. There's also a motor discharge theory — that physical movement literally burns off the excess cortisol and adrenaline that anxiety generates.
We've got at least three different mechanisms depending on the underlying condition. ADHD is about cortical arousal. Autism is about sensory modulation. Anxiety is about grounding and discharge.
They can co-occur, which makes it even more complicated. About thirty to fifty percent of autistic people also meet criteria for ADHD. So for someone with both, their fidgeting might be serving multiple functions simultaneously.
Let me ask something that might be uncomfortable. Is there any truth to the idea that these behaviors should be trained out of people? Not asking because I agree — I'm asking because that view is still out there.
It's a fair question and it's important to address it. Historically, the approach was exactly that — behavioral suppression. Applied behavior analysis, or ABA, often targeted stimming for elimination. The goal was to make autistic people appear more neurotypical. And the autistic community has been pretty vocal about the harm this caused. Many autistic adults describe stimming suppression as deeply distressing — like being told to stop breathing.
The shift has been from elimination to understanding function.
Yes, and that's the consensus in progressive clinical practice now. You don't try to eliminate stimming unless it's causing actual physical harm — like head-banging or self-biting. Instead, you try to understand what the behavior is communicating or regulating, and address the underlying need. If a kid is stimming because the fluorescent lights are overwhelming, you change the lighting, not the kid.
That's a much more humane approach. And it lines up with what you said about ADHD — if fidgeting improves cognitive performance, suppressing it is actively counterproductive.
There's a researcher named Sydney Zentall at Purdue who's been making this argument since the nineteen eighties. She showed that hyperactive children actually need more stimulation, not less. Her work was really foundational to the optimal stimulation theory.
What about adults? We've been talking mostly about kids, but adults fidget too. Is the mechanism the same?
Largely, yes, but the expression changes. Adults learn to channel it into socially acceptable forms — pen clicking, leg bouncing, pacing during phone calls, doodling in meetings. Some people use discrete fidget tools like spinner rings or fidget cubes. The underlying need is the same, but the manifestation adapts to social context.
I've noticed I think better when I'm walking. Is that related?
Walking is a rhythmic, repetitive movement that provides proprioceptive input. There's a whole literature on the cognitive benefits of walking — improved creative thinking, better problem solving. Steve Jobs was famous for his walking meetings. Charles Dickens walked for hours every day. It's essentially socially sanctioned fidgeting at scale.
We've medicalized something that's actually on a continuum with normal human behavior.
That's a really important point. Fidgeting isn't some aberrant thing that only happens in developmental disorders. Everyone fidgets to some degree. It's just that in ADHD and autism, the need for it is more intense and the consequences of not doing it are more severe.
Which brings us back to the fidget spinner craze. It feels like there was this brief moment where fidgeting became visible and almost trendy, and then the backlash hit.
The backlash was largely about schools banning them, which created this weird dynamic where a tool that was helpful for some kids got banned because other kids were using them as toys. And to be fair, a lot of the marketing around fidget spinners was pretty dubious — claims about curing anxiety and ADHD and PTSD that weren't supported by evidence.
The marketing overpromised and the schools overreacted.
And the nuance got lost. The real story is that some fidget tools help some people in some contexts, and the key is matching the tool to the need. A visual spinner might be great for someone who needs sensory stimulation during a break but terrible for someone who needs to focus on a visual task.
What would you recommend to a parent who's trying to figure this out for their kid?
I'd say start by observing the function. When does the fidgeting happen? What's the context? Is it during boring tasks, suggesting an arousal deficit? Is it in noisy, bright environments, suggesting sensory overwhelm? Is it during transitions or social situations, suggesting anxiety? The answer tells you what kind of tool might help and what environmental changes might reduce the need for it.
That's practical. I like that.
Involve the kid in the process. Ask them what feels good, what helps. Kids often know more about their own sensory needs than we give them credit for.
I want to zoom out for a second. We've covered the neuroscience, the history, the practical applications. What's the big misconception you'd most want to correct?
That fidgeting is a sign of disengagement or disrespect. It's almost always the opposite. It's the brain's way of staying engaged. When I was practicing pediatrics, I'd see parents constantly telling their kids to sit still, and I'd have to explain — the sitting still is making it harder for them to listen to you. The movement is part of how they pay attention.
That reframing alone would change a lot of classrooms and a lot of dinner tables.
How many open-plan offices have you been in where everyone's expected to sit quietly at their desks? For a lot of people with ADHD, that environment is actively hostile to productivity.
What's the ideal environment look like?
Flexible seating options — standing desks, balance boards, exercise balls as chairs. Permission to move during meetings. Access to discrete fidget tools. And most importantly, a culture that doesn't stigmatize movement. Some companies are already doing this — there's a design firm called IDEO that's famous for having bikes and scooters in the office. But it's still the exception, not the rule.
It's interesting how much of this comes back to cultural norms about what attention and respect are supposed to look like.
Those norms are pretty arbitrary when you examine them. The idea that eye contact and stillness equal respect is culturally specific, not universal. In many cultures, sustained eye contact is actually considered aggressive or disrespectful. The link between stillness and attention is similarly a social construction.
Alright, let's talk about the fidget spinner patent story a bit more. You said Catherine Hettinger lost the patent because she couldn't afford the renewal. Has anyone tried to make that right?
There was a Kickstarter campaign in twenty seventeen that raised about twenty thousand dollars for her. And she's been philosophical about it in interviews — she's said she's just glad the concept reached so many people. But no, she never got anything close to what she would have earned if she'd held the patent during the craze. Some estimates put the global fidget spinner market at over five hundred million dollars in twenty seventeen alone.
Five hundred million. And the inventor got a twenty thousand dollar consolation prize.
It's a brutal story about the patent system. If you can't afford the maintenance fees, your invention enters the public domain and anyone can manufacture it. The fees escalate over the life of the patent — they start around four hundred dollars and go up to several thousand by the end of the twenty-year term. For independent inventors without corporate backing, that can be a real barrier.
Alright, shifting gears slightly. You mentioned tactile versus visual fidgeting. Are there other dimensions we should be thinking about?
Proprioceptive versus vestibular. Proprioceptive input comes from pressure on joints and muscles — squeezing, pushing, lifting heavy things. Vestibular input comes from the inner ear and involves balance and spatial orientation — spinning, rocking, swinging. Some people crave one type more than the other. That's why you see some autistic kids who love spinning in circles or swinging for hours. They're seeking vestibular stimulation.
That connects back to the sensory processing differences you mentioned.
The vestibular system is one of the sensory systems that can be either hyper or hypo responsive in autism. A hypo responsive vestibular system means the brain isn't getting enough feedback about movement and balance, so the person seeks out more intense vestibular input — spinning, rocking, jumping.
Which actually makes the fidget spinner make more sense as a design. It's not just tactile — there's a visual-spinning component that might be providing vestibular-like feedback.
That's an interesting connection. And it might explain why some people find spinners helpful while others find them distracting — it depends on which sensory system needs the input.
What about the social dimension? Is there anything to the idea that fidgeting serves as a social signal?
There is, actually. In neurotypical contexts, fidgeting often signals emotional states — anxiety, boredom, impatience. People read those signals, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. In autism, the social signaling function of stimming is more complex. Some autistic people describe stimming as a way of communicating internal states that they can't easily verbalize. A happy flap versus a distressed rock. The people close to them learn to read these signals.
It's not just self-regulation. It's also communication.
For some people, yes. And that's why the communication hypothesis has gained traction. It reframes stimming not as meaningless repetitive behavior but as a legitimate form of expression.
Which makes the historical practice of suppressing it even more troubling. It's not just taking away a coping mechanism. It's taking away a voice.
And the autistic self-advocacy movement has been making this point for decades. Organizations like the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, ASAN, have been really clear that stimming is a natural and important part of autistic culture and identity, not a pathology to be eliminated.
Let's bring this back to Daniel's question. He asked why fidgeting is pronounced in developmental disorders. I think the answer we've arrived at is that it's not a bug — it's a feature. The brain is doing something adaptive.
And the evidence supports it. The brain is using movement to regulate arousal, modulate sensory input, express internal states, and maintain cognitive engagement. The fact that it looks unusual to outside observers is a problem with the observers' expectations, not with the behavior itself.
I do wonder about the neurochemistry piece you mentioned being unresolved for autism. What would it take to nail that down?
Better imaging, mostly. Functional MRI studies during stimming would be ideal, but the movement itself creates artifacts in the scanner. You can't exactly tell someone to stim while lying perfectly still in an MRI tube. Some researchers are using EEG instead, which is more tolerant of movement, but the spatial resolution is lower. It's a genuine methodological challenge.
We're limited by the tools.
There's some interesting work with near-infrared spectroscopy, NIRS, which is more movement-tolerant than fMRI. And wearable EEG is getting better. I think we'll have clearer answers in the next decade.
What about the genetics? Is there a heritable component to fidgeting specifically, or is it just downstream of the heritability of ADHD and autism?
I don't know of any studies that look at fidgeting as a standalone heritable trait. It's almost certainly downstream. The heritability of ADHD is around seventy to eighty percent, autism is around fifty to ninety percent depending on the study. Fidgeting and stimming are behavioral manifestations of those underlying genetic differences.
You inherit the neurotype, and the fidgeting comes along with it.
Though environment clearly modulates the expression. The same genetic predisposition might lead to more visible fidgeting in a restrictive classroom and less in a flexible one.
That's actually hopeful. It means we can design environments that work better for these brains without trying to change the brains themselves.
And that's the direction the field is moving. Universal design for learning — creating environments that work for a range of neurotypes rather than forcing everyone to adapt to one narrow standard.
Alright, I want to circle back to something practical. You mentioned the fidget cube and other tools. If someone's listening and thinking they might benefit from this, where do they start?
I'd say start cheap and simple. A basic stress ball. A smooth stone to rub. A pen with a clicker. See what feels helpful and in what contexts. Don't invest in a fifty dollar fidget gadget until you know what kind of sensory input you're seeking. And pay attention to whether the tool helps you focus or distracts you. If you find yourself playing with it instead of working, it might be the wrong tool for that context.
For parents trying to figure this out for their kids?
Start with observation and experimentation. And collaborate with the kid's occupational therapist if they have one. OTs are the specialists in sensory integration, and they can do a formal assessment of sensory processing patterns. There's a standardized assessment called the Sensory Profile that's widely used.
I didn't know that existed.
It's been around since the late nineties, developed by Winnie Dunn, who's a major figure in sensory processing research. It measures things like sensory seeking, sensory avoiding, sensory sensitivity, and low registration — basically, how strongly someone responds to sensory input across different domains.
That seems like it would be useful far beyond developmental disorders. Everyone has sensory preferences.
And that's the continuum point again. These aren't categorical differences. They're extremes on distributions that apply to everyone. Some neurotypical people are very sensory-seeking. Some autistic people aren't. The diagnosis is about the overall pattern and the degree of functional impact.
I'm curious about the cultural dimension here. Are there societies where fidgeting and stimming are more accepted or even normalized?
It varies enormously. Some cultures have more tolerance for movement during learning and conversation. In some Indigenous educational traditions, learning happens while doing — walking, making, moving. The Western classroom model of sitting still and facing forward is pretty culturally specific and historically recent.
The pathologizing of fidgeting might itself be a cultural artifact.
To some degree, yes. That doesn't mean ADHD and autism aren't real — they absolutely are, and they cause genuine functional challenges. But the way those challenges are perceived and accommodated is heavily shaped by cultural expectations about behavior and attention.
Alright, before we wrap, I want to ask about one more thing. The fidget spinner craze was also a manufacturing story. Most of them were made in China, shipped globally, sold on Amazon. Was there anything notable about the supply chain side of it?
It was a fascinating case study in viral manufacturing. The basic design is so simple — a bearing and some plastic or metal lobes — that factories could retool in days. When demand spiked in early twenty seventeen, Chinese manufacturers just cranked out millions of units. The cost per unit dropped to under a dollar at wholesale. It was one of the fastest product rollouts in history.
The environmental cost of all that plastic?
Significant and largely unexamined. Tens of millions of fidget spinners ended up in landfills within a year or two. Most were made of ABS plastic with metal bearings. Not easily recyclable. It's the classic fad toy environmental story — think Beanie Babies, but with more petroleum products.
We have this weird full circle. A toy invented for a child with a disabled parent becomes a global craze, generates half a billion dollars for people who didn't invent it, gets banned in schools, ends up in landfills, and the original inventor gets a Kickstarter consolation prize.
That's the story. And underneath all of that is the real, substantive science about why human brains need to move to think, and why some brains need it more than others. The fad came and went, but the underlying need is permanent.
That's a good place to land. One thing I'll be thinking about is how much of what we consider "good behavior" is really just behavior that's convenient for institutions, not behavior that's actually optimal for the person.
That's the tension, isn't it? Schools and offices are designed for efficiency and order, not for cognitive optimization. Changing that requires rethinking some pretty fundamental assumptions about what learning and work are supposed to look like.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early Renaissance, a small community of silk weavers in the Fergana Valley of what is now Kyrgyzstan developed a tactile sign language for communicating across noisy loom rooms. One of its most distinctive signs — for the word "snag," meaning a broken thread — originated from the name of a local breed of mountain goat whose horns would catch on loom frames.
A sign language for noisy loom rooms named after a goat.
I have so many questions about the goat.
That was something. This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps. Until next time.
