Clara’s Verdict
I had a close friend at university who was diagnosed with dyslexia in her second year, aged twenty. She described the years before that diagnosis as living inside a building whose layout she had memorised entirely through trial and error, because nobody had ever given her a floor plan. David Grant’s That’s the Way I Think is, among many other things, that floor plan. Now in its fourth edition and published by Highbridge Audio with a May 2026 release, it has earned its reputation as the most humane and practically useful introduction to neurodiversity currently available in audio form.
Grant’s particular skill is refusing to treat neurodivergence as a cluster of deficits to be catalogued. He takes what he calls a lifestyle approach, which in practice means attending to how people actually experience their own minds rather than how diagnostic categories describe them from the outside. That orientation makes the book feel alive in a way that clinical literature rarely manages, and it is what has driven the book through four editions and into the reading lists of educators, clinicians, and parents across the UK.
About the Audiobook
The fourth edition of That’s the Way I Think adds three entirely new chapters covering neurodiversity as a broad social concept, autism in depth, and the intersection of neurodivergent experience with mental health. Grant has also substantially revised existing content on dyslexia, sleep, creativity, and sport, reflecting research that has moved quickly in all of these areas since the third edition appeared. Running to six hours, the book spans dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, ADHD, and autism with an even hand that resists the temptation to rank or compare conditions against each other.
Grant’s approach throughout is to weave together first-person accounts with scientific context, which keeps the writing from becoming either a dry textbook or an uncritical collection of testimonials. The personal narratives are diverse enough to prevent any single account from being taken as representative, and the scientific framing provides the anchoring framework that allows those accounts to be genuinely informative rather than simply affecting.
He is particularly attentive to female experiences of neurodivergence, which have historically been underrepresented in the diagnostic literature because so much early research was conducted on male populations. The fourth edition gives this a prominence that was less marked in earlier versions, and it is one of the revisions that most significantly updates the book’s usefulness. Grant is equally attentive to the very large number of people who carry neurodivergent traits without ever receiving a formal diagnosis, whether because they have learned to mask effectively, because they live in communities without good diagnostic access, or because they have simply never encountered the framework that would make their experience legible. That last group is rarely centred in this kind of book, and Grant’s inclusion of them is among the things that lifts the fourth edition above its predecessors.
The evolutionary framing, Grant argues that many neurodivergent traits have persisted across generations because they conferred genuine advantages in different environmental contexts, is handled with appropriate caution. He presents it as context rather than consolation, which is the right call: the goal is understanding, not a compensatory narrative.
The Narration
Stephen R. Thorne reads with a warm, even pace that makes the book feel like a thoughtful conversation rather than a lecture delivered from a position of clinical authority. He navigates the first-person accounts with particular care, giving each voice enough space to land without becoming theatrical. For material that is fundamentally about the richness and complexity of human experience, Thorne’s unshowy performance is exactly right. The six-hour runtime is comfortable rather than taxing in audio form, largely because of how cleanly he handles transitions between the more personal and more analytical passages.
What Readers Say
This edition had not yet accumulated Audible UK listener reviews at the time of writing, which reflects its May 2026 release date. The previous editions of the book have a long track record in educational and professional circles, and Grant is well regarded among teachers, educational psychologists, and parents of neurodivergent children alike. The fourth edition arrives with endorsements from practitioners in the field rather than celebrity blurbs, which tells you something about where the book’s credibility actually sits and who its primary audience is.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone with a neurodivergent diagnosis looking for a portrait of their own experience that goes beyond the clinical. Parents and educators who want a nuanced, research-grounded overview rather than a list of coping strategies that assumes all neurodivergent people share the same needs. And equally: people who suspect they may be neurodivergent but have never pursued a formal diagnosis, who will find Grant’s attention to that experience directly validating rather than exclusionary. This is not a self-help book in the motivational sense. It is a book that takes its subject seriously and offers genuine illumination in return.
