I find this pretty interesting. I can understand how some of the traits of ADHD might be a competitive advantage in things like hunting, but there are other traits, such as inattentiveness, that I fail to understand how that would be a competitive advantage in hunting.
I have ADHD, and I basically swing between intense periods of focus/hyperfocus, and serious inattentiveness. I can see the advantage of hyperfocus… however I’m yet to find an advantage for inattentiveness, and the trouble with ADHD in my opinion is that I don’t seem to have a lot of control over when the hyperfocus kicks in, or when the inattentiveness kicks in.
There was a once famous story about Seymour Cray being asked, when they moved to a new building, where he wanted his office phone. He supposedly replied on the tree outside his window.
I've searched the internet and have no luck finding where I read that (many years ago now).
Seems like interruptions have been a nuisance to coherent thought forever.
Edit: found another source citing the phone story, but not the original i had read, i think.
> There was a once famous story about Seymour Cray being asked, when they moved to a new building, where he wanted his office phone. He supposedly replied on the tree outside his window.
> I've searched the internet and have no luck finding where I read that (many years ago now).
Here you go! [0]
> A Tribute to Seymour Cray, by Charles W. Breckenridge, SRC Computers, Inc.
> Presented during the keynote session at Supercomputing '96, November 19, 1996
> Seymour avoided publicity. He was given many awards and honors, and would have had many more had it not been for his nature to decline them in order to remain totally focused on his work. He led a streamlined life, designed to allow him to achieve his goals, goals that sometimes appeared to others to be utterly unachievable. He avoided distractions. Once when someone ordered a phone for him because they noticed that he did not have one in his office, when asked where he wanted it installed, he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, "on the tree outside my office."
You’re thinking of it way too specifically and narrowly. Those traits might have lots of side effects you aren’t considering. There were all sorts of problems to be solved in hunter-gatherer days. Specifically hunting by stalking large prey is not the only skill that was useful back then.
It doesn’t need to be all or nothing though, humans are social creatures. If rates are similar, having 5-10% of your tribe being more exploratory could be advantageous, even if the rest are picking up slack in other areas.
Unsure if it’s pseudoscience, but similar to the argument around morning vs. evening preference being related to having someone alert for the tribe at the right times.
I think it can be phrased in terms of the famous explore/exploit dichotomy from cybernetics. An agent with ADHD is more likely to exploit/dig deeply once it gets the "scent", but that threshold is higher. A weak signal of ambient reward will lead to impatient exploring. Conversely, a non-ADHD agent will sooner find something good enough to fixate on but will also sooner give up on that region of interest and go on to the next scent. This would explain the paradox of hyper focus of ADHD and the corresponding moderation/saturation in non-ADHD as well.
It could help your hunting group not be ambushed by a surprise attack from a tiger or another hunting group.
While the other group members are looking around the ADHD group member could be more sensitive to noticing random sounds and therefore notice things like that. Therefore hunting groups with at least 1 ADHD dude would be at an advantage.
And my brain gets distracted by what it wants to think about, not what it should be doing or paying attention to.
So don’t count on me for sustained wide field threat detection
We will need a Highly Sensitive Person in our party for that. Rolls plus 12 for general context alertness!
The Highly Sensitive Person in my life sometimes gets upset when they realize I am not aware of what is going on around me while working or reading. Their reaction is like I was driving with my eyes closed, it really concerns them.
Inattentiveness kicks in for me at work (software developer) constantly, but physical activity puts me into hyper-focus. Even first-person shooter games kick me into hyper-focus. I think it all comes down to personal stimulation thresholds. I find work boring and uninteresting, but even the most mundane tasks like picking weeds is like heroin for my ADHD because I find it enjoyable and feel I'm making progress.
I have never met an ADHD person who is inattentive under stress.
An ancient human did not have to be 'productive' for long durations. They had to have intense productivity on short spurts and not be a huge mess the rest of the time.
IMO, my ADHD doesn't manifest nearly as badly if physical activities ate involved. Cooking needs long durations of focus, and I've never become inattentive during it.
Sitting on a table and staring at a screen ? Now that's an adversarial scenario.
> Sitting on a table and staring at a screen ? Now that's an adversarial scenario.
I have found the environments plus multiple screens in Vision, in a quiet room, to be incredibly helpful
Less effort to stay focused on otherwise uninteresting tasks, with no external stimulus but nature (very calming to me) and all the task’s components visible on glorious “screens” so I don’t glitch out under the mental “fatigue” of constant window swapping
The very large stationary screens make it natural to frequently get up and move around, while not losing focus. I walk up to them like large whiteboards which mixes things up and keeps my body’s motion continually involved in my thinking.
Just wish I could select specific objects to pop through full immersion. Like my keyboard and cans of energy drink. For now I use 1/2 or 2/3 immersion.
After a long age, I can again work 10 hours thinking it was just 4 or 5.
It’s not a fashion item, but when it’s tight enough the weight distributes very well.
I have worked all day in it, then felt no hesitancy to watch Bladerunner 2049 in 3D on a “screen” large enough to feel like I was in the movie, and felt fine.
(Tip: Max the angular screen size to most of your field of view. Then adjust the amount of 3D effect to be completely natural by adjusting the screen distance, eliminating the typical 3D uncanny valley. You have it right when your brain suddenly stops paying attention to the 3D aspect because it’s so ordinary. But subconsciously the world is real and you are in it.)
With the fancier strap I felt face & cheek pressure right away, and face fatigue in a couple hours
The change has had other wins. Putting screens anywhere, at true eye level, and only needing a wireless keyboard/trackpad, let’s me sit back in a padded office chair, work on a couch, etc avoiding static position stress and eliminate any tendency to hunch over my laptop
Another interesting oddity is when you lean into a screen, or walk up to it, the resolution effectively keeps up. So inches away from a 100 inch screen, the large letters in front of you still look near perfect, without pixelation (still max out the actual in-headset resolution).
I experience the headset as a big mental & physical ergonomic upgrade for the Mac, with the VR/AR features simply being interesting side benefits
Second this. This has been exactly my experience. I enjoy it, and feel it’s a net win for me despite all the tradeoffs (comfort, text sharpness, battery life). Selective passthrough for objects like a cup and keyboard would be really great.
The genes that support cognition are usually the same genes implicated in autism and adhd. Most variants imparting increased risk for those conditions are extremely common,(typical odds ratio, <<1.1). Some rare variants impart greater risk but those variants are uncommon, in part because of natural selection. If you do not have these rare variants, it typically takes a large number of common mutations before you get the condition. Thus natural selection effects against those rare variants are weak, and this ignores that there might also be beneficial effects of those common variants, either at the group level by increasing diversity of thought, or when appearing without other rare variants.
The take home is that it is much more complicated than single gene disorders where selection effects can have their greatest impact. Common variants impact on fitness are heavily conditioned on the overall genetic mileau.
Being not able to focus will cause you to jump from one thing to the next.
"Oh let me gather wood"
10 minutes later
"Oh look! I found flowers"
10 minutes later
"Those stones look amazing… what could we possibly do with them?"
10 minutes later
"Its getting cold. where is the wood"
Isolated this may seem like a disadvantage. But the negative consequences are reduced when one is acting in a bigger group. And this jumping from topic to topic make the person become a generalist which can be useful.
I always imagine that ADHDers would be the gatherers in the hunter-gatherer society. That is where the inattentiveness kicks in. At least for me, when going for a walk,I always notice that I am much more aware of all the plants, flowers, berries and small mammals than my friends. I know that there is a new type of flower I never saw before near that one tree. They actually know where we were on a map.
I read somewhere about a polar bear at a zoo that compulsively paced back and forth. This is not a behavior observed in polar bears in the wild; it was likely was caused by the fact that bears are evolved to walk dozens of miles a day, but this bear lived in a small, enclosed environment.
So maybe ADHD is not adaptive, but is just a pathology caused by the mismatch between our evolved environment and our modern environment?
Maybe inattention can help you spot things when you're super bored and casting about for stimulus. You might see something you wouldn't have otherwise? Very unscientific "Just So" opinion lol
None of this even strongly or directly indicates that early humans did in fact have ADHD. At best it suggests that ADHD, if someone has it, may provide an edge in terms of gathering resources.
I'm sure you could give similar results for things like autism. This wouldn't automatically suggest, however, that really early humans did in fact have it.
Wouldn’t its very reliable high prevalence across a wide diversity of today’s gene pools strongly suggest an early, not late or isolated, origin?
That seems scientific enough.
Given that strong persistence over time and population, the assumption that it must have advantages becomes a sensible and supported conjecture. And identifying what benefits it might have bestowed a sensible area of research toward verifying that.
Anything conclusive would require many more experiments & more evidence of course. Most individual papers in historical and behavioral evidence fields can’t settle something definitively on there own.
Those all seem like things that can be explained as being more common just because humans live significantly longer now. I don't think that's the only reason, just that it's not an obviously fair comparison - ADHD doesn't seem to increase with age, but the ailments you listed do.
While life expectancy at birth has increased a lot, that was mainly due to infant survival rates. Life expectancy once a person reaches, say, 25, has not increased by that much.
Diabetes type II was vanishingly rare not long ago. Now we have teenagers suffering from it. Teenagers with Diabetes type II is not due to humans living significantly longer.
Similarly with dental caries, which is quite common in childhood these days. This is not due to people living significantly longer.
Similarly with Cancer. There are cancers that are relatively common in young people today. Testicular, or breast cancers occur quite often in young people. Missionary doctors in Africa, among the native Americans, or the Inuit, report not diagnosing a single case of cancer for years. It is not a matter of diagnostic failure. An untreated late stage breast cancer or testicular cancer is quite easy to diagnose.
Here's the publication. IMO, these authors need to read The Selfish Gene, but it is an interesting theory. I have ADHD and work in a related field to these authors. This theory has been on the uptick but isn't really mainstream. I do rather like to entertain the fantasy, though.
I mean yes but the article fundamentally misrepresents ADHD and “disorders” in general. A “disorder” is a set of symptoms or traits that cause the person or their loved ones distress or trouble taking care of themselves in their daily lives. So it’s possible to “have ADHD” without it being a “disorder”.
It’s also the case that humans have a wide variety of behavioral and personality traits many of which are influenced by genes. All of those have a potential evolutionary impact. Whether they constitute a “disorder” depends on how they impact the individual in their given environment.
A person living in an entirely different world (eg a hunter gatherer society) than we inhabit today may be disordered for that world but would thrive in our world and vice versa—some traits that are a problem in the modern world would suit the ancient lifestyle well.
In the end, ADHD and lots of other psychological disorders are wildly misunderstood by doctors, reporters, and the patients themselves. But it all comes down to the question: do these traits negatively impact your life or the life of those around you? If they cause distress in daily living then it’s a “disorder”. If those same traits are not a problem for someone else, then it isn’t.
> do these traits ynegatively impact your life or the life of those around you? If they cause distress in daily living then it’s a “disorder”. If those same traits are not a problem for someone else, then it isn’t.
Agree with this.
And even when they do cause distress, it’s not uncommon for ADHD to also be associated with positive attributes as well.
Genes are not selected to make us reliably happy, but successful in a statistical way in some environment. So “disorder” definitely overstates a negative interpretation.
EDIT: A term like “processing style” would be less pejorative or opinionated.
Every common processing style that can be “high functioning” has its advantages, disadvantages, coping strategies, and ideal support systems.
None of us was born complete, a master of all thinking styles, and without the need for other kinds of people.
FURTHER EDIT: re another common “processing style”, I have dealt with more than one productive narcissist for extended time frames.
Things did not always go well is an understatement. But not always badly either - they both had many accomplishments directly helped by their “disorder”.
The mix of positive and negative features of that, not to mention the achievements of many famous people with elements of that, also suggest we need a better word than “disorder”.
Even worse in that case, the connotations of the words “narcissist” and “disorder” create a particularly strong resistance for people with those traits to learn more about themselves or openly deal with their thinking style in a practical open way.
Completely perverse terminology for knowledge that by another name could better help those people and those around them!
As we start saying everything and everyone has ADHD, it basically just means no one has it and it's just the mind. And there are a few that have a mind that does not have it.
Agree, I've seen dozens of ADHD videos and there is nothing I can see that wouldn't apply to everyone else, unless I would also have something similar undiagnosed, but I also don't feel the necessity to get anything diagnosed
Life is hard, more and more bureaucratic, 9 to 5 is boring, too many tasks are overwhelming, too many interests too. Too much punishment, and very little guidance, too much noise. Tiktok and YT shorts don't help. But we don't need to take some pills to finally appreciate it, we to be annoyed about it, fight against it, and make something better
But if anyone can suggest a good article/video explaining it I would appreciate it
Really? From what I've heard ADHD is a diagnosis that's "uneverly distributed" (i.e., it's diagnosed a lot in the USA but far less so elsewhere in the world).
Perhaps our (i.e., US citizens) infatuation with ADHD is a function of Big Pharmas ability to move minds with marketing, as well as influencing the focus of healthcare professionals (e.g., doctors) and edu professionals.
My point is, it feels odd to make any claims when apparently there's not a consistent distribution of the trait).
There is very high variance in diagnosis, especially with different variants of ADHD such as older people (vs children), female (vs male) and inattentive (vs hyperactive).
Almost certainly across cultures too.
So variation in diagnosis might not reflect variation in prevalence. Hopefully they did their homework.
I don't know about ADHD specifically but I think a lot of "disorders" are probably actually features and just get labelled as bad because they don't fit in with what "society" wants from you.
Yeah, there are 3 prongs to use when debating about classification: (1) statistical rarity, (2) distress, and (3) the ability to seek reasonable accomodations in the environment.
Pretty interesting. No great surprise that we've had these varied neurotypes all along, IMO.
Since one of the biggest advantages of our species is our brains, it makes sense that evolution would produce slightly different types that give different advantages. Given that we're a social species, having a variety of neurotypes in a group would offer all the advantages while the group as a whole offsets the disadvantages like inattention.
Imagine a group of hunters. Someone with ADHD might hyperfocus and be really good at spotting fast prey like rabbits or birds, but may not notice a wolf creeping up on them. The group can compensate for that, and are more successful than without the ADHD tracker.
Just think about the wide variety in our bodies. There's a whole spectrum of physical ability from very small and nimble humans to very big and very strong ones. There's a huge range of different adaptations evolved by different groups. It really just makes sense that we'd see a similar sort of variety in structure and ability of something as complex as a brain.
Humans evolved to fill niches, same as any animal.
52 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadBoth can be big advantages.
according to Yuval Noah, the time requirement for hunting would be roughly 2 days a week.
Well, inattentiveness refers to modern life, and is manifested more with its overly complex demands, often also based on precise time constraints.
In hunting it might not be that much of an issue. Especially if hunting is your hyper-focus subject.
Time blindness and hyperfocus is a gift from the gods when it comes to productive rabbit hole work. (Subterraneous hunting!)
Or flow as it’s generally called.
But modern life has a complexity level that constantly competes with flow for everyone.
I've searched the internet and have no luck finding where I read that (many years ago now).
Seems like interruptions have been a nuisance to coherent thought forever.
Edit: found another source citing the phone story, but not the original i had read, i think.
https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html
> I've searched the internet and have no luck finding where I read that (many years ago now).
Here you go! [0]
> A Tribute to Seymour Cray, by Charles W. Breckenridge, SRC Computers, Inc.
> Presented during the keynote session at Supercomputing '96, November 19, 1996
> Seymour avoided publicity. He was given many awards and honors, and would have had many more had it not been for his nature to decline them in order to remain totally focused on his work. He led a streamlined life, designed to allow him to achieve his goals, goals that sometimes appeared to others to be utterly unachievable. He avoided distractions. Once when someone ordered a phone for him because they noticed that he did not have one in his office, when asked where he wanted it installed, he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, "on the tree outside my office."
[0] https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html
Unsure if it’s pseudoscience, but similar to the argument around morning vs. evening preference being related to having someone alert for the tribe at the right times.
Eg hunting when fixated on hunting, you bring back 5 times the food vs hunting while you're watching a movie in your head gets you 1/2 times the food
While the other group members are looking around the ADHD group member could be more sensitive to noticing random sounds and therefore notice things like that. Therefore hunting groups with at least 1 ADHD dude would be at an advantage.
The original multi-tasking.
True multitasking it is not!
And my brain gets distracted by what it wants to think about, not what it should be doing or paying attention to.
So don’t count on me for sustained wide field threat detection
We will need a Highly Sensitive Person in our party for that. Rolls plus 12 for general context alertness!
The Highly Sensitive Person in my life sometimes gets upset when they realize I am not aware of what is going on around me while working or reading. Their reaction is like I was driving with my eyes closed, it really concerns them.
An ancient human did not have to be 'productive' for long durations. They had to have intense productivity on short spurts and not be a huge mess the rest of the time.
IMO, my ADHD doesn't manifest nearly as badly if physical activities ate involved. Cooking needs long durations of focus, and I've never become inattentive during it.
Sitting on a table and staring at a screen ? Now that's an adversarial scenario.
I have found the environments plus multiple screens in Vision, in a quiet room, to be incredibly helpful
Less effort to stay focused on otherwise uninteresting tasks, with no external stimulus but nature (very calming to me) and all the task’s components visible on glorious “screens” so I don’t glitch out under the mental “fatigue” of constant window swapping
The very large stationary screens make it natural to frequently get up and move around, while not losing focus. I walk up to them like large whiteboards which mixes things up and keeps my body’s motion continually involved in my thinking.
Just wish I could select specific objects to pop through full immersion. Like my keyboard and cans of energy drink. For now I use 1/2 or 2/3 immersion.
After a long age, I can again work 10 hours thinking it was just 4 or 5.
It’s not a fashion item, but when it’s tight enough the weight distributes very well.
I have worked all day in it, then felt no hesitancy to watch Bladerunner 2049 in 3D on a “screen” large enough to feel like I was in the movie, and felt fine.
(Tip: Max the angular screen size to most of your field of view. Then adjust the amount of 3D effect to be completely natural by adjusting the screen distance, eliminating the typical 3D uncanny valley. You have it right when your brain suddenly stops paying attention to the 3D aspect because it’s so ordinary. But subconsciously the world is real and you are in it.)
With the fancier strap I felt face & cheek pressure right away, and face fatigue in a couple hours
The change has had other wins. Putting screens anywhere, at true eye level, and only needing a wireless keyboard/trackpad, let’s me sit back in a padded office chair, work on a couch, etc avoiding static position stress and eliminate any tendency to hunch over my laptop
Another interesting oddity is when you lean into a screen, or walk up to it, the resolution effectively keeps up. So inches away from a 100 inch screen, the large letters in front of you still look near perfect, without pixelation (still max out the actual in-headset resolution).
I experience the headset as a big mental & physical ergonomic upgrade for the Mac, with the VR/AR features simply being interesting side benefits
I recommend it highly in those terms
The take home is that it is much more complicated than single gene disorders where selection effects can have their greatest impact. Common variants impact on fitness are heavily conditioned on the overall genetic mileau.
"Oh let me gather wood" 10 minutes later "Oh look! I found flowers" 10 minutes later "Those stones look amazing… what could we possibly do with them?" 10 minutes later "Its getting cold. where is the wood"
Isolated this may seem like a disadvantage. But the negative consequences are reduced when one is acting in a bigger group. And this jumping from topic to topic make the person become a generalist which can be useful.
So maybe ADHD is not adaptive, but is just a pathology caused by the mismatch between our evolved environment and our modern environment?
If this is modern science, then what a shame.
None of this even strongly or directly indicates that early humans did in fact have ADHD. At best it suggests that ADHD, if someone has it, may provide an edge in terms of gathering resources.
I'm sure you could give similar results for things like autism. This wouldn't automatically suggest, however, that really early humans did in fact have it.
That seems scientific enough.
Given that strong persistence over time and population, the assumption that it must have advantages becomes a sensible and supported conjecture. And identifying what benefits it might have bestowed a sensible area of research toward verifying that.
Anything conclusive would require many more experiments & more evidence of course. Most individual papers in historical and behavioral evidence fields can’t settle something definitively on there own.
Some combinations inevitably don’t work as well as others, but the variation in combinations is still net valuable.
And some outliers may be valuable in the context of being a limited part of the population. I.e. we need some day dreamers, some OCD people, etc.
There are plenty of things which are common across a wide diversity of today's gene pools that, as far as we know, were rare in the past.
For example: Type II diabetes, Dental caries (pre agriculture), or Cancer.
While life expectancy at birth has increased a lot, that was mainly due to infant survival rates. Life expectancy once a person reaches, say, 25, has not increased by that much.
Diabetes type II was vanishingly rare not long ago. Now we have teenagers suffering from it. Teenagers with Diabetes type II is not due to humans living significantly longer.
Similarly with dental caries, which is quite common in childhood these days. This is not due to people living significantly longer.
Similarly with Cancer. There are cancers that are relatively common in young people today. Testicular, or breast cancers occur quite often in young people. Missionary doctors in Africa, among the native Americans, or the Inuit, report not diagnosing a single case of cancer for years. It is not a matter of diagnostic failure. An untreated late stage breast cancer or testicular cancer is quite easy to diagnose.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.258...
It’s also the case that humans have a wide variety of behavioral and personality traits many of which are influenced by genes. All of those have a potential evolutionary impact. Whether they constitute a “disorder” depends on how they impact the individual in their given environment.
A person living in an entirely different world (eg a hunter gatherer society) than we inhabit today may be disordered for that world but would thrive in our world and vice versa—some traits that are a problem in the modern world would suit the ancient lifestyle well.
In the end, ADHD and lots of other psychological disorders are wildly misunderstood by doctors, reporters, and the patients themselves. But it all comes down to the question: do these traits negatively impact your life or the life of those around you? If they cause distress in daily living then it’s a “disorder”. If those same traits are not a problem for someone else, then it isn’t.
Agree with this.
And even when they do cause distress, it’s not uncommon for ADHD to also be associated with positive attributes as well.
Genes are not selected to make us reliably happy, but successful in a statistical way in some environment. So “disorder” definitely overstates a negative interpretation.
EDIT: A term like “processing style” would be less pejorative or opinionated.
Every common processing style that can be “high functioning” has its advantages, disadvantages, coping strategies, and ideal support systems.
None of us was born complete, a master of all thinking styles, and without the need for other kinds of people.
FURTHER EDIT: re another common “processing style”, I have dealt with more than one productive narcissist for extended time frames.
Things did not always go well is an understatement. But not always badly either - they both had many accomplishments directly helped by their “disorder”.
The mix of positive and negative features of that, not to mention the achievements of many famous people with elements of that, also suggest we need a better word than “disorder”.
Even worse in that case, the connotations of the words “narcissist” and “disorder” create a particularly strong resistance for people with those traits to learn more about themselves or openly deal with their thinking style in a practical open way.
Completely perverse terminology for knowledge that by another name could better help those people and those around them!
Life is hard, more and more bureaucratic, 9 to 5 is boring, too many tasks are overwhelming, too many interests too. Too much punishment, and very little guidance, too much noise. Tiktok and YT shorts don't help. But we don't need to take some pills to finally appreciate it, we to be annoyed about it, fight against it, and make something better
But if anyone can suggest a good article/video explaining it I would appreciate it
I highly recommend the first 4 parts of this playlist (at least) and other videos and writings by Dr Barkley.
Perhaps our (i.e., US citizens) infatuation with ADHD is a function of Big Pharmas ability to move minds with marketing, as well as influencing the focus of healthcare professionals (e.g., doctors) and edu professionals.
My point is, it feels odd to make any claims when apparently there's not a consistent distribution of the trait).
Almost certainly across cultures too.
So variation in diagnosis might not reflect variation in prevalence. Hopefully they did their homework.
Since one of the biggest advantages of our species is our brains, it makes sense that evolution would produce slightly different types that give different advantages. Given that we're a social species, having a variety of neurotypes in a group would offer all the advantages while the group as a whole offsets the disadvantages like inattention.
Imagine a group of hunters. Someone with ADHD might hyperfocus and be really good at spotting fast prey like rabbits or birds, but may not notice a wolf creeping up on them. The group can compensate for that, and are more successful than without the ADHD tracker.
Just think about the wide variety in our bodies. There's a whole spectrum of physical ability from very small and nimble humans to very big and very strong ones. There's a huge range of different adaptations evolved by different groups. It really just makes sense that we'd see a similar sort of variety in structure and ability of something as complex as a brain.
Humans evolved to fill niches, same as any animal.