ADHD as an evolutionary advantage
What if there were evolutionary circumstances under which having ADHD presented a distinct advantage? A recent study has found one of them, and we’re going to take a look at it today.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
So if you haven’t already seen last week’s post, I’d recommend going back and reading it first because we’re picking up exactly where we left off last week, leading with the paper “Empirical tests of natural selection-based evolutionary accounts of ADHD: a systematic review”.
I’m not going to rehash the paper again, but the conclusion was basically, well, inconclusive. The paper suggests that there was not enough evidence to indicate that any of the ADHD natural selection theories in existence so far were anything more than just theories. But what is most interesting is the quote that was at the end:
“It could be possible to test individuals displaying various degrees of ADHD-behavior under circumstances mimicking key features of an ancestral environment (rapidly changing, time critical and resource depleted) (11). If the environmental mismatch hypothesis suggested by Jensen et al. is correct, individuals with ADHDtraits should outperform individuals without such traits under these circumstances.”
So guess what, we’re going to look at a paper about rapidly changing, time critical and resource depleting environments! This paper is called “Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging” and we’re going to deep dive into it a little further.
Now this paper is super recent, published in February of this year. In this paper they looked at patch foraging, where you must make a decision whether to stick with a known resource that is potentially depleting or move onto something different. The exercise they used also had a time limit so we start to hit two out of the three scenarios suggested by the previous paper.
I don’t know why but throughout research and writing this post I’ve just pictured it as strawberry foraging, although there’s no indication that it was strawberries.
The theory suggests that these patch foraging decisions can be solved using simple algorithms such as the Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) in order to forage in an optimal way. This these algorithms are well tested, with birds, bees, monkeys and humans having been shown to behave in line with these models, including the Ache people of Paraguay’s hunting habits, Nahua mushroom foragers and even human shopping behaviour. The paper suggests that evolution has settled on a near-optimal solution for deciding when to abandon a depleting resource and move onto a new one.
The purpose of the paper was to investigate how ADHDers compare to the general population when it comes to this exercise. They lay out their predictions early on:
“We predict that individuals with ADHD or ADHD-like phenotypes will both leave patches earlier than predicted by foraging models like the MVT and also earlier than individuals lacking the phenotypical characteristics”
I’m foreshadowing a little here but I just want to highlight this again. The paper predicted that ADHDers would leave patches earlier than would be optimal according to these well studied foraging theories. Earlier.
Instead they found the result that everyone stayed longer in the patches than the MVT predicted, but the candidates that scored higher on the ADHD self-report scale spent less time in each patch than the non-ADHD group. They also achieved higher reward rates, and their patch leaving decision making was more in line with the MVT, although still staying longer than the MVT predicts.
I’ll just highlight this again. The paper predicted that ADHDers would perform worse on the foraging experience but actually found that they performed in a more optimal way than non ADHDers on this experiment!
Many of us ADHDers are impatient and get called out about it like it’s a bad thing, but in this case, our impatience serves us.
When I read these papers there is often bias fairly clear in the papers. I mentioned this in my video on ADHD and personality where I found a paper that contained participants that were mostly college educated and another that described us as low-functioning and commented that while these two things are equivalent, they do show bias in opposite directions.
I also am aware of my own biases and that I bristle at all the negativity that ADHD is treated with because I think it’s damaging to hear how we’re “worse” than neurotypicals all the time and means that people have negative assumptions about us when they find out we have ADHD.
But that’s why I love this paper. Because it states its premise - that ADHD will be worse - and finds the exact opposite. It didn’t go looking for positivity around ADHD but it found it anyway and honestly, that’s so refreshing for me to read because sometimes the research I do for this channel can be really depressing. But I digress, let’s get back to the paper.
They did suggest some limitations in the studies. The first is that the symptoms were self-report and not an official diagnosis. I have mixed feelings about this point because I think the diagnostic criteria is incomplete anyway and I’ve talked about this a few times but I accept that this is pretty important to acknowledge when it comes to an academic paper.
Their second point was that this experiment was run in the pandemic when there was a global increase in ADHD-like symptoms and as a result almost half of their participants scored as ADHD. I actually found this comment interesting because it reads to me like there was potential an increase of ADHD-like symptoms among neurotypicals, and therefore suggests that they might be picking up a lot of false positives for ADHD as a result, but actually I looked at the paper they referenced for this claim and it was talking about how ADHD symptoms became more apparent in children who already had ADHD (Rogers & MacLean 2023).
I imagine there were a lot of ADHD kids bored out of their brains during the pandemic like this lil guy.
It then occurred to me that actually the fact almost half the participants had ADHD is maybe not too surprising if you consider the fact that we were stuck at home with nothing to do and playing a foraging game for a study would probably be a nice fun activity to get some dopamine on a bored afternoon. I don’t have evidence to support this, but I know I took part in the Great British Intelligence Test during the pandemic multiple times as part of their longitudinal study during the pandemic just because I was bored and it was interesting to take part in.
But even with these two limitations in mind, the paper did conclude that their findings suggest that ADHD serves as an “adaptive specialisation for foraging” and that this could explain its widespread prevalence and persistence in the human population.
Brought into the context of modern society however, they note that modern-day decision making is more likely to consist of non-depleting and independent alternative choices which is not where our expertise lie and like the paper from last week, indicate that there is a mismatch between what we evolved to do and the modern day society we find ourselves in.
Speaking of struggling in the modern day society, I work with ADHD clients who are in mid to senior positions at work and looking to grow their careers to help them navigate their career journey in a way that is aligned with their strengths and their brains. If you’d be interested in finding out more about this, get in touch and we can talk about what that would look like.
References:
Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging (Barack et al., 2024)
How evolutionary thinking can help us to understand ADHD (Swanepoel et al., 2018)
ADHD Symptoms Increased During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Meta-Analysis (Rogers & MacLean 2023)
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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