Share

For three decades, I’ve been told I was the one with the wrong theory. Psychiatrists, researchers, and more than a few hostile reviewers spent the 1990s explaining to me, patiently or not so patiently, that ADHD was a neurological disorder characterized by a defect in the attention system, and that stimulant medications worked by correcting that defect.

The Hunter in a Farmer’s World idea was charming, they said. A useful metaphor, maybe. But the science was settled: these kids had broken attention filters, the pills fixed the filters, end of story.

But now a study published in the journal Cell in late December changed that story pretty dramatically. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis analyzed brain scans from nearly 6,000 children, comparing kids who’d taken stimulant medications on the day of their scan with kids who hadn’t.

They expected to see increased activity in the brain regions associated with attention. That’s what the textbooks said would happen. That’s what thirty years of consensus said would happen.

It didn’t happen.

What they found instead was that Ritalin and Adderall light up the brain’s reward and wakefulness centers. Not the attention system: the reward system.

Dr. Benjamin Kay, the neurologist who led the study and who prescribes these medications to children every day at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, put it this way:

“When I first saw the results, I thought I had just made a mistake because none of the attention systems are changing here.”

He hadn’t made a mistake. The mistake was thirty years old and it belonged to the field of psychiatry.

Here’s what they now believe is actually happening when a Hunter child takes a stimulant. The medication doesn’t sharpen a broken filter. It doesn’t repair a faulty attention circuit. What it does is make unrewarding tasks feel more rewarding.

Dr. Nico Dosenbach, the study’s senior author, described it this way: the drugs “pre-reward” the brain, allowing it to keep working at things that wouldn’t normally hold its interest. Math homework. Grammar exercises. Forty-five minutes of sitting still while a teacher explains something the child already understood in the first thirty seconds.

That reframes everything.

The Hunter brain isn’t broken. It never was. What it is, and what it has always been, is a brain calibrated for a world where reward is real, immediate, and earned.

When your ancestors were tracking prey across the savanna, the reward system wasn’t a luxury: it was the whole game. Find something worth chasing, lock on, pursue it with everything you have, and eat. Find something not worth chasing, recognize it fast, and go find something better. The Hunter brain is exquisitely, magnificently tuned to make exactly that calculation dozens of times a day.

The problem isn’t the tuning. The problem is that we took that brain and put it in a classroom so designed for Farmers that it lets out during the summer so kids can help bring in the crops.

What the Washington University team found is that stimulant medications essentially trick a Hunter brain into treating a Farmer task as though it were worth hunting. The dopamine system gets artificially boosted, and suddenly the worksheet feels like prey.

The child can sit still not because the medication fixed their attention, but because they’re no longer desperate to go find something more interesting, because for the moment, their brain has been persuaded that this is interesting.

That works, by the way. For many children and adults, it works quite well, and I want to be clear about that. I’ve never been categorically opposed to medication.

The truth is more complicated and more personal than that. I’ve watched medication give some people their first real experience of competence, and that matters enormously.

What I’ve objected to, always, is the story we tell around the medication. The story that says the pills are fixing a disorder. Because that story does real damage to real people, damage that the pills themselves don’t cause.

When a parent is told that their child has a “defective” attention system, they absorb something about who their child is. When a child is told that, they absorb it too. I know because they told me that as a kid, and then told my son that when he was young.

And I’ve spent decades talking to adults who were told exactly that as children, and are still, decades later, trying to unlearn it. The story of the broken filter becomes the story of the broken person, and it follows that person around in ways no pill can fix.

The reward story is different. A brain that’s calibrated for the wrong environment isn’t a broken brain. It’s a mismatched brain. And mismatches can be worked with, worked around, and in the right circumstances, turned into extraordinary advantages.

I’ve been saying since my first book on the topic was published in 1993 that Hunter traits become liabilities in Farmer environments and assets in Hunter ones. Now a study in one of the most prestigious journals in science is essentially confirming the neurological basis for why that’s true: the Hunter brain doesn’t find Farmer tasks rewarding because the Hunter brain wasn’t built to. That’s not a disease. That’s a design.

There’s another piece of the study that deserves more attention than it’s gotten in the coverage I’ve seen. The researchers found that the stimulants also helped children without ADHD who hadn’t slept enough the night before.

The medications, it turns out, do something very similar to what a good night’s sleep does for the brain’s wakefulness system. Which raises an obvious question that the study’s authors raised as well: before we reach for the prescription pad, are we sure this child is actually a Hunter in a Farmer’s world, and not simply a tired kid in an underventilated classroom?

Sleep problems are epidemic in children with ADHD, for reasons that also map neatly onto the Hunter framework. Hunter brains are wired for vigilance. They stay alert longer into the night because, for most of human history, the night was when the predators came.

The delayed sleep phase that’s so common in people with ADHD isn’t a symptom of a disorder. It’s a legacy of a time when someone in the tribe needed to still be awake at two in the morning. Now we’re medicating children in part because they’re tired, and they’re tired in part because their biology was built for a world that no longer exists, and the school day starts at seven-thirty regardless.

I don’t tell you all of this to make you angry, though if you’re a Hunter, or the parent of one, some anger is probably appropriate. I tell you because the story we tell about ADHD has real consequences for real people, and the story just changed.

The researchers who spent thirty years telling us all that my framework was a charming metaphor have now published data showing that the medications they prescribe don’t work the way they thought they did, and that they work in a way that is, frankly, a lot more consistent with the Hunter/Farmer model than with the broken-filter model.

Hunters don’t have an attention deficit. They have a reward-calibration system built for a different world. That’s a very different thing, and we should start treating it that way.

Leave a comment

Share

A new study reported by PsyPost looks at something most Hunters with ADHD already know in their bones but that medicine has been slow to take seriously: sleep isn’t just a side issue, but is woven into the condition itself.

The researchers found that genetic variants associated with reduced melatonin production were linked in children to greater ADHD symptom severity, especially inattentiveness. Importantly, this relationship held even when obvious sleep problems like delayed sleep onset were accounted for.

In other words, this is not simply a matter of people with ADHD staying up too late and then being tired the next day; the biology appears deeper than that.

Melatonin is often treated as a bedtime supplement, a little pill we take 5 milligrams of to nudge ourselves into sleep. But biologically it’s much more than that.

This hormone is an essential part of the body’s core timing system, shaping circadian rhythms, regulating alertness and rest, and interacting with stress and immune pathways. When melatonin production is altered, the entire rhythm of the organism can shift. That matters a great deal when we’re talking about attention, focus, and responsiveness to the environment.

Seen through the lens of my Hunter in a Farmer’s world hypothesis, this study fits remarkably well. ADHD traits have long been framed as deficits because they clash with the demands of modern industrial society. Sit still. Focus narrowly for hours. Wake up at the same time every day regardless of season, light, or context.

These are Farmer traits. They are perfect for plowed fields, factory floors, classrooms, and offices. But they’re not the only way a nervous system can be organized.

In a Hunter or forager context, flexibility mattered more than rigidity. Being alert at odd hours could mean survival. Sensitivity to changes in light, sound, and movement was an advantage. The ability to hyperfocus when something meaningful appeared, followed by periods of rest or wandering attention, fit a world that was dynamic and unpredictable. A nervous system that didn’t lock itself into a single rhythm may have been exactly what was needed.

And lower or differently timed melatonin production could support that kind of life.

Rather than enforcing a strict sleep-wake cycle, it might allow for adaptive variability including night watchfulness, early morning vigilance, bursts of energy at nonstandard times, and a readiness to respond to sudden opportunity or threat all become more plausible in that context. None of that looks like pathology until you drop that nervous system into a world built around bells, clocks, deadlines, and indoor lighting.

What makes this study particularly interesting is that it pushes back against the idea that sleep problems in ADHD are merely secondary. For years the assumption has been that ADHD causes poor sleep because the mind will not shut off.

There is truth in that, but the genetic data suggest a shared root. The same biological systems that shape circadian timing may also influence attention regulation, impulse control, and cognitive endurance. That reframes ADHD not as a broken attention system but as a differently timed one.

The study also points toward inflammatory pathways, including interleukin 6, that intersect with melatonin biology. This matters because inflammation, stress response, and vigilance are tightly linked.

In ancestral environments, a nervous system tuned for alertness and rapid response would often be paired with a robust inflammatory and immune response. In the modern world, where chronic stress replaces acute danger, that same wiring can turn against us.

None of this means that melatonin supplements cure ADHD. Clinical trials have shown that while melatonin can help shift sleep timing and improve sleep quality, it does not reliably reduce core ADHD symptoms on its own.

That fact, though, actually strengthens the Hunter in a Farmer’s world model rather than weakening it. If ADHD were simply a sleep disorder, a hormone fix would solve it. Instead, what we see is a complex interaction between circadian biology, environment, expectations, and meaning.

The real problem, in my opinion, isn’t the nervous system at all; it’s the mismatch. We’ve built a civilization that demands uniform rhythms from bodies and minds that evolved to express diversity. We then label the people who don’t fit the dominant rhythm as “disordered.”

The melatonin findings suggest that some of that diversity is written into our genes, not learned behavior or moral failure.

This also helps explain why so many people with ADHD report doing their best thinking late at night, or feeling most alive when the world is quiet and distractions fall away. That is not laziness or defiance: it may, in fact, simply be our biology expressing itself honestly. It may be the Hunter waking up to the sound of prey nearby when the village sleeps.

The danger isn’t that these traits exist, but that our society keeps forcing them into a mold that denies their value. When we pathologize circadian differences, we miss the possibility that society itself is too rigid. We ask why the Hunter cannot become a Farmer, but we rarely ask whether the world still needs Hunters.

This study doesn’t prove my Hunter in a Farmer’s world hypothesis, but it does add another solid piece to the picture. ADHD isn’t just about attention: it’s also about timing, rhythm, and how a nervous system engages with the flow of the world. When we understand that, the conversation shifts.

Instead of asking how to fix people, we can begin asking how to build a world that makes room for all of us.

Share

When we talk about ADHD in our culture we almost always talk about what’s missing. We talk about the deficits. We talk about the chaos. We talk about the impulsivity that makes you late and the distractibility that leaves your desk a mess and the inability to sit still in a world built for people who can.

In a Farmer’s world that deficit frame makes sense: you rise at dawn, you follow the rows, you do the same tasks again and again and again. In that world, traits like routine and consistency are rewarded and the mind that wanders feels broken, like it can’t keep up with the plow.

But human beings weren’t always Farmers. For most of our evolutionary history we were Hunters, roaming across the savannah, moving in tribes or packs, scanning for patterns, reacting to opportunities and threats in real time. In that landscape, the traits we now label as “symptoms” of ADHD aren’t bugs. They’re the very qualities that made you a successful hunter.

A new study published in Psychological Medicine by researchers at the University of Bath, King’s College London, and Radboud University upends the deficit narrative and shows what many of us with ADHD have known intuitively all along: adults with ADHD frequently endorse psychological strengths like hyperfocus, humor, creativity, spontaneity, and intuitiveness more strongly than neurotypical peers, and knowing and using those strengths is linked with higher well-being, better quality of life, and fewer symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress.

This isn’t fluff. It’s the first large-scale, empirical lens on strengths in ADHD instead of deficits.

They asked 200 adults with ADHD and 200 without ADHD to rate themselves on 25 positive traits. And while people with ADHD often face real struggles in work, relationships, and mental health, they were just as likely to recognize their own strengths and apply them in everyday life.

That matters in the Hunter in a Farmer’s World model because it reframes the narrative. A Hunter mind isn’t flawed just because it doesn’t thrive in a sedentary, siloed, production-line world. Instead, the Hunter mind is optimized for scanning the horizon, seizing opportunities, and shifting focus quickly. It’s optimized for conditions of uncertainty, novelty, and change.

When you take those traits and try to squeeze them into a commodified, routine-oriented Farmer’s world, of course it feels like a deficit. Of course you get labeled restless or unfocused. You are essentially being penalized for not being built for that world.

But what the study makes clear is that within the ADHD mind there are strengths that can be harnessed.

Hyperfocus, for example, is a trait that looks like trouble when you can’t finish your taxes, but it looks like genius when you’re building something you care about. Hyperfocus is the ability to lock in deeply on something that grabs your attention, to go down the rabbit hole of complexity and emerge with insight. In a Hunter’s world that’s adaptive. In a Farmer’s world it’s misinterpreted as inability to switch off a task. A Farmer wants you to switch tasks at predictable intervals. A Hunter needs to zero in when target conditions are right. (SciTechDaily)

Creativity and spontaneity get the same treatment. In a routine-based context they’re messy. But in a world where rapid adaptation and novel solutions make the difference between resources and starvation, creativity and spontaneity are not just useful: they’re essential. And intuitiveness, the ability to read context and pattern faster than someone who is following a checklist, is a Hunter’s secret weapon.

The study also found that across both groups, whether you have ADHD or not, the more you know your strengths and use them, the better your life satisfaction and psychological health. That’s a profound point for how we think about human capability.

We’re all better when we know what we bring to the table, but for people with ADHD, who have long been told what they lack, the cultivation of strengths is not just an add-on. It’s a reorientation.

In the Hunter’s world, the mind isn’t measured by how well it sticks to one thing indefinitely but by how well it navigates complexity, how quickly it spots opportunities, and how flexibly it responds to change. That’s why Hunters are good at problem-solving in open-ended environments. That’s why many of the most creative thinkers, entrepreneurs, artists, explorers, and innovators recruit people with the very traits labeled as ADHD deficits.

They’re drawn to ambiguity and possibility. They find patterns where others see noise. They pivot without hesitation. These are competitive advantages in any domain that rewards exploration and invention.

But western society is still overwhelmingly Farmer-oriented. We build systems, institutions, and workplaces that reward consistency, predictability, and stability. So someone with a Hunter’s mind gets judged against Farmer criteria and inevitably falls short. We call it a “disorder” rather than a difference and then wonder why the person feels misunderstood.

This new research gives scientific backing to a different way of seeing it: that there are identifiable strengths in ADHD that can be cultivated, and that awareness of that strength correlates with well-being.

Imagine what happens when we take this insight deeper than today’s therapy models. What if schools, workplaces, and communities started to ask not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What are your strengths and how do they serve you?”

What if instead of punishing spontaneity we encouraged it in creative contexts?

What if instead of suppressing hyperfocus we taught people how to channel it into projects that matter?

The Hunter isn’t broken in the Farmer’s world: he or she’s misplaced.

The takeaway isn’t that ADHD is easy or that struggles disappear. It’s that there’s a whole suite of internal capabilities that have been overlooked because we’re judging brains built for dynamism by standards built for routine.

And when you recognize and use your own psychological strengths you don’t just cope better. You thrive.

For a mind built to hunt, a life that demands directionless compliance will always feel constricting. But when you understand what’s in your toolkit and start using it on your terms, you begin to rewrite the narrative.

This study doesn’t just challenge the deficit model of ADHD. It gives us a language to talk about ADHD the way Hunters would: a set of evolved capabilities that, when supported, can offer real psychological strength and resilience.

Leave a comment

Share

Louise and I have this running joke: one of our dogs is like a human with ADHD, and the other is the poster child for “did you mean to call me, or was that just in your head?”

One of our dogs, an Aussie named Blu, is hypervigilant, constantly scanning the world around him, a super-light-sleeper, and even tries to supervise the cats. Chewbecca, our Aussie-poodle mix, is so laid back that we only half-jokingly refer to her as Blu’s “emotional support dog.”

But lately I’ve been thinking: maybe the joke is closer to reality than I realized. Because according to a recent StudyFinds article, dogs can actually show behaviors that mirror human ADHD.

The study referenced looked at thousands of dogs, asking their owners questions about impulsivity, hyperactivity, and inattention, the three main traits we usually associate with human ADHD.

The researchers found parallels: younger dogs and male dogs tended to show more of those impulsive, restless, inattentive behaviors, just like in humans. They also observed that dogs who spent more time alone (without humans around) were more prone to hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention than dogs that had more social contact.

It’s a fascinating result, because it suggests that the temperamental wiring of some dogs is naturally more “ADHD-prone”: that restless, jumpy, distraction-loving wiring. And that brings me to the question I want to explore with you: how much of ADHD (in humans) is this sort of innate temperament, and how much might trauma or stress push someone further into the zone of diagnosable dysfunction?

Let me be clear: I don’t believe every case — or even most cases — of ADHD are caused by trauma. In fact, most evidence leans hard toward inheritance, baseline temperament, and biology. But I also don’t think trauma plays zero role (having had my share of life’s traumas as the result of my own ADHD).

The dog study gives us a good metaphor. If a dog is already wired to be more sensitive, more impulsive, more easily bored, environmental pressures or stresses — being left alone, lack of stimulation, unpredictability — can push that wiring into more extreme expression.

Think of temperament as your baseline setting. One dog is born with a “volume knob” turned up on distractability and impulsivity. The other dog is that mellow, low-knob version. Now imagine life throws stress, chaos, or deprivation at both of them. The high-knob dog might escalate wildly: barking nonstop, refusing to rest, becoming unable to settle. The low-knob dog might feel it, but maybe it just sulks more, sleeps more, or withdraws. The difference is that the baseline wiring shapes how much room the stress has to distort things.

In humans, twin and family studies repeatedly show ADHD is highly heritable. Many of us are born with a nervous system that leans toward restlessness, distractability, or impulsivity. Add to that epigenetic tweaks (which allow life experience to influence how genes are expressed), and environment does matter, although it rarely creates ADHD from nothing, in most people.

So trauma or adversity may sometimes “induce” something like ADHD behavior, especially in someone with a latent vulnerability. But more often, what we see is that trauma or stress amplify the symptoms of an underlying temperament that was already there.

The difference is important, because it changes how gentle and how patient we need to be with ourselves and others (and our dogs!). If someone thinks “my ADHD must all be because of what happened to me,” we might unintentionally shame them into thinking they caused it. But if we see it as a mix — temperament plus life — then we afford more grace.

The dog study also hints at something else: isolation matters. Dogs that were regularly left alone showed more of the restlessness, impulsivity, distractability traits. That mirrors how humans experiencing neglect, loneliness, or under-stimulation early in life might manifest more ADHD traits or aggravate them. It’s not a smoking gun for trauma “causing” ADHD, but it’s a clue that the environment nudges the genetic expression.

Another wrinkle: some behaviors from trauma and some behaviors of ADHD can overlap or mimic each other, including hypervigilance, distractibility, and emotional reactivity. Sometimes clinicians debate whether someone’s symptoms are better explained by PTSD or ADHD. In those borderline or co-morbid cases, trauma might be masquerading as ADHD or exacerbating it. But that overlap doesn’t mean they’re the same. We still need to parse whether a trait is primarily temperament or primarily reactive.

Also, ADHD itself (because of its impulsivity or risk-taking) may increase someone’s exposure to stress or traumatic events (like it did with me as a kid). So causality runs both ways sometimes. That can muddy the waters: did the ADHD‐prone wiring cause more rough life exposures, or did rough life exposures cause ADHD? Often, it’s entangled.

What I like about the dog study is that dogs don’t carry most of the human baggage. They don’t conceptualize failure, guilt, or identity. They don’t wonder if they’re “lazy, crazy, or stupid?” So when they exhibit impulsivity or attention problems, we can more cleanly see the behavior without the overlay of human psychology. It gives us a kind of mirror for temperament. And it suggests that yes, there is a “naturally ADHD-leaning” wiring, even in animals, not just humans.

In the end, I lean toward saying that trauma can push, distort, amplify, and complicate ADHD traits, but in the majority of people with ADHD, the core is a temperament we were born with. The trauma is more often a seasoning than the main ingredient.

Recognizing that gives us humility. It also frees us to support ourselves not just by healing the past, but by building scaffolding around our wiring: routines, boundaries, support, structure, acceptance.

So if you came to me and said “I want someone to explain how trauma causes ADHD,” I’d say that’s oversimplified. But if you asked “how do nature and nurture dance together in ADHD?” I’d argue that the dog study offers one of the sweetest little illustrations: temperament gives us the stage, environment adds color, and sometimes life throws in a few thunderclaps. Let’s not blame every storm for orchestrating our wiring: some of that wiring was composed long before the weather rolled in.

Share

I’ve always been super-curious; my parents used to joke about it, particularly at how unwilling I was to settle for answers like, “Because,” or “To make little boys ask questions.”

Turns out I’m probably not alone; this is apparently a trait that all or most of us in this Hunter tribe share!

ADHD is often framed as a deficit, a collection of inattention, impulsivity, and restless energy that needs to be subdued. Yet when viewed through the lens of the Hunter versus Farmer model described in my books and here at hunterinafarmersworld.com, it can be understood as a survival strategy that evolved for a very different environment than the one most people inhabit today.

Hunters, in that model, thrived in unpredictable settings where scanning for opportunity, reacting quickly, and staying alert could mean the difference between eating and starving or between safety and danger. Farmers, by contrast, developed temperaments that excelled in repetitive routines, long-term planning, and delayed rewards, qualities perfectly suited to tending crops or managing steady, predictable work.

When schools and workplaces organize themselves entirely around farmer priorities, the traits that once helped hunters survive can look like flaws rather than adaptations.

New research highlighted in ScienceNews under the title “People with ADHD may have an underappreciated advantage: Hypercuriosity” complicates the picture in a way that resonates deeply with the hunter metaphor.

Sujata Gupta reports on studies suggesting that many people with ADHD experience what researcher Anne-Laure Le Cunff calls hypercuriosity, a drive to seek novelty and information with unusual intensity.

Le Cunff describes this not just as ordinary curiosity but as a restless need to explore, question, and collect ideas. It’s tied to the same neurological pathways that govern impulsivity and reward, making it hard to resist following interesting threads even when other responsibilities loom.

Experiments show that when tasks tap into that urge to know, people with ADHD often outperform peers in depth and speed of engagement. The “deficit” emerges mainly when they are trapped in activities devoid of personal meaning or novelty.

Bringing these strands together suggests that hypercuriosity may be the engine that powers a hunter’s radar. The restless scanning, the hunger for stimulation, the quick shifts of focus are not just distractions but part of a system evolved to notice opportunities and dangers in real time.

In an ancestral landscape where food sources shifted, predators lurked, and alliances mattered, failing to register new information could be fatal. The same neural sensitivity that today makes it difficult to ignore irrelevant stimuli might once have been what kept hunters alive. Hypercuriosity is the interior fuel for that sensitivity, driving attention toward what is new or potentially useful.

This perspective also clarifies why so many children and adults with ADHD suffer in conventional settings. Classrooms that reward quiet endurance of monotony, or jobs built on repetitive tasks and rigid schedules, smother the very impulse that makes hunters thrive. The result is boredom, anxiety, or rebellion, which educators and employers often mistake for laziness or defiance.

But when environments offer room to pursue questions, to improvise, to solve novel problems, hypercuriosity turns from liability to asset. It enables rapid learning, inventive solutions, and unusual persistence in exploring subjects that matter. The difference lies less in the individual than in the structure of the tasks and rewards surrounding them.

Evolutionary thinking reinforces this idea.

Traits like impulsivity, scanning for novelty, and craving stimulation may have been indispensable in a world where threats and opportunities appeared without warning and where success favored those who could change strategies quickly.

Modern societies emphasize planning, compliance, and steadiness, which privilege farmer tendencies and obscure the contexts in which hunter wiring is not only functional but superior. Hypercuriosity, as identified by Le Cunff and her colleagues, offers a scientific label for what my Hunter in a Farmer’s World model has long intuited: that many people with ADHD are not broken Farmers but Hunters navigating a modern societal environment built for someone else.

This doesn’t mean ADHD should be romanticized as a superpower. The challenges are real. Tasks that hold no interest can still be impossible to complete, deadlines can slip, and emotional storms can disrupt relationships and work.

But understanding hypercuriosity helps shift the conversation away from pure remediation toward alignment. Education systems can design curricula that let students chase their questions and learn by doing rather than only by rote. Workplaces can create roles that value quick thinking, variety, and exploration. Individuals can learn to structure their days to take advantage of moments when curiosity is strongest, while using tools and strategies to manage obligations that resist engagement.

Seeing ADHD through the combined lenses of hypercuriosity and the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis invites a more humane and practical approach. It recognizes that the mind described in Gupta’s article is not merely disordered but attuned to discovery, a trait rooted in our species’ long history of adapting to change.

Supporting that trait doesn’t erase every difficulty, but it opens the possibility that the restless attention of people with ADHD is not an error of nature but a signal that our talents belong in environments where exploration and swift response are valued.

Rather than forcing Hunters to plow fields, society can find ways to let them track what fascinates them, bringing out contributions that would otherwise remain hidden beneath the weight of misplaced expectations.

Share

For as long as we’ve been here, human survival has depended on a balance of instincts. Some of us were built to plant, tend, and wait. Others — Hunters — were built to scan the horizon, notice the tiniest shift in the wind, and sprint toward opportunity or away from danger.

ADHD is often treated as a defect in the modern, farmer-designed world, but what it really is is the modern expression of those ancient hunter traits. And recent research and stories from today’s workplaces and schools are starting to recognize what our DNA has been telling us all along: ADHD can be an extraordinary edge, if you know how to wield it.

A new study on foraging behavior, reported in The Washington Post earlier this year, looked at why some people seem wired to abandon a depleted food patch and move on while others stick it out longer.

Those who moved quickly — who scanned wider areas, jumped from one spot to another, and explored more broadly — were more successful at gathering food overall.

The traits that make people restless, novelty-seeking, and distractible in today’s offices made them more likely to feed the tribe in ancient grasslands.

This is the “hunter in a farmer’s world” idea in action: traits that look maladaptive in the straight-rowed fields of agriculture are exactly what you want in a fast-changing, unpredictable landscape.

Fast-forward to today, and the world around us is changing faster than any cornfield ever did. The tools we use at work, the problems we’re asked to solve, the threats we face — whether it’s climate change, AI disruption, or a sudden shift in the market — are closer to the chaos of the hunt than the predictability of planting season.

This is where ADHD traits become powerful assets. Hyperfocus, for example, is often seen as the flipside of distractibility, but it’s one of the most potent abilities in the human behavioral toolkit. When a hunter locks onto a target, everything else disappears. In the right setting, that laser focus can lead to breakthroughs no plodding, farmer-minded persistence could match.

The Associated Press recently profiled people with ADHD who have turned those traits into professional superpowers. They’ve built careers in creative industries, emergency response, entrepreneurship, and innovation precisely because they can hyperfocus when it matters, scan for opportunities others miss, and shift gears without losing momentum.

They’ve learned to work with their rhythms instead of against them: breaking tasks into sprints instead of marathons, using body doubling for accountability, and building flexible routines that mimic the natural ebb and flow of the hunt rather than the unyielding timetable of the factory clock.

Even education is starting to catch up, at least in some places. In Mumbai, a new university-certified program called InclusivEd is offering life and career skills training specifically for neurodivergent adults, including those with ADHD. The approach is modular, hands-on, and rooted in real-world problem-solving.

It’s the modern equivalent of an ancient tribal survival school, where instead of being told to sit quietly in neat rows, hunters are taught to use their energy, instincts, and adaptability to succeed in the environments they’re naturally built for. It’s not about “fixing” ADHD; it’s about equipping people to deploy it strategically.

The problem is that in most of the industrialized world, we still run our schools, offices, and expectations on a farmer’s timetable. We value linear progress, predictability, and standardized benchmarks over rapid adaptation, improvisation, and instinctive leaps.

We still label people as defective when they can’t sit still for eight hours, as if sitting still was ever the measure of human worth. This mismatch between the environment and the wiring is what turns hunter traits into liabilities. But shift the environment, and the very same traits become survival advantages.

For hunters in a farmer’s world today, success isn’t about pretending to be a farmer. It’s about recognizing your hunter nature and building a life that uses it.

That might mean structuring your work in bursts instead of blocks, finding work that rewards scanning and adaptability, surrounding yourself with allies who can help with follow-through, or using technology to manage the repetitive details that sap your energy.

It means choosing targets wisely so your hyperfocus hits something worth hitting, not just whatever happens to wander into your line of sight.

It means leaning into the curiosity, creativity, and quick-switching that come naturally, instead of seeing them as flaws to suppress.

The more the world speeds up, the more we need hunter brains in the mix.

Innovation doesn’t come from people who are content to keep tending the same patch forever. It comes from those who can spot a new opportunity in the corner of their eye, sprint toward it, and adapt on the fly when it turns out to be different than expected.

The very survival of our species has always depended on people like this. The difference now is that instead of chasing gazelles, we’re chasing ideas, solutions, and breakthroughs. And we’re doing it in a landscape that’s shifting so quickly that the ability to pivot might be the most valuable skill of all.

So if you’ve been told your ADHD is a problem, remember: in another time, in another setting, your wiring would have made you the one the tribe counted on to find the next meal, the safe path, the hidden danger before it struck.

And that skill set can make you spectacularly always successful today, if you just learn how to properly harness it.

That edge is still there. It’s not a disorder for most people — it’s a survival strategy. And in the wilds of the modern world, that just might make you the one who thrives while others are still metaphorically planting rows and hoping for rain.

Share

There’s a scene that plays out in almost every ADHD diagnosis story.

It starts with confusion: missed deadlines, scattered thoughts, emotional reactivity. Eventually, a desperate Google search leads to a checklist. Maybe then a doctor. A long wait. Maybe a skeptical primary care physician. Or a months-long referral to a specialist.

For adults, it often ends in more frustration than relief. For children, it can come with labels, prescriptions, or educational accommodations that arrive too late.

And now, suddenly, AI says it can cut through all that in minutes.

A team of scientists has built an artificial intelligence system that can diagnose ADHD using nothing more than body motion: Specifically, subtle physical movements recorded during a computer-based task. Their model, trained on a relatively small dataset, can identify ADHD in under 15 minutes using just a wearable sensor and a deep-learning algorithm.

The implications of that are seismic, not just for diagnosis, but for how we understand what ADHD really is.

The study, published last month in Nature Digital Medicine, used motion capture data from accelerometers to analyze how participants moved their heads, hands, and torsos while playing a simple game. The AI then learned to detect patterns that distinguish ADHD from neurotypical behavior. Not just fidgeting, but micro-adjustments like tiny shifts in posture, timing, rhythm.

Movement, it turns out, may be a fingerprint of attention. And AI, with its uncanny pattern recognition skills, might be able to see what human eyes miss.

This isn’t entirely new ground. For years, researchers have tried to quantify ADHD through brain scans, EEG readings, eye tracking, and other biometric markers. But most of those methods are either expensive, invasive, or too noisy to be clinically useful.

What makes this study so compelling is its simplicity. No wires. No scans. Just a few sensors and a clever algorithm. That brings us to the real breakthrough: accessibility.

If validated at scale, this kind of tool could radically democratize diagnosis. No more waiting lists. No more “maybe your insurance will cover it.” No more gatekeeping by doctors who don’t understand adult ADHD. You could imagine a school screening tool, or even a downloadable app that flags whether further evaluation is warranted.

That kind of accessibility would have been unthinkable a decade ago, although it also raises some very real questions about ethics, bias, and consent.

For one, who controls this data?

Movement is intimate, just like voice or facial recognition. And once you train an algorithm to detect ADHD, what’s to stop it from being used in hiring, in education placement, or even in policing? Will we see employers screen for neurodivergence the way they now run background checks?

And what about false positives? ADHD isn’t a binary condition. It’s a spectrum, and context matters. A restless child in a rigid classroom may light up the AI as “ADHD” when what they really need is flexibility, not a diagnosis. Conversely, a clever adult who’s masked their symptoms for years might slip under the radar.

But even with those caveats, something important is happening here.

The idea that ADHD can be measured by movement—not just subjective reporting—could finally help shift public understanding. For decades, ADHD has been dismissed as laziness, bad parenting, or a trendy excuse. But if AI can detect it through biomechanics, that lends it a legitimacy the medical community has struggled to assert.

It also fits into a broader rethinking of what attention is—and how we measure it.

Traditional diagnostics rely on what people say about their behavior. “Do you have trouble finishing tasks?” “Do you feel restless?” “Do you interrupt others?” But those are subjective. They depend on memory, self-awareness, and cultural context.

A working-class parent may interpret their distractibility as stress. A gifted child might be labeled “immature” instead of divergent.

What AI brings to the table is objectivity. It doesn’t care about excuses or impressions. It just sees the pattern.

Still, it’s important to ask: what exactly is it seeing? Is the AI picking up on an internal neurological difference, or is it detecting how ADHD people cope with the world around them? Is fidgeting a symptom, or a strategy? Are we diagnosing brains, or just looking at their attempts to survive in a world not built for them?

The answers to those questions matter, because they affect how we respond.

If movement is merely a response to boredom or anxiety, then medicating it away may be the wrong approach. If it’s intrinsic to attention regulation, then maybe we need more spaces that accommodate motion, not less. Maybe classrooms shouldn’t punish kids for pacing. Maybe workspaces should normalize standing desks and kinetic options. Maybe we need to rethink everything from how we learn to how we love.

This study also ties into a growing movement to de-center the “Farmer” brain as the gold standard.

For too long, attention has been defined as the ability to sit still and follow directions. But in the wild, that’s not always the optimal survival strategy. Our hunter ancestors needed to scan, to move, to adapt. Their attention was wide, not narrow. And their bodies were part of that attention system. They didn’t just sit and think: they stalked and sprinted. What if ADHD isn’t about a short attention span but, instead, about a body and brain tuned for motion and responsiveness?

Artificial intelligence, in this context, becomes a strange ally.

It takes a machine to validate something our ancestors knew instinctively: movement is thought. Restlessness is communication. Attention isn’t always still.

We’ve built a world that rewards the Farmer’s stillness and punishes the Hunter’s motion. But AI may inadvertently be building us a bridge by offering tools that detect, support, and even validate the Hunter’s way of being.

That validation is long overdue. Adult diagnoses of ADHD have skyrocketed in recent years; not because it’s fashionable, but because many people are finally being seen for the first time.

As new diagnostic tools emerge, we must ensure they’re used with consent, context, and compassion. We must also be vigilant against their misuse, particularly in employment, education, and surveillance. AI can help us understand ourselves, but it can’t replace human empathy.

Ultimately, this technology asks us to see ADHD not just as a diagnosis, but as a language: a movement language, a tempo, a rhythm. It speaks through fidgeting fingers and bouncing legs. Through glances, shifts, and micro-adjustments. AI can translate that language. But it’s up to us to listen, and to respond with respect, not restriction.

Because sometimes the body knows before the mind does. And now, apparently, the machines are starting to listen, too.

Subscribe now

Written by Dr. Vaudree Lavallee & Thom Hartmann

The “Hunter in a Farmer’s World” metaphor was first used in the original 1993 version of “ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World” to characterize the life situations in which those with ADHD often found themselves.

The metaphor is now popularly used to refer to subsequent Thom Hartmann books many of which address the ongoing wounding of our children by those who still portray ADHD/ADD as a disease. “Hunters in a Farmer’s World” has been called a “Just So Story,” “mind candy,” and “unreputable” by the editor and owner of a privately published subscription newsletter for psychologists and parents of ADHD kids.(2),(12)

The editorialist’s surprisingly harsh front-page commentary is in response to a book that was foremost a story told by a father (Thom Hartmann) who wanted to find an alternative to what he considered an emotionally destructive story told to his son about the way his son’s brain functioned!(16) Although initially flattered by all the recent attention Dr. Barkley had shown the earliest version of the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis, we find it tragic, self-serving, and blatantly unscientific that he would present it only in part, and that the part he’d choose was significantly misrepresented.

“ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World” provided a more feasible (and substantially more accurate) reinterpretation of the widespread fable used by those who wish to depict ADHD persons as “deficient” and “disordered.” In subsequent Thom Hartmann books and articles, more attention was directed toward building the skills and self-esteem of ADHD children and adults.

These efforts have been widely embraced by many, but aggressively opposed by those in the ADHD circuit who responded to our call to keep ADHD children’s egos intact with, for example, Barkley’s Marie Antoinette-like retort , “If feeling good is the clinical goal, then why not just give them heroin ?”(2)

In contrast to such unfortunate and derisive rhetoric, the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis maintains that self-esteem is not a drug used to pacify but a sword that can be used to fight off the evils of despondency and self-hatred, and to provide hope for ADHD children.

The Hunter/Farmer hypothesis presumes that, irrelevant of where one places on the ADHD continuum, one not are there weakness to be compensated for but there are also ADHD-related strengths that we must nurture.

Contrarily, Barkley and those who consider ADHD to have no value whatsoever promote an absolute acceptance of the “disorder” perspective and a total reliance on compensatory or defensive strategies, offering “authoritative” advice about how to “take charge” of such children.(4) Their disorder perspective assumes that there is one, single, superior (non-ADHD) way of behaving and being in the world, in all times and cultures, and that all other humans not so endowed are defective, lack creativity and have reduced intelligence (Barkley, Goldstein, etc.)

Barkley’s recommendation that ADHDers be authoritatively controlled and taught to avoid pursuing new opportunities for themselves (stimulation-seeking/risk-taking),(2) however, is like telling an entrepreneur to quit looking for new market and business opportunities, an inventor to stop trying to see how things work (or how they could work better), or a hockey player to stop trying to scoring goals!

Some ADHDers might be able to find contentment under the scourge of such defeatist (and possibly self-fulfilling) prophecies, but not without giving up many of their lives’ hopes, aspirations, and goals along the way.

The debate concerning whether ADHD is a disorder or a difference has considerable implications, not only for ADHD research, but also for those adults and children along the ADHD continuum who deserve more than a life spent only meeting the minimum threshold of their real potential.

Like the perpetually dueling Smothers Brothers, with their constant refrain of, “Mom always liked you best,” the world of ADHD research and speculation often seems to devolve into acrimony around whose theory is most or least supportable (or which brother is superior: the ADHD one or the over-focused one).

Unfortunately, in this process one of the early causalities has been accuracy. Because of Barkley’s newsletter’s wide circulation, it seemed important to provide readers a rebuttal, and to correct at least a few of his mischaracterizations of the genesis, reasoning, and details of the Hunter/Farmer metaphor.

In two issues of his for-profit newsletter, Barkley has editorialized that the Hunter/Farmer metaphor was “laughable” and “inconsistent with evolutionary theory” since, according to his (mis)interpretation of the Hunter/Farmer metaphor, he says it states that hunters have evolved into farmers rapidly over the past 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution.

We are, however, more apt to agree with those who state that biologically humanity has evolved very little since our hunting and gathering days, (21) or that existing differences between populations are likely due either to founders effects (genetic differences among founding families, many who were immigrants) or to the differential “pruning” effects of nature, pestilence, culture, and rivalry.(20)

We have always suggested that the cluster of “Hunter genes” and the cluster of “Farmer genes” have been with us since the earliest dawn of the human race: neither “evolved” from the other. (Indeed, this spectrum of behavior is seen within species across the animal kingdom, from dogs and cats to chimps and the great apes.)

There has always been a need, in all societies, for the “adventurous explorer” and for the “careful bookkeeper,” whether it be hunting and then skinning animals, or planting crops and entertaining the planters.

The core of the hunter/farmer hypothesis, in short form, is that in hunting/gathering societies those persons with the “hunting gene” are rewarded and have an increased probability of procreation, and among agricultural and post-agricultural/industrial societies (such as today) the “farming gene” is celebrated and increases the social and procreative advancement of farmers.

All theories on human development, regardless of content, fall into two categories: those, such as the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis, that take the “difference perspective” and those, such as the executive functions model, that take the “disorder perspective.”

The perspective one decides to incorporate into one’s model or hypothesis has enormous implications concerning how one treats individuals and how one interprets their behavior.

For example, no one will argue that hunters do not exhibit extreme difficulty in reciting nonsense syllables in correct sequence, or that they do not have poor rote memories. The disorder perspective attempts to “cure” such deviancy by encouraging (or forcing) ADHD children to work harder on sequence and rote, or medicating them.

Alternatively, the difference perspective assumes that different people may need to utilize different techniques to achieve the same goals. The difference perspective presumes that there are different ways of remembering, and different ways of processing and organizing input.

As an example, researchers indicate that, in contrast to the excellent rote memories possessed by Farmers, intelligent Hunters not only boast, but are also able to take advantage of their “superior” incidental memories.(9),(26)

In other words, since Hunters are predisposed to scan their environments, they are more apt to record and then later utilize background information. Conversely, Farmers are more likely to think in terms of an object devoid of context.

The limit in scope of the disorder perspective is both its major asset and its greatest liability. It’s easily grasped and propagates readily because it neatly compartmentalizes a complex range of variables, and appeals to the latent moralist in our culture and in each of us.

On the other hand, it ignores the fact that both people and environments are complex and variable, largely disregards the effects of context on performance, and overlooks evidence that human weaknesses in one environment often turn out to be powerful or even vital and adaptive assets in another.(10),(17),(20),(26)

For example, rather than questioning the desirability of the “brick” factory-style school house with it’s large class sizes and homogeneous instruction methods, the disorder perspective places blame for failure squarely on to the child.(22) Not surprisingly, the disorder perspective sees adaptation and disorder as two distinct categories, rather than two aspects of a single phenomenon.(2)

What is an Adaptation and is ADHD one?

An adaptation, according to Barkley, is something that appears in hindsight to have been “designed for some purpose” or to solve “particular problems.”

The human thumb is commonly considered an such an adaptation, although the real adaptation may be the human creativity that allowed us to find a use or two for this oddly positioned finger. Other inventions, such as handcuffs or the inside of jars, could be used to “prove” that the thumb may also be maladaptive in certain circumstances. Which is view of the human thumb is right? Probably all three.

The thumb debate is but a small example of the importance of avoiding absolute statements in an evolutionary context. Likewise, Barkley has described the type of absentmindedness often experienced by persons with ADD/ADHD as proof of a mental “deficit,” whereas other scientists view it as one of the “side consequences of a generally adaptive architecture that sometimes gets us into trouble.”(23)

As you can see, a disorder may not be the opposite of an adaptation, but its compliment.

The topics of evolution and adaptation were also explored extensively by Pinker(21) in a book that can best be described as an intelligent elaboration of Dawkin’s selfish gene theory. Nonetheless, Barkley’s use of Pinker’s work to discredit adaptation in the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis is inappropriate since Pinker indicates that at least one cornerstone of the Executive Functions model, delay of gratification, may be maladaptive.

Pinker proposes that not only is going for the quick reward more adaptive, but that risk-taking, another common hallmark of ADHD, is also more adaptive in the long run. In other words, defining disorder and adaptation as absolute opposites is a fallacy that’s not supported by most evolutionary theorists and researchers.

In 1997 when Barkley first presented a variation on Strang and Rourke’s 1983 Executive Functions model to explain ADHD, Barkely chose to incorporate into his model the existing body of literature of brain function, and to emphasize the similarity between symptoms of pseudopsychopathy (right frontal lobe damage) and ADHD.

The right-frontal-lobe brain damaged individual has been shown to experience increases in motor activity, talkativeness, and a lack of tact and restraint,(19) symptoms commonly associated with ADHD. Animals with frontal lobe damage cannot to adapt new situations or environments, while humans with such lesions similarly experience extreme difficulties in situations requiring problem solving and unique solutions(19).

Because he assumes ADHD to be synonymous with this type of brain damage,” Barkley(3) concluded, rather incorrectly, that persons with ADHD are also less capable of creative thought, and stated this hypothesis concerning ADHD and creativity explicitly in several of his writings.

If brain damage research had been used to build the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis, “ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World” may have explored the difficulties associated with being a right-frontal-lobe-damaged individual in a world taken over by people with left-frontal-lobe-damage. Described in non-disorder (difference) terms, left-frontal-lobe-damaged “Farmers” could be seen as objective (rather than indifferent), exerting emotional self-control (rather than showing little overt emotion), able to show enough self-regulation to remain silent (rather than showing little or no verbal output), and speaking only when spoken to (rather than failure to initiate conversations).

However, this silly analogy was never used in “ADD: A Different Perception,” or any subsequent Thom Hartmann book or article for that matter, because Hunters are not right-frontal-lobe brain damaged persons, and Farmers are not left-frontal-lobe brain damaged persons: each are, instead, two end-points on a continuum of human variability.

To understand the role of brain pathology research in validating the Executive Functions model, we need to first determine what the Executive Functions model would look like without reference to brain damage. The Executive Functions model would still compare the more liberal and flamboyant ADHDers unfavorably to the more conservative and restrained “statistical norm.”

Americas “brick” factory-like schoolhouses would still be seen as the epitome of human civilization and accomplishment. And, like Phillip Rushton,(11) the Executive Functions model would still see a negative correlation between IQ and promiscuity. In summary, we would still have an ethnocentric (almost Aryan) commentary of genetic endowment differences.

Without these highly questionable (and, in the opinion of these authors, outright flawed) ideological underpinnings, however, what remains of the Executive Functions model is simply a theory of individual variation.

The Executive Functions model tends to focus on post base-line variation in human response to environmental stimulation while ignoring important differences in how such stimulation may initially be experienced by the individual.

We agree that after controlling for base-line differences between Hunters and Farmers, there may be important executive function differences among Hunters and among Farmers.

Additionally, these “executive function” differences may turn out to be one among the many variables which help determine whether ADHD will produce an entrepreneurial success or a chronic criminal.

As the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis predicts, there are base-line differences in the ways individual Hunters and Farmers each experience and cope with depression, boredom, frustration and joy.

However, these base-line differences do not fully explain why one Hunter (or Farmer for that matter) may or may not experience depression at a dysfunctional level.

Instead, the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis suggests that it’s the driving need or hunger for aliveness which animates most ADHD/ADD behaviors, and executive function is only a small (but significant) variable that determines how this need or hunger is satisfied (through socially adaptive means, such as a high-stimulation job in an emergency room, or socially maladaptive means like becoming a barroom brawler).

Seen in this light, Barkley’s so called executive system may be nothing more than a fight or flight response mechanism, acting like a rubber band that exerts its influence at both ends of the ADHD continuum.

Evidence which indicates that having a “happy temperament” as an infant is associated with improved prognosis for Hunters while some environmental factors, such as having experienced abuse, are associated with negative life chances(13) lends support to the prospect that the Executive Function model is a theory of within-Hunter variation rather than of Hunter/Farmer differences.

To recapitulate, if one were to divide the population into groups based on individual differences in tolerance of (or desire for) novelty, the individuals in each group would still vary in both their tolerance of and their exposure to adversity or stress. Theoretically, those in each group whose threshold for stress has been exceeded may exhibit many of the cognitive difficulties associated with the so-called executive functions.

Researching ADHD Adaptation, and Self-Esteem

The myopic nature of the disorder perspective leads to narrow and incomplete answers. Previously, disorder perspective researchers seemed to believe that everything we needed to know about ADHD we could gain through a better understanding of the workings of methylphenidate.

Now, Barkley(2) writes that we should only ask the purpose of the executive function system rather than consider whether there are also adaptive functions associated with ADHD-like behaviors.

Although knowing a little bit more concerning methylphenidate (Ritalin), such as its effects during pregnancy, or concerning the function of executive control processes may provide some benefit, neither is an adequate replacement for a better understanding of humanity and its complexity throughout the ADHD continuum.

Some self-proclaimed empiricists appear to have difficulty with what they consider murky constructs, such as self-esteem, which are associated with subjective emotions. In contrast to the so-called ambiguousness of self-esteem, these “empiricists” appear more comfortable with the presumably more precise language used in the DSM-IV definition of ADHD, such as “often,” “excessively” and “extraneous.”

Other researchers, however, are less predisposed to automatically dismiss clinical observations and case studies, and more apt to report trends and to design research studies so as to settle theoretical disagreements and uncover a wider range of truths. It is to these other researchers that we will now turn.

According to longitudinal ADHD research, a positive self-esteem is associated with resiliency, autonomy, and a sense of humor,(18) all factors that are known to boost the immune system and improve one’s general physical well being in a wide range of studies.

Conversely, low self-esteem is associated with the feelings of helplessness stemming from a belief that personal failure is due to unchangeable factors such as inherent inability or inferior intellect. (8)

Considering these associations between self-esteem and how one’s life turns out, one should not be surprised that, when asked, many ADHD individuals indicate that what was most helpful to them while growing up was having an adult who believed in them,(18) or that ADHD children who have a good relationship with their grandparents fare better.(13)

Whether they be parents, teachers, or clinicians, adults wield a great deal of influence over the self-concepts and performance of those children with whom they are entrusted. Often the single most significant variable in a child’s life that will determine his or her success was the presence of an adult who believed in and supported the child.

Rosenthal and Jacobson were the first to show that experimental manipulation of teacher expectations may influence student outcome. The researchers informed teachers that the performance of randomly picked students was going to improve dramatically.

These “spurter” effects were more pronounced in first and second graders and in students with whom teachers traditionally held lower expectations, such as minority students .(7) The question left unanswered by Rosenthal and Jacobson’s research is how specifically did teacher expectation lead to changes in student grades.

Elementary school teacher Jane Elliot proposed that a teacher’s expectations influence student performance through its influence on teacher behavior. She dramatically illustrated the power of self-concept by using eye color differences to explain the concept of discrimination to her students. She found that her students actually performed better at their assignments on the day when their eye color was deemed superior and worse on the day when their eye color was considered inferior.(7)

Researchers Becker, Place, Tenzer and Frueh(6) also found an association between teacher’s impressions of and behavior toward various students when they exposed teachers to one of three taped conversations between a female librarian and a young girl. The second and third tapes were identical to the control tape, except that in one tape the child interrupted the adult, and in the other the child engaged in three acts of tangency. For example, when the librarian suggest French food as a possible topic, the girl in the tangency condition started talking about how she lost her tooth after biting into an apple.

As expected, teachers’ perceptions of both student ability and the likeliness that the student would receive their help were lower in both the interruption and tangency condition than in the control condition. Not surprisingly, teachers described the child in the interruption condition as a “poor listener”, and the same child in the tangency condition as having “poor attention” or being a “dumb blond.” More needs to be known concerning the effects of these attitudes on teacher and student performance.

A more detailed look into the impact of self-esteem on both hunters and farmers may also benefit greatly from the body of research on priming and relational schemas (scripts).

Priming is a scientific term denoting any experimental or naturally occurring manipulation, which makes some memories or information more readily accessible than other information.(1)

A priming stimulus can be anything -- a word, a picture, an instruction, a facial expression, or even an emotion. For example, what Weiss(27) refers to as “flooding” and what Hallowell and Ratey(14) refer to as “hyperfocusing on the negative” may just be the effects of priming combined with the interconnection of emotion and memory retrieval.

Since ADHD questionnaires tend to focus on the negative aspects of ADHD, it is possible that the act of filling these questionnaires out immediately prior to task performance can call forth (prime) negative memories and emotions in ADHD participants that may influence task performance.

The potential for priming to bias research results has not previously been explored in ADHD research. The failure of ADHD researchers to reduce the occurrence of this type of bias when designing studies is one of the ways in which many of the existing studies into ADHD and its outcomes are potentially flawed and altogether at odds with accepted scientific models.

In summary, we find the work of those who attempt to position ADD/ADHD entirely as a pathology, “a failure of evolution,” or a character trait of “no value whatsoever,” to be more rooted in thinly-veiled pseudo-morality and eugenics than in science.

Vast bodies of literature — as well as common sense and the positive personal experiences of millions with ADHD — are conveniently ignored, overlooked, or dismissed. In Barkley’s words we find contempt and a reductionist, mechanistic world-view that allows only for pathology and non-pathology.

By obsessively focusing on negatives and refusing to acknowledge any evidence of value in ADHD, anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances, the increasingly small circle of “pure pathology” advocates are bringing only pain, power-based relationships (between parents told to “take charge” of their ADHD children, as well as between professionals and their clients), and the most massive labeling, segregation, and ostracizing seen in our public schools since the early days of “separate but equal” education among the races.

There are those who are more concerned about the appearance of being a “good” parent or “good” teacher who may take comfort in the pronouncement that their children were “born with this problem” and that “you should neither assign blame to yourself or accept it from others.”(4)

Such fatalistic pronouncements serve only to release parents, teachers and researchers from their responsibility and guilt concerning their children’s failures.(22) The wounding wreaked on millions of children by their being told they are brain-deficient and have a mental disorder, however, is largely ignored by the pathology proponents, as is the agony endured by other parents who read in Barkley’s newsletter that their children’s condition, “rather than representing an adapted evolved set of valuable qualities, reflects weaknesses in the evolution.. .”

It is time we set aside this one-dimensional “villain story” which focuses solely on “the burden of ADHD to affected individuals, to their families, and to society.., “(5) and on how ADHD is a “deficiency in functioning” which makes one “less capable.”(2)

Science doesn’t support the absolute pathology model, common sense doesn’t support it, and certainly any sincere hope for therapeutic outcomes and healthy children don’t support it.

It’s time to stop the wounding, the finger pointing, and the critical, condescending tone used to refer to and address those with ADHD and their advocates. It’s time to walk away from the doomsayers and look to the light of a new day and world where all children are valued for their unique gifts.

Share

REFERENCES

(1) Baldwin, M. (1992). Relational Schemas and the processing of social information. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 461- 484.

(2) Barkley, R. (2000). More on evolution, hunting, and ADHD. The ADHD Report, 8, 2, 1-7.

(3) Barkley, R. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 65-94.

(4) Barkley, R. (1995). Taking Charge of ADHD: The Complete Authoritative Guide for Parents. Become an Empowered Parent - A World-Renowned Expert Tells You How to Help Your Child and Yourself!

(5) Barkley, R. (2000). Genetics of childhood disorders: XVII. ADHD, part 1: The executive functions and ADHD. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 39, 477-484.

(6) Becker, Place, Tenzer and Frueh (1991). Teachers’ impressions of children varying in pragmatic skills. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 12, 397-412.

(7) Boocock, S. (1980). Sociology of Education - An Introduction, Second Edition.New York: University Press of America.

(6) Brooks, R. (1994). Children at risk: Fostering resilience and hope. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 64, 545-553.

(7) Ceci, S., & Tishman, J. (1984). Hyperactivity and incidental memory: evidence for attentional diffusion. Child Development, 55, 2192-2203.

(8) Ceci, S. (1996). On Intelligence - A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development. Cambridge:Harvard University Press.

(9) Di Cresce, G. (2000). Rushton’s racial link to IQ rapped - Prof. Dismissed as crank. The Winnipeg Sun, February 3, 4.

(10) Goldstein, S., & Barkley, R. (1998). ADHD, hunting, and evolution: “just so” stories. The ADHD Report, 6, 5, 1-4.

(11) Grizenko, N., & Pawliuk, N. (1994). Risk and protective factors for disruptive behavior disorders in children. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 64, 534-540.

(12) Hallowell, E., & Ratey, J. (1994). Driven To Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood through Adulthood. New York: Pantheon Books.

(13) Hartmann, T. (1993). Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception.

(14) Hartmann, T. (1999). Whose disorder is disordered by ADHD. Tikkun, July/August, 17-21.

(15) Hartmann, T. (2000). Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADHD.

(16) Hechtman, L. (1991). Resilience and vulnerability in long term outcome of attention deficit disorder. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 36, 415-421.

(17) Kolb, B., & Whishaw, I. (1990). The frontal lobes. In WH Freeman. Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology -3rd Edition. New York.

(18) Nesse, R., & Williams, G. (1995). Why We Get Sick - The New Science of Darwin Medicine. New York: Vintage Books.

(19) Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. New York:Norton.

(20) Reid, R., Maag, J. & Vasa, S. (1993). Attention deficit disorder as a disability category: A critique. Exceptional children, 60, 198-214.

(21) Schacter, D. (1999). The seven sins of memory - Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54, 182-203.

(22) Semrud-Clikeman, M., Steingard, R., Filipek, P., Biederman, J., Bekken, K., & Renshaw, P. (2000). Using MRI to examine brain-behavior relationships in males with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 39, 477-484.

(23) Schacter, D. (1999). The seven sins of memory - Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54, 182-203.

(24) Shaw, G., Brown, G. (1991). Laterality, implicite memory and attention disorder. Educational Studies, 17, 15-23.

(25) Weiss, L. (1992). Attention Deficit Disorder In Adults - Practical Help for Sufferers and their Spouses. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company.

Vaudree Lavallee wrote this article in 2000 for the book “Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADHD.”

Share

What Maslow Overlooked

As time went on after I developed the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis and published my first book on the topic, I dug deeper and deeper into the available literature about ADHD, talked with more and more of the re­searchers, and learned some truly interesting and often star­tling things in the process.

Abraham Maslow published his landmark book Motivation and Personality in 1954. In this book he articulated what he called the “hierarchy of human needs.”

Our most basic need, he said, is for biological stasis. We need water, food, appropriate nutrition, to excrete, and to maintain our body at a constant temperature.

The second level Maslow identified as the need for safety. Once these basic physical needs are met, then we go off in search of our third need, which he identified as the need for love and belonging. When that’s met, we start seeking self-esteem and status. Finally, when all these physical and emotional needs are satisfied, a person will turn to what some might call spiritual needs, and which Maslow called the need for self-actualization.

Maslow’s insight into this hierarchy or pyramid of needs had a revolutionary impact on the field of psychology, creating a whole new school of psychological thought called Humanis­tic Psychology, and was profoundly insightful. He shows us why a person who is starving will not care much about his social status. For example, in 1980 in northern Uganda I went into a famine area to help set up a feeding center and hospital for starving refugees. Not only did they not worry about their appearance, many didn’t even care if they were wearing clothes: they were starving.

Maslow points out some misconceptions many people have: for example, what we describe in western society as “hunger,” he calls “appetite.” Few of us have ever experienced life-threatening hunger, which is at the foundation of the pyramid of needs, or even when we say we are hungry, most of the time we simply crave a specific taste or flavor, or want that pleasant feeling of fullness in our stomach. This isn’t a stasis or survival need, but more likely a self-esteem or some other higher need.

Maslow said wherever a person is stuck on this pyramid, everything above that level becomes invisible.

For example, if somebody was to come up to you right now and put their hand over your mouth and nose, violating your need for homeostasis because you wouldn’t be able to breathe, you wouldn’t be worried about safety: “Am I going to fall off the chair as I knock this guy’s hand off my face?” You wouldn’t be worried about the low social needs: “What are the people in the room going to think of me if I knock his hand off?” You wouldn’t worry about the high social needs: “What’s he going to think?” You wouldn’t worry about self-actualization: “What’s God’s opinion about this?” It would just be, “Get a breath!”

Similarly consider a person stuck in “safety.” If you were out at night trying to cross a busy street and suddenly the traffic got really bad and you’re thinking it’s possible you might not even make it across this street, it’s all of a sudden real dangerous. At that moment you’re not wondering if your tie is straight or how your make-up looks. Your concern would only be about getting safety.

We’ve all known people, particularly children, who are so stuck in a low social need, who so desperately need the approval of their peers, that they’re willing to sacrifice the high social need. They will hurt a friend in order to get the approval of the peer group.

However, there is one question that was asked of Maslow when he first presented this theory that he never successfully answered. According to this model, if a person has homeostasis and has safety, then they won’t do things that violate that. People don’t go down the pyramid. A person would not endan­ger their own safety except to accomplish homeostasis.

The question that Maslow couldn’t answer was, “Why is it that people who have all their homeostatic needs met engage in risk-taking behaviors? Why do people drive too fast on the highway? Why do they drive around without a seat belt? Why do people go bungee jumping? Why do they jump out of air­planes? Why do they quit jobs to start entrepreneurial busi­nesses? Why do people take chances ?

The Need for Aliveness

The need Maslow overlooked exists between safety and homeo­stasis. It’s below the level of conscious thought. This overlooked basic human need may be so critical to an understanding of human nature that knowing it gives us a revelatory flash of insight into the nature of personality disorders, and specifi­cally ADD. This need is what I call The need to experience alive­ness: the need to feel that one is alive. Some people experience this need with great intensity, and some people experience it with only a moderate level of intensity.

Cogito, ergo sum, the philosopher Rene Descartes wrote in 1637, which means I think, therefore I am. Yet merely think­ing is not enough to create, in many people, the reality — the down-in-the-gut knowledge — that therefore I am.

To validate therefore I am, we must experience the fact of our aliveness. Ugo Betti wrote:

“At any given moment I open my eyes and exist. And before that, during all eternity, what was there? Nothing.”

To understand how Maslow could have overlooked a fun­damental human need which drives the behaviors of as much as 30% of our population, it’s important to first understand how a particular part of our brain is wired. This part of the brain, and the way it works, can cause this need to come into being, or, to remain unexpressed.

Thalamic Gain

The part of the brain which most likely drives this process is called the thalamus.

All of our senses, except smell, flow into the thalamus, which is a small structure near the base of the brain. When we hear, see, feel, or taste something, that information from the sensory organs and nerves is first passed along to the thala­mus, before being relayed to the rest of the brain.

What our eyes see, for example, moves along as electro­chemical impulses through the optic nerves (through the op­tic chiasma) to a part of the thalamus dedicated to vision. From there, the signals project to the part of our brain that actually sees, the primary visual cortex located in the occipital region of the cerebral cortex. The same process occurs with sound, touch, and taste.

The thalamus acts in much the same way as a faucet does on a sink. Sensory inputs pass through it on the way to their final destination (much like water must pass through a faucet to reach the sink). The faucet of the thalamus controls how much of that information reaches its ultimate destination — and how quickly and at what level of strength.

Another model, suggested by Dr. Dale Hammerschmidt of the University of Minnesota’s Medical School, is of the thalamus as a graphic equalizer on a stereo system. This is probably a more accurate way of looking at it, as the thalamus doesn’t always ap­ply the same amplification or attenuation to each sense. Some people are more sensitive to sight, others to hearing, others to touch, and some to taste, or any combination of these four. These anomalies are sometimes the result of thalamic variations. How­ever, I’ll use the faucet metaphor here both because of its simplic­ity and because not everyone is familiar with a graphic equalizer.

Another important brain structure connected with the thalamus is the reticular formation (often called the Reticular Activating System or RAS).

The RAS is a large group of nerve cells which originate deep within the brain. Long nerve cells that look like fibers grow up from this area through the thalamus, and then extend on out into and throughout various parts of the cortex (our thinking brain). It’s as if the thalamus had a little curled-up porcupine underneath it, with disproportionately long quills which stick up into virtually every important part of the conscious brain.

Largely on orders from the thalamus, the RAS tells the conscious brain how alert it should be. The RAS is responsible for the startle reflex, and is one of the primary control sys­tems for our general level of arousal or awakeness.

The thalamus and the RAS are the ever-vigilant doorkeep­ers of our senses, and, as part of our most ancient brain struc­tures, they have as a primary responsibility to provide informa­tion to the brain for that most ancient of instincts — the fight- or-flight response. They are responsible for our safety and sur­vival (at the most primal level of Maslow’s hierarchy).

Let us say that the thalamus gets an unusual input from the eyes or ears — say a loud noise or the sight of something flying at us. Instead of just normally passing it along to the cortex so we could think about it, the thalamus will do two things:

♦  First, it turns up the volume level for that particular sight or sound, so our conscious brain will notice it more vividly. Those vivid memories are known in the literature as “flashbulb memories.” (People who’ve been in car accidents often relate how clearly they remember seeing the oncoming car, for example. This is the result, in part, of the thalamus having opened up the faucet, thus pro­ducing a more memorable impression on the brain.)

♦  Second, the thalamus will activate the RAS, saying, “Hey, wake up the rest of the brain! Something impor­tant and maybe dangerous is happening out there! ” The very long and super-efficient nerves of the RAS trans­mit a whoops!/startle impulse to the brain, that adds a huge dose of impact to our sight, sound, feeling, or taste.

The RAS and thalamus are so powerfully involved in main­taining and modulating our level of awareness or awakeness, that if either are accidentally damaged during surgery or in an accident the person will slip into a permanent coma. Simi­larly, when someone sustains a concussion which knocks them unconscious, it’s usually because the RAS has been jarred hard enough to shut itself down as a defense strategy.

So, in combination, our thalamus and our RAS control how much of the world around us we sense — how fast and with what volume the input flows through the faucet of the thala­mus, and how awake or aware we are as we process that input.

People with a wide-open thalamic faucet are awash in sen­sory input. Those with a closed thalamic faucet sense the world as if through cotton.

Closed and Open Faucets

One of the more interesting recent medical discoveries is the fact that each one of us has a slightly different “normal” set­ting for how open or closed the faucet of our thalamus is, and thus how hair-triggered our RAS may be at activating the rest of the brain.

The Volume Control of the Thalamus

Those born with their thalamic/sensory volume control set above the midpoint line only have to open their eyes to know they’re alive. Those born with the gain control below the line must periodically remind themselves they’re fully alive by interacting with their environment in stimulating ways, so as to increase their sensory inputs enough to push through the low thalamic gain and reach into the realms above the line.

In an agricultural (Farmer) society, above-the-line thalamic gain would be valued and useful, as those people wouldn’t leave the farm in search of stimulation. In a hunter/gatherer society, the below-the-line setting would be valuable, as it would drive hunters to the stimulation of the hunt.

Bobby’s adrenal system and RAS fill him with stimulation ... until the novelty wears off.

Bobby’s baseline gain is low, so in class he doesn’t feel “alive.” To get aliveness, he pulls on Sally’s pony-tail, she screams, stimulating his RAS to turn up his thalamic volume control over the threshold of aliveness.

Bobby’s neurology returns to his “normal” but the classroom is still too boring to give him a sense of aliveness, so after a few minutes he throws a spitball at Billy. Boom!

People with a wide-open thalamic faucet experience sight, sound, touch, and taste as being strong and vivid: they’re flooded with sensory input. The result is that they often want to back away from the world. Their sensory experience is some­times painfully bright. Boisterous conversation or loud music overloads their brains, and they’re uncomfortable with strong touch or other intense physical sensation.

These people are sometimes referred to as introverts, although in the context of Carl Jung’s original meaning for the term this is a misnomer. Nonetheless, people with a very active thalamus and RAS tend to be quiet, withdrawn, and to dislike wild disruptions in their lives. Their primary life strategy is often avoidance of excess sensation, pain, emotion, or disruption.

So much input is flowing through the thalamus and RAS into the cortex that they necessarily step back from life and look for a little peace and quiet.

On the other end of the spectrum are those people whose thalamus and RAS are not as open: less sensory information flows through, or flows through with a lower intensity. People with a more-closed thalamic faucet experience the world as “too quiet.” Since the faucet is closed a bit tighter, less con­tinuous sensory stimulation comes through, and it takes a much more dramatic event to punch through and activate their reticular startle response.

These people see, hear, taste, and feel (in terms of sensation, not emotion) less vividly. Rather than trying to push themselves away from the world, they throw themselves into it, often with an intensity that is bewildering to the open-faucet thalamus folks.

Since it takes a stronger sensory input to make it through the faucet of their thalamus and RAS and into their thinking/ experiencing brain (the cortex), these people are not over­whelmed by bright lights, strong colors, loud sounds, intense physical sensations, or strong tastes. If anything, they enjoy these things, because such sensations bring them, if only for a few moments, into a more close and intimate contact with a world they may normally feel is a bit distant.

We’ve all known people who fit into the two extreme ends of this spectrum: they’re stereotypes or cliches in our society and in popular literature.

Closed-faucet folks who crave stimulation, live for the party, love to perform in front of people, are into skydiving or roller coasters, and consume hot peppers with an enthusiasm that baffles their friends.

Open-faucet folks, inundated by sensory input, just want to be left alone, don’t generally speak up, appreciate subtle things such as fine art and classical music, and often are quick to dismiss the closed-faucet folks as boors or egomaniacs.

Then, of course, there are those people who fall in the middle between these two extremes. The world is vivid to them, but not painful. They have enough sensory input to satisfy them, so they don’t go out of their way to create more for them­selves, yet they’re not so overpowered by it that they feel the need to withdraw. These people are the ones who some would consider “normal.”

Final Basic Human Need

But what, you may ask, does this have to do with basic human needs and things like ADHD?

Maslow gave us a remarkable look into human behavior when he outlined his hierarchy of needs. Maslow pointed out that:

“The human being is a wanting animal and rarely reaches a state of complete satisfaction except for a short time.”

Freud, Adler, Skinner, Jung, and other psychologists have pointed out that many of those behaviors we define as neu­rotic are really misdirected attempts to satisfy basic needs, or are the result of unfulfilled basic needs.

We see that in different people, different thresholds of sen­sation are necessary in order to experience gratification of this basic human need to feel alive.

Nobel-prize-winning poet, playwright, author and philoso­pher Rabindranath Tagore, for example, had a life devoted to quiet meditation and contemplation. He enjoyed sitting quietly and pondering the nature of things, living within his mind (so to speak), presumably because his need for sensory input was adequately satisfied. The faucet of his thalamus and RAS was probably wide open, and life came in at him full-force. The writ­ings he left us say things such as, “That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.” Similar descriptions of the naturalness of aliveness, the fulfillment of that “need to experience alive­ness” simply from being alive, can be found in the writings of many others, from Thomas Merton to George Santayana.

These people had their “need to feel alive” satisfied from birth. Their thalamus and RAS were open wide enough to ex­perience the world constantly, in full Technicolor. Like a per­son after a perpetual Thanksgiving dinner, they felt full all their lives.

Those with a thalamic faucet that’s more closed, how­ever, need to periodically leap up through the baseline set by their thalamus to gasp in a full breath of aliveness. Their lives are characterized by a constant search for stimulation, and many are tortured by this basic need to feel alive on a daily basis.

The philosopher Pascal wrote in 1670, “There is a plea­sure in being in a ship beaten about by a storm, when we are sure that it will not founder.” Would Tagore have said the same? Probably not. Pascal would have probably enjoyed The Scream Machine roller coaster at the famous Six Flags Over Georgia amusement park; Tagore would have probably dismissed it as crude and overly stimulating.

So we have here now a final Perhaps it’s a Life Wish:        To wake up, even if just for an instant a day, and viscerally know that they  are alive.

Freud first came close to nailing down this “basic human need in 1933 when he wrote about the Id: “We can come nearer to the Id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement... These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organization and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure principle.”

This is not to say that the basic human need to experience “aliveness” is the same as what Freud called the Id, but I do believe that Freud was close to touching this need when he embarked on an exploration of those driving and motivating forces which lie below our normal levels of waking conscious­ness. After all, consider how few people are sufficiently self-aware to say, for example, “I like to drive fast because it makes me feel more alive.”

Yet how else to explain this sort of behavior, unless we leap to the conclusion (as Freud and others sometimes have) that such behavior must demonstrate an unconscious death wish? The idea of an unconscious death wish is interesting and, no doubt, occasionally true, but it doesn’t explain the liking of spicy foods, loud music, vivid colors, wild sex, and other types of sensation-seeking behavior that are often associated with the types of people who also drive like maniacs. They can’t all be trying to kill themselves!

So if these folks aren’t trying to kill themselves with all this sensation-seeking, what is their goal?

Perhaps it’s a Life Wish: To wake up, even if just for an instant a day, and viscerally know that they are alive.

A New Understanding

Characterizing this previously undefined human need as the basis of these behaviors then gives us a whole new key to un­derstand both healthy high-stimulation activities as well as de­structive and self-destructive stimulation-seeking behaviors. In both cases, the person seeks the experience of aliveness. In the former, they’ve found appropriate ways to get it (skydiving, public speaking, sales, politics, substitute teaching, being an emergency room physician). In the latter case they’ve stumbled into — often by life circumstances which shut out the appropri­ate routes — destructive ways to experience stimulation (mug­ging people, taking drugs, having frequent sex with a wide vari­ety of people, starting fights, gambling).

How does this help us better understand ADHD and other variations from the norm?

If this model is accurate, this tells us first that ADHD, or this disruptive behavior as it were, is not about cognition. It is not a failure of the thinking mechanism.

Number two, it’s not a failure of morality.

Number three, this is not the failure of the inhibitory mechanism or executive function.

It’s a starvation for aliveness.

In placing the “need to experience aliveness” on Maslow’s scale of human needs, we see a variety of ways in which people can fulfill this need. Maslow points out that people are rarely stuck in just one of the levels of the hierarchy, but operate instead at different levels simultaneously. We tend to have one primary place where we’re dealing with life’s issues at any given moment in time. For a closed-faucet person, that place will always be colored by a need to feel aliveness, because this need is so primal.

It may be that we’re mostly struggling for aliveness.

When we know whether a person is closed- or open-faucet, we can predict how they’ll express or act out their other needs. Closed-faucet people struggling with the need for love will be distracted by the opposite sex, make impulsive decisions about relationships, and take risky chances in those relationships. Those people struggling with the need for self-actualization, on the other hand, will leap from group to group, guru to guru, in the quest for new experience and insight. Of course, you could apply this logic to any level of need and behavior.

Open-faucet people, on the other hand, will be more cau­tious in their seeking and less likely to connect with high-stim situations, people, or relationships.

When I shared this concept of a new basic human need that Maslow may have overlooked with psychotherapist George Lynn, he observed:

“Your emphasis on this additional human need to feel alive in Maslow’s Hierarchy makes a lot of sense. This explains the rage that my ADHD clients’ parents tell me their kids experience in school. Rage may be a response to hav­ing a basic need suffocated or starved.” (Italics added.)

This is so common-sensible as to be intuitive, particularly for those people with a closed-faucet thalamus/RAS who have experienced this in their own lives. These kids and adults are different from the norm, and their core self will instinctively resist being squashed into society’s proverbial round hole.

So here we see another non-pathological way to view at least one large aspect of ADHD, the need for risk taking or high stimulation. I’ll talk about others in future articles.

Share

When I was laying in bed all those years ago reading about prehistoric hunters and farmers in Scientific American after my son’s ADHD diagnosis and it occurred to me that ADHD and Hunters may be the same thing, all of this went through my head (in a bit more disorganized way) in one epiphenous moment. It was one of those moments where I really felt like a light bulb had gone off in my head. This was the answer I’d been looking for.

Whether the Hunter/Farmer model as a way of viewing ADHD is ultimately demonstrated to be good science or not, may not be vital. For the moment, it provides us with a way to view this condition that leaves self-esteem intact, accurately mod­els and predicts how and why medications are helpful, and reframes our techniques for working with Hunter-type indi­viduals in schools, the workplace, and in relationships.

The bottom line is nobody knows what ADHD is or where it came from, but we know it’s there.

We don’t know what elec­tricity is either. Just about everybody learned in school that elec­tricity is the motion of electrons in a wire. But what about elec­tricity that moves through space, such as radio waves, where there is no possible flow of electrons? Then electricity is a wave, we’re told. But a wave of what and in what medium? Nobody knows.

The fact is that nobody even knows what electricity is, in wires or in space. It’s definitely not the flow of electrons, even through a wire, and experiments show that in space a single electron will behave like a wave in one circumstance, and then like a particle in another.

Oddly, experiments show that the most important variable that determines whether it’s a particle or wave is if it’s being observed by a human being. Yet we talk about electricity as if we understand it. We create models of it, like Ohm’s Law, which work out most of the time, although they break down when pushed beyond the boundaries of nor­mal temperatures and distances. We can make light bulbs work even though we don’t know what’s going on inside that light bulb. We don’t know how aspirin works, but for a hundred years we’ve been giving it to people.

So, even though we don’t absolutely understand something doesn’t mean it’s not real and doesn’t mean we can’t do something about it. What my son needed was the right story to tell himself that left his self-esteem intact and gave him a map through the territory of living life with ADHD.

What I was looking for was a model for ADHD that would accomplish the good and useful things the diabetes story did, but with­out the stigma of pathology. I wanted to acknowledge for my son that he was different from many of his classmates, that he was going to face challenges in school. He may have to take medi­cation. He may have to learn new skills and new ways of being successful in school that are different from the traditional ways kids learn in school. I was not a parent in denial, but I wanted to keep his self-esteem intact and I wanted him to have hope.

What he needed was the right story.

I discovered the power of stories more than a decade ear­lier, when I ran a program for abused kids. One Fri­day afternoon a social worker dropped by around four in the afternoon. She had a ten-year-old girl in the back seat.

“Her name is Sally,” the social worker said (I’ve changed names here), “and I don’t know her history. Her social worker is on vacation this week, and I just picked her up from the police station, and because of confidentiality laws the only thing my office could tell me was that she can’t go home to her parents. So if you don’t have a bed for the weekend as an emergency placement, I’m going to drop her off at the state mental hospital for the weekend, as I’m on my way home.”

By coincidence, we had an empty bed that day as a child had been discharged to a foster family earlier in the week. So we took in Sally for the weekend, with the agreement that on Monday we’d get together with her regular social worker, find out what the situation was, and decide if she was an appropriate place­ment for our facility or if we should refer her to a foster home or another institution. The social worker left, and Louise assigned Sally to Linda’s house, as that’s where we had the empty bed.

Linda was one of our best-ever childcare workers. She was smart, loving, insightful, and emotionally strong. That Friday night she took Sally up to the empty second-floor bedroom and said, “Here’s your bedroom, there’s your bed, and there’s a nightgown. You get ready for bed and I’ll be back in ten min­utes.” Linda went downstairs and had a cup of herbal tea.

Ten minutes later, Linda returned to Sally’s room to find Sally had changed into her nightshirt, and was laying on top of her bed, facedown. Linda sat on the bed next to her, and reached over to give her a gentle backrub. She was going to say, “I’m really glad you’re here, and we’re going to have a wonderful time this weekend. You’ll have fun, learn a lot, and it’ll be a great experience for us both.”

But Linda never had a chance to say those words, because just as her hand lightly touched Sally’s shoulder, Sally exploded off the bed at her, screaming and clawing and biting, shouting that she was going to kill Linda and slashing for Linda’s face with her nails.

Linda grabbed Sally’s wrists and flipped her over on the bed, face down, and essentially fell on top of her, both of them facedown, holding her so she couldn’t hurt either herself or Linda, as Sally continued to sputter and shriek and scream. Her yells were so loud that Louise and I came over to find out what was going on.

Linda was talking Sally down, say­ing, “It’s OK, you’re safe here, everything is going to be fine.” After about four or five minutes (which is an incredibly long time for such behavior to persist), Sally eventually depres­surized and lay quietly on the bed, panting to catch her breath.

Thinking it was now a safe time to sit up, Linda let go of Sally’s wrists and hoisted herself erect. She looked down at the little girl and saw that during the struggle Sally’s night­shirt had worked its way up to the middle of her back. To her horror, Linda saw that Sally’s back was covered with cigarette burns, old and recent.

If you were to ask little Sally at that moment in time who she was, she would have told you her truth. She would have said that she was the little girl who was so bad that the only way you could control her behavior was to put cigarettes out on her. (And, truth be told, she was a master at angering adults.) Sally ab­solutely believed this, and had years of experience to prove it.

What we had to do with Sally was one of the most terrify­ing and difficult things that can be done with a human being under any circumstances I know of, and that is the breaking down of an old personality, the old set of stories about who she was, and the reintegration of a new one.

Our Own Stories

As we go through life — particularly childhood — we collect stories about who we are. They come from our parents, sib­lings, peers, and teachers. We find them in our culture and our media. The stories fall into two basic categories: I am/I can and I’m not/I can’t.

The I am/I can stories form the foundation of our lives. They’re the floor we stand on as we move out into the world. They take many forms: I’m the fat one; I’m the skinny one; I’m the smart one; I’m the dumb one; I’m the cute one; I’m the ugly one; I’m the good one; I’m the bad one, and so on. Most are actually far more elaborate, but all start with these simple building blocks. They are the stories of who we are, and they define our posture and position, our power and our willingness to undertake things.

These stories stick to us as we grow through childhood the way lint sticks to a cheap suit or burrs collect in the fur of dogs in autumn. We test them against the world a few times, and if the response we get validates them, we decide they’re real and they become part of the floor, walls, and ceiling of our lives.

They form the box in which we live, and very, very few people will ever go outside that box or step off that floor. In a very real way, you could say that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can and can’t do are our fate, our destiny. They determine our future.

Changing these stories is incredibly difficult, once they are accepted. Most people will never change the core stories they develop during their childhood. In psychoanalysis, if even a small shift can be accomplished, it can be life transforming.

Brainwashing and boot camp are other examples of times when people’s stories are intentionally shifted, but, again, these are difficult processes and, in the case of boot camp, only a very small part of the over­all structure of a person’s stories is touched.

By and large, most people will never change the core stories they develop during their childhood. Because this is such a rare event, it may ac­count for our fascination with novels and movies in which the lead character experiences a major personality transformation.

So, understanding as I did the power of the stories we tell ourselves, when our son was diagnosed as having ADHD, I came to an absolute and compete conclusion: I did not want my son to be walking around for the rest of his life saying to others and (most importantly) to himself, “I’m the one with a deficit, I have a brain disorder.”

It may, of course, be true (although the jury is very much out) that ADHD is a brain disorder. But even if that is the case, I thought it was a disempowering story. It wasn’t useful. It didn’t add to my son’s hope, or enhance his resilience.

So, what I was looking for was a different story. I wanted a story which would acknowledge all the realities of ADHD, the learn­ing methods, the indicators, the need to work harder than his peers for the same rewards. But I also wanted him to have hope.

So when this thought of Hunters and Farmers came to me, I sat him down and said:

“We’ll keep that ADHD label, because in the current school system it may get you a better teacher. But don’t take it too seriously. I don’t think you have a deficit or a disorder: I think you’re my son. And I’m the son, on my mother’s side, of the misfits and mal­contents of British society who came to this country in the 1600s and fought a war of independence against the conform­ist British.

“And I’m the son of a father whose parents came to America in 1917 from Norway, who were the descendants of the Vikings - those people who terrified most of western Europe for two thousand years. We’re the descendants of the warriors, buccaneers, pirates, explorers, and . . . well . . . Hunters of Europe. But in the past thousand years, the Farm­ers have taken over. They’ve taken over the schools so com­pletely that they even let out during the summer so the kids can help bring in the crops!

“So, you have two choices. One, you can learn to fake it dur­ing the school hours and behave like a Farmer. We can talk about how you can learn the skill-set to do that. Or, two, you can take these Farmer pills (Ritalin), which will make your brain work just like a Farmer’s brain for about four hours. Or you can do both until you have the Farmer behaviors down pat.”

In this context, my son was able to accept his ADHD with­out putting himself into the category of damaged goods (he made a T-shirt that says: “There’s nothing wrong with me — you just can’t keep up!”), yet was still willing to consider the entire range of “normal interventions” for what we call ADHD.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the self-talk and stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what our role is in the world. And the “broken brain” story about an ADHD diagnosis is, in my opinion, one of the worst things we can inflict on a still-developing child.

Share

Wrong or different?

One night in the midst of my research about six months after my son’s diagnosis, I was lying in bed reading. It was about two o’clock in the morning. I’m a light sleeper, and discovered long ago if I read something truly boring, it will put me to sleep. (I probably learned this in school.) So for years I’ve subscribed to Scientific American magazine. It’s much cheaper then sleeping pills.

The article was an analysis of the genome of wheat and rice; it mentioned that one of the reasons why it’s so impor­tant to understand when wheat and rice appeared in their modern forms is because they were pivotal to what we call the Agricultural Revolution, which was a turning point in the his­tory of the human race. About 7,000 to 12,000 years ago, some tribes began to engage in agriculture because it was so much more efficient at producing food than hunting and gathering. They had more children, they had more food, they had more children, they took more land, and they started displacing the hunter/gatherers until now they’re about 99% of the world’s population. The hunter/gatherers today constitute fewer than 200 million people while there are 6 billion agriculturalists.

As I was drifting off to sleep, I wondered what it would have been like to be alive during the time of my own ancestors from northern Europe ten thousand years ago, before agricul­ture. They were hunter/gatherers, and lived that way for tens of thousands of years before the appearance of agriculture.

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that a hunter going through the forest in search of his family’s dinner would have to be extremely vigilant — noticing everything around him and in his environment — or else he may miss the rabbit which is going to be his dinner, or the lion or bear which wants to make him its dinner. He’d have to be scanning his entire environ­ment, constantly, if he was to be both successful as a hunter and safe as a human being.

Like a flash, the thought came to me that this was a per­fect definition of what we call distractability when it presents as a behavior in public school.

But wait a minute, I thought — I learned that distractability was a pathology, and the proof of that is that when distractible kids are put in an even more boring environment, their distractability increases. But, I continued with the thought, what would a hunter have to do in the forest if he didn’t see anything to eat? He’d have to look harder, to scan more fully, to become even more vigilant.

Wow, I thought, that’s one of the three primary behaviors that make up ADHD. But what about the other two, impulsivity and stimulation seeking behavior?

A hunter chasing a rabbit through a forest or jungle don’t have time to make a well-thought-out decision if a larger animal, say a deer, were to appear on the trail. He can’t pull out a pad and pen and create two columns, one labeled bunny and the other deer, and write under the bunny column, “less meat but easier to catch” and under the deer column “more meat but harder to catch.”

Instead, he would have to make an instant decision. He’d have to be en­gaged in either ignoring or shifting to chase the deer within microseconds. (And such decision-making ability would be even more important if something were chasing him!) This behav­ior engaged before careful thought occurs is the dictionary defi­nition of impulsivity. It wouldn’t just be a useful behavior in a hunting world, it would be essential for survival.

Two out of three, I thought. But what about that stimula­tion seeking behavior?

Again, consider those hunters who wake up in the morning and say, “What sounds like fun to me today is to go out there in the natural world where there are things I want to eat and things that want to eat me, and use my skills and knowledge to find the former and avoid the latter.”

Those risk-takers would be the most likely to be successful hunters. On the other hand, the failing hunters would be the highly risk-averse ones, the people who say, “I think I’ll just stay here in my cave or tepee until all the lions or bears or snakes have gone away.” Such hunters would starve, because the predators never did go away.

Could it be, I thought, that ADHD was adaptive? That it was a collection of neurologically mediated behaviors that would make a person successful in a primitive hunting environment, but are not useful in a modern classroom? What were the ideal characteristics of a Hunter?

♦  They can totally throw themselves into the hunt; time is elastic. Another characteristic of a good Hunter is the ability to totally focus on the moment, utterly aban­doning all consideration of any other time or place. When the Hunter sees the prey he gives chase through gully or ravine, over fields or through trees, giving no thought to the events of the day before, not considering the fu­ture, simply living totally in that one pure moment and immersing himself in it. When involved in the hunt, time seems to speed; when not in the hunt, time be­comes slow. While a Hunter’s ability to concentrate in general may be low, his ability to utterly throw himself into the hunt at the moment is astonishing.

♦  They’re flexible, capable of changing strategy on a moment’s notice. If the wild boar vanishes into the brush and a rabbit appears, the Hunter is off in a new direction. Orderliness is not particularly important to a Hunter, but the ability to make a quick decision and then act on it is vital.

♦  They can throw an incredible burst of energy into the hunt, so much so that they often injure them­selves or exceed “normal” capabilities, without real­izing it until later. Not unlike that quintessential of all Hunters, the lion, they have incredible bursts of energy — but not necessarily a lot of staying power.

Given the choice of describing themselves as the tor­toise or the hare in Aesop’s famous fable, a Hunter would always say that he or she is the hare.

♦  They think visually. Hunters often describe their actions in terms of pictures, rather than words or feel­ings. They create outlines in their heads of where they’ve been and where they’re going. (Aristotle taught a memory method like this, with which a per­son would visualize rooms in a house, then objects in the rooms. When he gave a speech, he’d simply move from room to room in his memory, noticing the ob­jects therein, which were reminders of the next thing he had to talk about.) Hunters often aren’t much in­terested in abstractions, or else want to convert them to a visual form as quickly as possible. They tend to be lousy chess players, disdaining strategy because they prefer to go straight for the jugular.

♦  They love the hunt, but are easily bored by mun­dane tasks such as having to clean the fish, dress the meat, or fill out the paperwork. Donald Haughey, a former senior executive with Holiday Inns, tells the story of how Kemmons Wilson, the legendary founder of Holiday Inns, had a group of executives he called Bear Skinners. Wilson would go out into the world and shoot the bear (negotiate a new hotel site, bring in new financing, open a new division, etc.), and his Bear Skinners would take care of the details of “skin­ning and cleaning” the deal.

♦  They’ll face danger that “normal” individuals would avoid. A wounded boar, or elephant, or bear, can kill you — and many a Hunter has been killed by his would-be prey. If you extend this analogy to war­fare, where the Hunters are often the front line infan­try or the most aggressive officers, the same is true. Hunters take risks. Extending this metaphor, Patton was a Hunter.

♦ They’re hard on themselves and those around them. When your life depends on split-second decisions, your frustration and impatience threshold necessarily tend to be low. A fellow Hunter who doesn’t get out of the way of a shot, or a soldier who defies orders and smokes on a dark night showing the enemy your posi­tion, cannot be tolerated.

So, the question: where did ADHD come from? If you com­pare the list of classic ADHD symptoms, and the list of the char­acteristics of a good Hunter during humanity’s pre-agricultural period, you’ll see that they match almost perfectly.

In other words, an individual with the ADHD collec­tion of characteristics would make an extraordinarily good hunter. A failure to have any one of those characteristics might mean death in the forest, jungle, or the arctic tundra.

This story, I thought, could be the thing that would save my son from thinking he was “broken” or “disordered,” and also give him (and me) clues to techniques and strategies to succeed and even prosper with ADHD. But most important, it gives Hunter children and adults back their self-esteem.

What Is ADHD?

Consider these two messages — letters written to a young man from his parents. The first, when he was 16 years old in a boarding school, is from his mother:

“Your work is an insult to your intelligence.” she wrote. “If you would only trace out a plan of action for yourself and carry it out and be determined to do so, I’m sure you could accomplish anything you wish. But it is that thought­lessness of yours which is your greatest enemy.”

When he was 19, this young man graduated from the mili­tary academy at the bottom of his class with rumors flying around that he had cheated.

He had been bounced out of many schools, but his family had money and they were always able to get him back in. His father then wrote him the following:

“There are two ways of winning in an examination, one credible, the other the reverse. You have unfortunately chosen the latter method and appear to be much pleased with your success. The first extremely discreditable fea­ture of your performance was missing the infantry, for in that failure you demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly happy-go-lucky harem-scarum style of work for which you have always been distinguished at your differ­ent schools.

“With all the advantages you had, with all the abilities which you foolishly think yourself to possess and which some of your relations claim for you, with all the efforts that have been made to make your life easy and agree­able, and your work neither oppressive or distasteful, this is the grand result that you come up among the 2nd rate and 3rd rate class who are only good for commissions in a cavalry regiment.

“I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays and later months, you will be­come a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy and futile existence. When that happens, you will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes yourself.”

So wrote the parents of Winston Churchill.

Historically the way we’ve looked at people with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is similar to how Churchill’s parents apparently saw their son: they’re not motivated or trying hard enough, or they lack morality. There are, however, other ways to look at these people.

My first introduction to ADHD, then called ADD, came in 1978. I was Executive Director of a residential treatment facility for severely emotionally disturbed children in New Hampshire, the New England Salem Children’s Trust. Many kinds of chil­dren came through the program during the five years I ran it. Most of them had been labeled as having minimal brain damage, minimal brain dysfunction, hyperkinesis, or hyper­kinetic syndrome. Today we would label them “ADHD.”

As one means of treatment, we investigated the Feingold Diet, created by Ben Feingold, a pediatric allergist with Kaiser-Permanente in San Francisco. In 1977, he published a book called Why Your Child Is Hyperactive, and had been treating children with severe, unexplained skin rashes.

He discovered many of his young patients were allergic to specific food sub­stances, more often than not the food flavorings and colorings derived from coal tar known as salicylates. Aspirin belongs to the same family of compounds, and many of these children were also sensitive to aspirin.

Having found dozens of children with this sensitivity, Feingold developed a diet that was free of salicylates and put his young skin-rash patients on it. What happened next caught him by surprise, however: the families of these children reported that the kids, when they went on the diet, not only lost their skin rashes but also no longer exhibited hyperactive be­havior.

Feingold replicated this many times over the years, and finally concluded that if a food allergy was severe enough to cause the skin to erupt, it must also be strong enough to irri­tate the central nervous system.

Having proved this to his own satisfaction, and that of many of the other pediatricians and allergists with whom he worked, he took a next step which was largely a leap of logic and faith. If this food allergy was causing hyperactive behavior in his patients with skin disorders, might it not be possible that it was causing the same problem among those hyperactive chil­dren who didn’t have sensitive skin?

What he and subsequent researchers found out is that for a small but measurable subset of the population, this appears to be true. At the Salem Children’s Trust we did a study of the Feingold Diet with 39 children over a six-month period. For 38 children, the diet made no difference. But we had one child we could turn on and off like a light switch with salicylate. That one child also had severe psoriasis. I wrote up that incident and it was published in The Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry in 1980.

So I thought I understood ADD. I had supervised a study, had written it up for a journal. I thought I knew what ADD was. But apparently I didn’t.

In 1989, at the age of 12, our middle child “hit the wall” in school. Most parents of ADD children — or adults with ADD — know exactly what hitting the wall means. It’s where a child has been faking it their entire academic life, paying attention twenty percent of the time (more or less), and somehow managing to pull a rabbit out of the hat at exam time.

There are warning signs — extreme unevenness in their grades (they do spectacularly in those classes where they’ve bonded to the teacher, but poorly in those where they haven’t, regardless of how difficult the subject may be); last-minute work; constant reports of lost or missing papers and homework; a wounded expression crossing his face whenever the topic of school was brought up.

We were getting calls from his English teacher and his math teacher say­ing “You’re kid’s gonna flunk. You gotta do something.”

Frankly, the idea that he might have ADD hadn’t even oc­curred to me, although in my defense I would say first of all it had been a number of years since I’d been involved with it, and sec­ondly, all of these kids I had been working with at that point 10 years earlier were severely damaged children. So when I thought of ADD, I always thought of it in the context of severe pathology. It didn’t occur to me it might be what was going on with our son.

My wife Louise and I took him to a psychologist who special­ized in educational testing.

“Nuke him,” I said. “Give him every test you have. Rorschach, MMPI, IQ tests — everything. I want to know if he has some sort of problem or learning disability that we’ve completely overlooked. Even ask him about drug use and how life is in school — maybe there’s something going on that he’ll share with you but has been hiding from us.”

We left him with the fellow and went out to do a half-day’s errands. When we returned, the psychologist brought our son out and sat him down in an office with Louise and me on either side of him. He stood in front of us and spoke to our son.

“I can see from your tests, young man, that you’re very bright. In fact, you’re probably smarter than your IQ tests indicated, because the first thing these tests measure is a person’s ability to take a test. . . and the condition you have makes it hard for you to take tests.”

“Condition?” my son and I said at the same moment.

“Well, yes,” the man said. “You have a brain disorder called Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD.”

My son’s eyes boggled.

“And it’s probably hereditary,” the man added, causing me to sit up and take notice.

He then went on to tell us some stories about ADD. Some of his stories were useful, but one was very counter-productive.

“It’s a little like diabetes,” he explained. “Diabetes is a fancy medical word we use to describe ‘insulin deficiency disease.’ The insulin producing cells of the pancreas die off from an autoim­mune condition or infection, leaving the body without the abil­ity to produce insulin, which is a hormone necessary for life. Without the insulin people will die, so we use daily injections to supplement their body with insulin we take from animals’ pancreases.

“Similarly, young man,” he continued, “your brain has been damaged. We don’t know how or where or when or why, but it’s not working right, and so we’re going to need to supple­ment your neurotransmitter levels with Ritalin.”

I’m not opposed to the limited use of Ritalin. When it works, it works really well; sometimes it may be the best thing for a person. But I don’t think it’s the first thing a person should try.

However, at that moment in that chair, the scientist part of me was thinking, “Hold on, wait a minute. This doesn’t make sense. There isn’t an organ in the body that is squirting Ritalin into the bloodstream all day long. ADD is not a Ritalin deficiency disease. ”

Second, and perhaps most important to me, was the fact that this explanation was devoid of an essential element. Study after study has proven that if a person has one thing in large measure he or she will be more resilient, more capable of withstanding severe trauma, will heal faster, and will even live longer if they have a fatal disease. On the other hand, without this one essential element, people die faster, heal slower, and are at greater risk of falling apart when life hits them with major prob­lems.

That one essential thing is hope.

And the ADD-as-diabetes tale was a story without hope.

On the way home, my son asked, “What’s wrong with me?” I had to honestly answer that while I’d thought of myself as somewhat knowledgeable on all this stuff, I obviously didn’t know the answers. “But,” I promised him, “I intend to find out.”

The next six months were a whirlwind of research activity. I searched university FTP sites on the internet, bought every book I could find on ADD in the local bookstore, visited the Emory Medical School library to collect papers and articles on ADD, and called the psychologists, psychiatrists, and psycho­therapists I’d worked with in New Hampshire. I was collect­ing stacks and piles of paper on the topic, which gradually spread from my office to the living room to the bedroom. (Louise says I don’t have a filing system: I have a piling system.)

Basically everybody was saying what the psychologist had told my son. At its core, ADD is generally acknowledged to have three components: distractability, impulsivity, and risk-taking/ restlessness.

(If you throw in hyperactivity, you have ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder — which, until recently, was considered to be “true” ADD, but is now viewed as a sepa­rate condition. ADHD is the disorder that children were believed to grow out of sometime around adolescence, but it appears that most ADHD kids simply become adults with ADD as the hyper­activity of their youth sometimes diminishes.)

Somewhere between 6 and 20 million men, women, and children in the United States were believed to have ADD at that time. Millions more indi­viduals possess many ADD-type characteristics even though they may have learned to cope so well that they don’t think of themselves as people with attention-related problems.

ADD or ADHD is not an all-or-nothing diagnosis. There appears to be a curve of behaviors and personality types, ranging from extremely-non-ADD to extremely-ADD. Although there has not yet been enough research in the field to know the shape of this curve, it probably resembles a bell curve, with the majority of “normal” individuals falling some­where in the center, showing a few ADD-like characteristics, and a minor- ADD is not an all-or-nothing diagnosis, being split up on the two extreme ends of the spectrum.

Since a large body of research indicates that ADHD is a hereditary condition, the distribution of this curve may well reflect the intermixing over the years of the genetic material of ADHD and non-ADHD individuals, blurring the edges of both types of behaviors. Placed along the spectrum of ADHD indi­viduals you will find people who typically exhibit some or all of the following characteristics:

♦  Easily distracted. ADHD people are constantly moni­toring the scene; they notice everything that’s going on, and particularly notice changes or quickly chang­ing things in their environment. (This is the reason why, for example, it’s difficult to have a conversation with ADHD people when a television is on in the room; their attention will constantly wander back to the tele­vision and its rapidly-changing inputs.)

♦  Short, but extraordinarily intense, attention span. Oddly enough, this isn’t definable in terms of minutes or hours: some tasks will bore an ADHD person in thirty seconds, other projects may hold their rapt attention for hours, days, or even months. ADHD adults often have difficulty holding a job for an extended period of time, not because they’re incompetent but because they become “bored.” Similarly, ADHD adults of­ten report multiple marriages, or “extremely intense, but short” relationships. When tested for attention span on a boring, uninteresting task, ADHD people tend to score significantly lower than others.

♦  Disorganization, accompanied by snap decisions. ADHD children and adults are often chronically disorga­nized. Their rooms are a shambles, their desks are messy, their files are incoherent; their living or working areas look like a bomb went off. This is also a common charac­teristic of non-ADHD people, possibly related to upbring­ing or culture, but something usually separates messy ADHD folks from their non-ADHD counterparts: non-ADHD people can usually find what they need in their messes, while ADHD people typically can’t find anything. An ADHD person may be working on a project when something else distracts him, and he makes the snap decision to change priorities and jump into the new project — leaving be­hind the debris from the previous project. One ADD adult commented that “the great thing about being disorga­nized is that I’m constantly making exciting discoveries. Sometimes I’ll find things I didn’t even know I’d lost!”

♦  Distortions of time-sense. Most non-ADHD people de­scribe time as a fairly consistent and linear flow. ADHD individuals, on the other hand, have an exaggerated sense of urgency when they’re on a task, and an exaggerated sense of boredom when they feel they have nothing to do. This sense of boredom sometimes leads to the in­creased consumption of substances such as alcohol and drugs, which alter the perception of time, whereas the sense of fast-time when on a project often leads to chronic impatience. This elastic sense of time also causes many ADD adults to describe emotional highs and lows as hav­ing a profound impact on them. The lows, particularly, may seem as if they’ll last forever, whereas the highs are often perceived as flashing by.

♦ Difficulty following directions. This has tradition­ally been considered a subset of the ADHD person’s char­acteristic of not being able to focus on something they consider boring, meaningless, or unimportant. While receiving directions, conventional wisdom has it that ADHD people are often monitoring their environment as well, noticing other things, thinking of other things, and, in general, not paying attention. In other words, ADHD people frequently have difficulty following direc­tions, because the directions weren’t fully received and understood in the first place.

♦  Exhibit occasional symptoms of depression, or daydream more than others. ADHD individuals who are relatively self-aware about the issues of sugar and food metabolism often report that depression or tired­ness follows a meal or the consumption of sugary foods. This reaction may be related to differences in glucose (sugar) metabolism between ADHD and non-ADHD people.

Another possibility is that ADHD people are simply bored more often by the lack of challenges presented by our schools, jobs, and culture, and this boredom translates for some people into depression.

♦  Take risks. ADHD individuals seem to have strong swings of emotion and conviction, and make faster de­cisions than non-ADHD types. While this trait often leads to disaster, it also means that ADHD individuals are fre­quently the spark plugs of our society, the shakers and movers, the people who bring about revolution and change. ADHD expert Dr. Edna Copeland, in a 1992 At­lanta speech, referenced a study which indicates that about half of all entrepreneurs test out as being ADHD.

Evidence is strong that many of our Founding Fathers were also ADHD. If they hadn’t been, the United States of America might never have come into being. ADHD risk-takers may have predominated in the early Americas be­cause those were the people best suited to undertake the voyage to this continent and face the unknown.

♦  Easily frustrated and impatient. To “not suffer fools gladly” is a classic ADD characteristic. While oth­ers may beat around the bush, searching for diplomacy, an ADD individual is most often direct, to the point, and can’t understand how or why such bluntness might give offense. When things aren’t working out, “Do Something!” becomes the ADD person’s rallying cry — even if the something is sloppy or mistaken.

What the Experts Say

The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IVr) published by the American Psy­chiatric Association has substantially expanded its criteria for ADHD. If you are interested in the only “official” methods for diagnosing ADHD or ADD in children or adults, you can find the DSM-IVr at your local library or bookstore.

Most likely, if you were to look at the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for ADHD, you would see bits of yourself and others. While numerous books and therapists offer elabo­rate (and sometimes expensive) tests for ADHD/ADD, it’s im­portant to remember that, according to the American Psy­chiatric Association, the only true diagnostic standard is to “hit” on their specified criteria. While elaborate and time-consuming tests may be interesting, and may provide useful insights into other facets of personality, none is officially rec­ognized by the American Psychiatric Association, which is the final arbiter of these matters in the United States.

The Hallowell-Ratey Criteria

In 1992, psychiatrists Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey developed, through years of clinical practice, study, and obser­vation, their own set of criteria for spotting probable ADHD, particularly in adults. While this isn’t an “official” set of diag­nostic criteria, since its first appearance in their book Driven to Distraction it has become one of the more common stan­dards against which both lay people and clinicians measure the probability of a person having ADHD.

According to Hallowell and Ratey, ADHD may be present when we see a chronic disturbance in which at least twelve of the following criteria are present (quoted with the kind permission of the authors):

A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals (regardless of how much one has actually ac­complished). We put this symptom first because it is the most common reason an adult seeks help. “I just can’t get my act together” is the frequent refrain. The person may be highly accom­plished by objective standards, or may be floundering, stuck with a sense of being lost in a maze, unable to capitalize on innate potential.

Difficulty getting organized. Organization is a major problem for most adults with ADD. Without the structure of school, without parents around to get things organized for him or her, the adult may stagger under the organizational demand of everyday life. The sup­posed “little things” may mount up to create huge obstacles. For want of the proverbial nail — a missed appointment, a lost check, a forgotten deadline — their kingdom may be lost.

Chronic procrastination or trouble beginning a task. Often, due to their fears that they won’t do it right, they put it off, and off, which, of course, only adds to the anxi­ety around the task.

Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow-through. A corollary of #3. As one task is put off, another is taken up. By the end of the day, week, or year, countless projects have been undertaken, while few have found completion.

Tendency to say what comes to mind without nec­essarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark. Like the child with ADD in the classroom, the adult with ADD gets carried away in enthusiasm. An idea comes and it must be spoken; tact or guile yields to childlike exuberance.

A restive search for high stimulation. The adult with ADD is always on the lookout for some­thing novel, something engaging, something in the out­side world that can catch up with the whirlwind that’s rush­ing inside.

A tendency to be easily bored. A corollary of #6. Boredom surrounds the adult with ADD like a sinkhole, ever ready to drain off energy and leave the individual hungry for more stimulation. This can easily be misinterpreted as a lack of interest; actu­ally it is a relative inability to sustain interest over time. As much as the person cares, his battery pack runs low quickly.

Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, ten­dency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to hyperfocus at times. The hallmark symptom of ADD. The “tuning out” is quite involuntary. It happens when the person isn’t looking, so to speak, and the next thing you know, he or she isn’t there. An often extraordinary ability to hyperfocus is also usu­ally present, emphasizing the fact that this is a syndrome not of attention deficit but of attention inconsistency.

Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent. Not a symptom, but a trait deserving of mention. Adults with ADD often have unusually creative minds. In the midst of their disorganization and distractibility, they show flashes of brilliance. Capturing this “special something” is one of the goals of treatment.

Trouble in going through established channels, fol­lowing proper procedure. Contrary to how it often appears, this is not due to some unresolved problem with authority figures. Rather, it is a manifestation of boredom and frustration: boredom with routine ways of doing things and excitement around novel approaches, and frustration with being unable to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.

Impatient; low tolerance for frustration. Frustration of any sort reminds the adult with ADD of all the failures in the past. “Oh, no,” he thinks, “here we go again.” So he gets angry or withdraws. The impatience has to do with the need for stimulation and can lead others to think of the individual as immature or insatiable.

Impulsive. Either verbally or in action, as in impulsive spending of money, changing plans, enacting new schemes or career plans, and the like. This is one of the more dangerous of the adult symptoms, or, depending on the impulse, one of the more advantageous.

Tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about alternating with inattention to or disregard for actual dangers. Worry is what attention turns into when it isn’t focused on some task.

Sense of impending doom, insecurity, alternating with high-risk-taking. This symptom is related to both the tendency to worry needlessly and the tendency to be impulsive.

Mood swings, depression, especially when disen­gaged from a person or a project. Adults with ADD, more than children, are given to unstable moods. Much of this is due to their experience of frustra­tion and/or failure, while some of it is due to the biology of the disorder.

Restlessness. One usually does not see in an adult the full-blown hyper­activity one may see in a child. Instead one sees what looks like “nervous energy:” pacing, drumming of fingers, shift­ing position while sitting, leaving a table or room frequently, feeling edgy while at rest.

Tendency toward addictive behavior. The addiction may be to a substance such as alcohol or cocaine, or to an activity, such as gambling, or shopping, or eating, or overwork.

Chronic problems with self-esteem. These are the direct and unhappy result of years of condi­tioning: years of being told one is a klutz, a space-shot, an underachiever, lazy, weird, different, out of it, and the like. Years of frustration, failure, or of just not getting it right do lead to problems with self-esteem. What is impressive is how resilient most adults are, despite all setbacks.

Inaccurate self-observation. People with ADD are poor self-observers. They do not accu­rately gauge the impact they have on other people. This can often lead to big misunderstandings and deeply hurt feelings.

Family history of ADD or manic-depressive illness or depression or substance abuse or other disorders of impulse control or mood. Since ADD is genetically transmitted and related to the other conditions mentioned, it is not uncommon (but not necessary) to find such a family history.

In addition to requiring 12 out of 20 hits on this test, Drs. Hallowell and Ratey add that these characteristics must in­clude a childhood history of similar behaviors and not be ex­plainable by other medical or psychiatric conditions.

The DSM says a psychiatric diagnosis isn’t warranted un­less something’s wrong — unless there’s some significant im­pairment of a major life function. My friend and editor, Dave deBronkart, found that he meets the criteria for ADHD on the above tests. When he told an ADHD expert that he was quite successful in his life nonetheless, the unfortunate response was, “You probably have something wrong with you and don’t even know it.”

Conditions that May Mimic ADHD, and Vice Versa

Several conditions may mimic certain characteristics of ADD, causing an inaccurate diagnosis. These include:

♦  Anxiety disorders. ADHD may cause anxiety when people find themselves in school, life, or work situa­tions with which they cannot cope. ADHD differs from anxiety disorders in that latter disorder is usually epi­sodic, whereas ADHD is continual and lifelong. If anxi­ety comes and goes, it’s probably not ADHD.

♦  Depression. ADHD may also cause depression, and sometimes depression causes a high level of distractability that’s diagnosed as ADHD. Depression, however, is also usually episodic. When depressed patients are given Ritalin or other stimulant drugs, which seem to help with ADHD patients, depressed patients will often experience a short-term “high” followed by an even more severe rebound-depression.

♦  Manic-Depressive Illness. Manic-depression, or bi­polar disorder, is not often diagnosed as ADHD because the classic symptoms of manic-depressive illness are so severe. One day a person is renting a ballroom in a hotel to entertain all his friends; the next day he’s suicidal. Yet ADHD is often misdiagnosed as manic-depressive ill­ness. A visit to any adult ADHD support group usually produces several first-person stories of ADHD adults who were given lithium or some other inappropriate drug because their ADHD was misdiagnosed as manic-depres­sive illness.

♦  Seasonal Affective Disorder. This recently discov­ered condition appears to be related to a deficiency of sunlight exposure during the winter months and is most prevalent in northern latitudes. Seasonal affective dis­order (SAD) symptoms include depression, lethargy, and a lack of concentration during the winter months. It’s historically cyclical, predictable, and is currently treated by shining a certain spectrum and brightness of light on a person for a few minutes or hours at a particular time each day, tricking the body into thinking that the longer days of spring and summer have arrived. Sea­sonal affective disorder is sometimes misdiagnosed as ADHD, and vice versa, but seasonality is its hallmark trait.

Two additional conditions, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) should also be noted here, because there is nothing in the DSM-IV to exclude a diagnosis of ADD in these children.

Hopefully, this rather comprehensive roundup of ADD and ADHD, along with its history, is helpful to you. There are many articles here on HuntersInAFarmer’sWorld that speak to both diagnosing ADHD and finding ways through it with success. Next week I’ll look at several.

Share

Since ADHD is a collection of skills and predilections necessary for the success and survival of a good Hunter, we’re left with the question, “What about non-ADHD people?” Where did their skills evolve from, and why do they represent the majority of the people in our culture?

The answer lies with the second basic type of human cul­ture which primitive man produced: the agricultural society. In this sort of community, Farmers were the ones who pro­vided sustenance and survival, and the skills of a good Farmer are quite different from those of a good Hunter.

In an agricultural world, distractability would be devastat­ing. If today was the perfect day to put in the crops (farmers and gardeners know how critical the timing of spring planting is) and the farmer was distracted by a butterfly he went off chasing into the forest, or he procrastinated in planting the crops, it would spell trouble. Instead, a very focused mentality would be necessary — the ability to pay attention today to one and only one task: planting. Everything else would have to wait: multitasking is not an option.

Similarly, Farmers couldn’t make snap decisions. While the food cycle for a Hunter is 24 hours, it’s a full year for Farmers. The Farmers would need brains that were wired in such a way that they could see out into the future a full year and glimpse the consequences of their actions today. They’d have to be neurologically set up so that the idea of picking bugs off plants — bug after bug, plant after plant, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation — was something they considered fun. (Today, of course, we call these people tax accountants.)

You would have to have a different kind of brain wiring when it comes to the structure of time. In the hunter/gather­ing world the food cycle is one day. You get up, go out, find your food, eat it, go to sleep. A typical hunter/gatherer (and this is well documented in the anthropological data) works no more than two hours a day. The rest of the time they’d play, dance, talk, and hang out with the kids.

To go through a list parallel to those of a Hunter, we find that a good Farmer:

♦  Isn’t easily distracted by his or her environment. It may take three or four weeks to plant all the seed or rice shoots necessary for a complete crop, and the win­dow of good weather may be very limited. If the Farmer were to be distracted while planting, and wander off to investigate a noise in the forest, or spend days trying to figure out why one plant was slightly larger than another, the crop wouldn’t get planted — and he or she would starve.

♦  Farmers sustain a slow-and-steady effort for hours every day, days every week, weeks every month. While it could be argued that there are bursts of energy needed during harvest time, most Hunters would say that such bursts are nothing compared to chasing a deer fifteen miles through a forest. The Farmer’s bursts need to last all day, often for days or weeks at a time. Even in high gear, a Farmer’s efforts would be characterized as fast-and-steady.

♦  Farmers see the long-range picture, and stick to it. While subtle or limited experiments are useful for Farmers, to bet the entire crop on a new seed might lead to disaster. A Farmer isn’t looking five minutes ahead, or an hour ahead (like a Hunter), but must, instead, look years ahead. How will this crop affect the soil? What impact will it have on erosion? Will it be enough to sus­tain the family or village through the winter? Fve vis­ited terraced hillsides supporting rice paddies or olive trees built by long-sighted farmers in Israel, Greece, and China that are still farmed more than 3,000 years after they were constructed: Farmers have the long view.

♦  Farmers are not easily bored. They pace themselves when living, the same way they pace themselves when farming. During the summer when things are growing, or during the winter when not much can be done, Farm­ers find constructive tasks to occupy their time such as building furniture, chopping firewood, or weeding the garden. They don’t mind repetitive tasks or things that take a long time to accomplish because that’s the nature of farming. Given Aesop’s model, a Farmer would de­scribe him or herself as the tortoise who ultimately wins the race through slow and steady effort.

♦  Farmers are team players, and often very sensitive to others’ needs and feelings. Because Farmers often must live and work together, particularly in primitive farming communities, they must cooperate. Japanese society is perhaps the most exaggerated example of this, evolving from an almost purely agricultural base. They think in terms of abstract notions and feelings, considering the future and the good of the community, and are patient chess players. Teamwork is a powerful asset of a Farmer.

♦  Farmers attend to the details. A Farmer must make sure all the wheat is threshed, all the cows are milked completely, all the fields are planted, or he or she courts disaster for the entire community. If a cow isn’t milked completely it can become infected; a crop put into ground that’s too wet or too dry might rot or wither. Einstein’s “God is in the details” might be a favorite saying of a Farmer.

♦  Farmers are cautious. Farming doesn’t often de­mand that a person face short-term danger. Farmers learn, instead, to face the more long-term dangers. They’re often better planners than they are fighters.

♦  Farmers are patient with others. The patience that it takes to watch a plant grow for five months is easily translated into patience with a co-worker who wants to explain a problem or situation.

Hunters and Farmers.

A quick review of the Farmer’s characteristics (obviously simplified for purposes of explanation), and a comparison of them with the Hunter’s skills, shows that one could easily re-characterize ADHD and non-ADHD persons as Hunters and Farmers. Although most people don’t fit into such neat cat­egories, it’s still possible to see the archetypes demonstrated in people we all know.

Individuals who are almost pure Hunters are classi­fied as classic ADHD. Individuals who are almost pure Farm­ers are classified as slow, careful, methodical, and, some­times, boring. Since Farmer characteristics are less likely to be risky and dangerous (for reasons explained), these extremely non-ADHD people are not often classified by psy­chologists. They don’t get into trouble, and tend not to stand out in our society.

I am not suggesting that Hunters “evolved” from Farmers or vice-versa. Rather, both genetic skill sets have always been part of humanity. Those with Hunter genes have thrived in tribal hunter or “wild west” environments, whereas those with Farmer genes rose up to become competent bureaucrats, fac­tory workers, and farmers.

Accepting the idea that there’s probably a bell curve to these behaviors, though, we can posit a norm which incorpo­rates both Hunter and Farmer behaviors, with swings in both directions on either side of the center line.

Share

ADHD is about the differences among humans. We and our children have different hair, eyes, body sizes, and different preferences in a thousand areas. Some of us prefer high lev­els of stimulation, while others like a more quiet world. Some are attracted to novelty and variety, whereas others are most comfortable with the consistent and predictable.

In these and many other ways, we aggregate differences which sometimes collect in such a way that we put a label on them, such as ADHD.

In India there appears to be a very different view of ADHD than what is conventional in the United States. During the monsoon season of 1993, the week of the Hyderabad earth­quake, I took a 12-hour train ride halfway across the subconti­nent to visit an obscure town near the Bay of Bengal.

In the train compartment with me were two Indian businessmen and a physician, and we had plenty of time to talk as the country­side flew by from sunrise to sunset.

Curious about how they viewed ADHD, I said, “Are you fa­miliar with the personality type where people seem to crave stimulation but have a hard time staying with any one thing? They hop from career to career, and sometimes even from re­lationship to relationship, and never seem to settle down to one thing?”

“Ah, we know this type well,” one of the men said, the other two nodding in agreement.

“What do you call it?” I asked.

“Very holy,” he said. “These are old souls, near the end of their karmic cycle.” Again the other two nodded agreement, perhaps a bit more vigorously in response to my startled look.

“Old souls?” I said, thinking that a very odd description for what we call a disorder.

“Yes,” the physician said, taking his turn in the con­versation. “In our religion, we believe that the purpose of reincarnation is to eventually free oneself from worldly en­tanglement and desire. In each lifetime we experience cer­tain lessons, until finally we are free of this earth and can merge into the oneness of what you would call God. When a soul is very close to the end of those thousands of incar­nations, he must take a few lifetimes and do many, many things, to clean up the little threads left over from his pre­vious lifetimes.”

“This is a man very close to becoming enlightened,” the first businessman added. “We have great respect for such in­dividuals, although their lives may be difficult.”

The other businessman raised a finger and interjected: “But it is the difficulties of such lives that purify the soul.” The others nodded agreement.

“In America we consider this a psychiatric disorder,” I said. All three looked startled, then laughed.

“In America, you consider our most holy men, our yogis and swamis to be crazy people too; we have great respect for such individuals,” said the physician with a touch of sadness in his voice. “We live in different cultures, different worlds.”

Amen. And happy Thanksgiving! :)

Give a gift subscription

Share

By Peter Jaksa, Ph.D.

We are, without question, engaged in a debate over how to look at people, the world, and life. It’s a very old debate with occasional new twists. The battle lines are roughly drawn be­tween the empirical, hard-facts scientific approach on one hand, and a more humanistic, intuitive, even spiritual approach on the other hand.

This debate strikes home for people with at­tention deficit disorders because it is shaping the prevailing views and attitudes about the nature of ADD. Not so coinci­dentally, it is also shaping our views about the nature of people who happen to have ADHD.

If ADHD is a “pathology,” then are we by extension “patho­logical?” If ADHD is a “gift,” then should we simply celebrate our “giftedness?” Is ADHD an unfortunate biological condition that dooms people to a life of failure, underachievement, and misery? Is ADHD merely an artifact or excuse, manufactured to cover up the failures of poor parents and irresponsible adults?

Each of these views has been expressed by one or more sup­posed “experts” in the field. Who the heck is right?

These are not simple nor trivial questions, because how we come to view the nature of ADHD will have profound implications for how we perceive ourselves, our expectations and goals in life, even our children and other loved ones.

It should come as no big surprise that Thom Hartmann finds himself right in the middle of this debate. Ever since the introduction of his Hunter/Farmer metaphor for ADHD, Thom has inspired and provided hope for many thousands of people with ADHD who have read his books and listened to his talks.

He has also raised the blood pressure and attracted the criti­cism of those who disagree with him. More recently his views have been attacked by experts in the field who don’t consider his views to be “good science,” and basically seem to wish that Thom would just go away. For a number of reasons, I would argue that these criticisms are short sighted and unfair.

What we know for certain is that ADHD is a biological condi­tion. It tends to run strongly in certain families due to genetic influences. It affects people in a number of ways and in differ­ent areas of life.

This condition appears to be part of our bio­logical legacy as human beings that transcends culture, race, and continents. When we apply labels such as “gift” or “pathol­ogy” to it, that’s all we’re doing — making value judgments and applying labels.

These are open to perceptions, interpretations, and limits in understanding. Ah, but labels and perceptions can lift people up or crush them, help to heal them or cut them to the bone. Ask any child who’s been called “smart” or “dummy,” “gifted” or “disabled,” “healthy” or “sick.”

The empirical, research based model of ADHD is defined by the quality and quantity of symptoms and other behaviors that can be measured and identified. What is “real” from this view­point is what can be measured and quantified, and withstand the rigors of statistical analysis.

The well-meaning empiricists thus come to view ADHD traits and behaviors at the most observ­able, quantifiable level. Much of this research is conducted on clinical populations, meaning people with ADHD who are experi­encing the most problems in their lives and seeking help to manage them. Small wonder then that ADHD, viewed from this point of view, comes out as “pathology” and becomes defined essentially in terms of symptoms, problems, and impairment.

This type of research is useful in identifying some of the problems that can be caused by ADHD, but it by no means pro­vides a full or complete picture of what ADHD is or how it af­fects people. It identifies many problems that people can expe­rience, but ultimately misses the larger picture of the person behind them.

It paints a picture of ADHD as a condition that can cause difficulties in life, which at times can indeed cause impairment, but misses the many positive qualities that are also associated with this complex biological phenomenon.

By missing the positive qualities, unfortunately, it denies their very existence.

This can cause severe damage not only to basic truths and accuracy concerning ADHD, but more impor­tantly it can damage the images and perceptions that people with ADHD form about themselves. This view, if presented as the entire picture of what ADHD is about, can cause real harm to those it is most intended to help.

Talk to some true believers of the empirical, controlled stud­ies approach about the increased creativity, spontaneity, emo­tional warmth, and energy of many people with ADHD and they may look at you like you’re from another planet. Those posi­tive qualities or traits, after all, have not been empirically measured, have they? Of course not, and they may never be measured in that way.

It is foolish to conclude, however, that those positive traits are “not real” or “unproven.” There are many, many qualities which make us most intimately and uniquely human — love, religious faith, loyalty, a sense of hope, natural curiosity — that never have been and never can be measured or analyzed via objective empirical methods.

How preposterous it would sound for anyone to deny the existence of such uniquely human qualities. And yet, a nationally known and respected expert on ADHD, a decent and well meaning indi­vidual by all accounts, recently made the public statement that “it’s a myth that there’s anything good about ADHD.”

How pre­posterous indeed.

The immeasurable, valuable contribution of Thom Hartmann is that he strives mightily to put the “human” back into our views of human beings with ADHD. Thom “gets” what it means to be a person with ADHD, by looking beneath the surface and seeing beyond the problems.

Many adults with ADHD, in particular, intuitively understand what he is talking about and can strongly identify with Thom’s message. He de­scribes their reality in a way that no research study or clini­cal model of ADHD can hope to define it.

In so doing Thom helps to provide some counterbalance to the predominantly “bad news,” problem-oriented, so-called pathology model of ADHD. He helps provide validation, and increased hope, for people who are too often told that they’re not as good and their future is not as hopeful.

For these reasons we owe Thom Hartmann our thanks and gratitude for his role as a writer, speaker, and advocate for people with ADHD. Thom is also an exceedingly creative thinker (a con­sequence no doubt of his lively and active ADHD mind), and has shown a penchant for ideas and solutions that sometimes stray far off the beaten path.

Whether or not any given person agrees with everything Thom has to say, he deserves our attention for the scope and breadth of his ideas. This is how awareness grows, and how invention and innovation occur.

Peter Jaksa, Ph.D.

Share

It’s true that labels are often useful, and there are very good reasons why we use them, both as individuals and as a society. At other times they can be insidious and destructive. It’s im­portant that we first have an overview, a broad look at what labels are, how they come to be applied, and the impact they can have.

For example, I have a friend, who prefers to remain anony­mous so I’ll call him Bill, who has a hereditary brain differ­ence from normal people. He first learned about this when he was a very young child.

Bill’s about a decade older than me, in his eighties now, and lives in retirement with his brain abnormality. There is no drug for his condition, and although numerous types of drugs, brain surgery and electroshock treatments have been tried on others over the years to correct his type of abnormal­ity, none has ever worked.

Many thousands of people were left dead or mental vegetables as a result of such experiments over the past thirty centuries. If you were to perform a PET, SPECT, or MRI scan on Bill’s brain, you would find that it is organized and wired differently than my brain or that of the vast major­ity of humanity. Odds are his brain is different from yours.

This difference is not only obvious on a medical scan, it’s also obvious to anybody who spends ten minutes with Bill and observes his behavior.

Bill’s brain abnormality was apparent to his teachers when he was a child. Recognizing his brain abnormality as some­thing which would cause Bill problems in later life, his teach­ers did their best to try to get him to rewire his brain, or at least to perform as if he didn’t have this brain difference.

“They really had my best interests at heart,” he told me. “They knew that the whole world is set up for people like you and not people like me, and even though it seemed to me at the time that they were brutalizing me and singling me out and ridiculing me for my difference, I know now that they were just trying to help me fit in and be a bit more normal. It was very painful as a child, however, to be identified as being so different just be­cause I was left-handed.”

Bill is lucky that he was born in the twentieth century.

Five hundred years ago, if he’d allowed people to learn of his difference, the leaders of the Catholic Church or any of sev­eral countries they controlled the governments of could have declared him an apostate, heretic, demon, agent of Satan, devil, or witch, and he could have been put to death. At the very least, he may have been subjected to torture or exorcism, and ostracized from both the church and the professions.

People of that era and before who shared Bill’s brain abnormality often went to great lengths to hide from everybody but their par­ents the fact of their difference, and there are records of par­ents and physicians in medieval Europe who put young chil­dren to death when it was determined that they were left-handed.

As it was, the worst thing that happened to Bill was that in the first few years of school his teachers tied his left arm to his body so he couldn’t use it. In later years, when he’d reach for things with his left hand, the nuns who were the teachers in the school he attended would painfully slap his hand with a yardstick or ruler, or shout across the room at him, startling and humiliating him enough to quickly switch to his right hand.

“Being left handed is no longer a crime or a sign of de­monic possession,” Bill told me a few years ago. “It’s not even any longer assumed that it means you’re gay. Now it’s just a major inconvenience. I suppose I should be grateful for that.”

Grateful, indeed.

Where the Wounding Occurs

Most people who grew up with ADHD and count themselves among the walking wounded will tell you that their wounds came not from the ADHD itself (unlike the tormented paranoid schizophrenic or the chronic depressive), but instead, like the left-handed person, from the response of the world around them to their ADHD.

Only other people with ADD understand them and the way they think and live their lives. Their disorganiza­tion or messiness or distractability is seen by their boss or spouse or teachers as enemy behaviors, symptoms of moral or mental weakness or sloth. Their craving for new experience and excitement is seen as an inability to make a commitment, a fail­ure of will, an emotional weakness, or an unreliability in a world dependent upon the predictable and reliable to work properly.

The wounding of most children with ADHD happens, then, not from within, but from without. It’s the world around them which inflicts its judgements and criticisms, just as it once did to left-handed people, and when those judgements include words like “bad, lazy, stupid, crazy, dysfunctional, defective, or disordered” then the wounding can cut very, very deep.

In this regard, even the labeling of a person with the term “Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder” is a form of wounding. It’s an instant stigma.

Few could imagine it being a pleasant experience to stand up among friends and peers to say, “I am the per­son here with a deficit,” or, “I’m the disordered one among this group.”

Even if there hasn’t been a formal diagnosis, the child with what we now call ADHD probably knows he or she is different from “normal” people: it’s been a darkly kept secret in the lives of many ADHD adults.

As is true of many people who are visible in this field, I’ve had many friends and relatives call up after reading my or others’ books to say, “I always thought I was the only one like this in the world; I always hid it as much as I could.” And many choose to continue to hide it.

My goal with this Hunter in a Farmer’s World website is to help those folks to realize they’re not necessarily “disordered” but, rather, merely different. And that there can be considerable benefits to that difference.

Pass it along…

Share

If you look through the index of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often referred to as the DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association, you will not find the word “normal” listed. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise: the DSM is about psychiatric abnormalities, and the business of the psychiatric and psychological industries is to assist persons with problems.

However, it does point up one overarching reality that extends well beyond just the field of psychiatry: we have a culture which has become obsessed with illness while it often ignores or overlooks wellness.

This has lead to the labeling of many relatively “normal” parts of the human condition as pathologies. In the modern recovery movement, people are often encouraged not to become stronger or resilient but instead to wallow in their weaknesses and to search for villains at which to point the finger of blame. These villains range from parents, to environmental poisons, to “brain abnormalities” such as ADHD.

For many this is merely an easy out, a technique for shifting away personal responsibility. However, the idea that such “weaknesses” or “damage” will automatically cause us to fail is, in fact, not at all consistent with reality.

For example, studies of “at risk” children done over the past 50 years (the most famous one being a study done in Hawaii) show that children from abusive, alcoholic, “broken” and poverty-struck homes are far more likely to grow up as healthy, well-adjusted adults than they are to grow up mentally ill, neurotic, or “damaged.” While many are fragile, many are also highly resilient, often more-so than their peers who grew up in “normal” homes.

How could this be?

Two pioneers in this field, Drs. Stephen and Sybil Wolin, in their book The Resilient Self, posit what they call the “Challenge Model” of childhood development as the answer.

In this view of human development, children use adversity as a tool to develop their own inner strengths and resiliences. While they often emerge into adulthood with scars (virtually everybody does), they also come through this difficult process of growing up with powerful strategies for dealing with adversity. In fact, these children are often far more successful and adaptive as adults than are the children of “normal” families.

Unfortunately, the Challenge Model is not known to most people, whereas the idea that people are damaged irreparably by their negative childhood experiences has so thoroughly infiltrated our popular media and the public’s notions of psychology that it’s considered an irrefutable truth.

This glorification of frailty has led us to both trivialize serious mental illnesses, and to view substantial parts of the what was once called “human nature” as neatly organized little disease categories. Wendy Kaminer in her book “I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional,” points this out with excruciating insight.

She shows how an advertising-hungry media and a run-amok victimness movement have shifted our view from an appropriate analysis of human differences into a hysterical search for our own particular mental illnesses, weaknesses, or category of victim status.

The upshot of this is the explosion of fads, books, and recovery groups, along with the apparent desire of just about every good citizen to figure out which particular mental illness they are suffering from.

“You Americans astound me,” Dr. Oswain Gierth of Germany told me a few years ago. “You spend so much time looking at and for behaviors and conditions that you can create labels and treatments for. Much of what you call ADHD over there, here in Germany we would just call part of the spectrum of human behavior.”

It’s reached the point where when I speak at ADHD support groups, the majority of people who want to talk with me after my speech are anxious to proclaim their own ADHD, as if it were a badge of honor to have a DSM-certified mental-illness label. While I’m proud that I’m a “Hunter” at heart, I would be reluctant to brag to anybody that I have a mental illness or “disorder.”

Much of this is fueled by the flood of books, magazine articles, and TV talk-shows which wallow and revel in emotional and mental pain, illness, and victimhood. Rarely do such media ever portray the wonders of resilience, or mention that over 70% of the children of severe alcoholics grow up with no alcohol problem (although they are more at risk), or tell us that the majority of people who suffered severe abuse as children are quite functional as adults, thank you very much.

By buying into the notion that a person is “damaged goods” because he or she had a painful childhood or is neurologically off the norm, we disempower that individual. We imply to them that they’ll never be successful without our (often expensive) help, that they’re lacking in inner resources, and that they’re fundamentally flawed. This can cause a person to become locked into a lifelong cycle of victimness which, while obsessing on their weaknesses, never gives them an opportunity to develop or use their own internal strengths.

And yet, research shows clearly that it’s often these very life-pains and neurological differences themselves which can be a source of strength when reframed and viewed in a positive light.

An article in The Journal of Learning Disabilities sought to identify those patterns of behavior or thought which had helped adults with learning disabilities to be successes instead of failures. The single most important variable, they found, was the degree to which the people viewed their disabilities in a positive light, rather than in a negative way. Those people who saw themselves as damaged goods were measurably less likely to be successful than equally “disabled” adults who instead viewed their differences as unique creativities or eccentricities.

Similarly, in the Hawaii studies, it was found that those children who viewed their abusers or painful life situations as adversities to overcome were most likely to be resilient and emotionally strong as adults. They often grew up successful and highly functional, in sharp contrast to their equally-abused or poverty-stricken peers who passively surrendered themselves to the situation and then, as adults, failed and blamed their failures on their past, on others, or on themselves.

Unfortunately, the majority of our media and spokespeople for the “helping professions” rarely encourage people to view their adversities and challenges in a positive light. Instead, there’s a stampede on to join the victim-of-the-month club.

In this frantic search for victimness, the ADHD label is a convenient one for many people. In many cases this is because whatever it is that we call ADHD really is a problem. But in many other cases, it’s the search for a scapegoat, an excuse, or even a reason to identify with a group to gain social acceptance. In some circles it’s now as “in” to have ADHD as it was to have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome thirty years ago.

And so, myth or not, seriously afflicted or not, many people are pinning the badge of ADHD upon themselves and their children, swept up in the tide of this latest darling of pop psychology. Unfortunately, instead of looking for possible ways to work through or around ADHD, many in the recovery movement (which the ADHD support movement has sometimes morphed into) focus entirely on “brain abnormalities,” “co-morbidities,” and the latest medication.

Solutions

There are potential dangers for people with ADHD in the recovery movement that’s sprung up around this label. Most in it are well-intentioned, honest, and very helpful people: many lives are being improved and people saved from failure and disaster.

But there are also shameless self-promoters with over¬priced books and videotapes, or who organize “support groups” only to exercise personal power over others, or label others as sick only because they can then sell them a palliative (some even involving exposures to radiation or experimental drugs, in a fashion painfully reminiscent of the radium treatments children were routinely given in the 1950’s which led to an explosion of thyroid and other cancers in later life).

And so the ADHD movement grows, more are swept into it, and pretty soon the backlash comes with people calling ADHD a myth, a made-up category, and a non-disease.

Of course the backlash folks are as wrong as are the “half the population has ADHD” promoters. The reasonable middle-ground is that there is such a thing—or things—as ADD/ADHD, but that much of the hysteria and hype surrounding it is misplaced or in-place only to serve special interests.

We must seek a rational middle ground, acknowledge and nurture the often-considerable strengths to be found in ADHD “Hunter” individuals, and help them bring these out and develop them as life skills. And we must be very careful of the fad-of-the-month syndrome, and those who would offer instant remedies or “for your own good” hand-holding.

Share

One aspect of the way ADHD plays out in a cultural context could be set in the framework of the need to reduce uncertainty in life, referenced by various psychological theorists from Adler to Jung.

For those Hunters with a highly-variable sense of time, reducing uncertainty in the environment takes the form of acting now, responding immediately to each change in the environment. For those without ADHD, however, who experience a linear sense of persisting time, reducing uncertainty takes the form of trying to stabilize things. Those people will, as surely as the tide, eventually try to get rid of or marginalize people who like to change things.

Thus, because Hunter-like people are so often the agents of change, once the change they created is adopted by the “stables” (Farmers), this latter group will — as any examination of history shows — isolate them, kill them off, eccentricate them or exile them. Britain did this with those individuals they sent to America and Australia centuries ago, and today we do this socially, often ghettoizing ADHD children in public schools.

This gives us another insight into a possibly adaptive role for ADHD in our modern society.

Certainly, most of modern culture is set up to reward Farmer¬like behavior. Our schools are based on an agricultural model, still letting out for the summer, because in times past children were needed to help bring in the crops. Stability is cherished and job-hopping and other forms of social instability are viewed as alarm flags to prospective employers or spouses.

The industrial revolution, much like the agricultural revolution, further extended the culture-shift that caused ADHD to suddenly fall “outside the template,” by introducing mechanization using repetitive (farming) techniques. This helps explain why the “factory” model of modern schools so often is anathema to ADHD children, and why experience-based school environments are so useful for ADHD kids.

At first glance, it would seem that being a Farmer in today’s society would be very desirable. The checkbook gets balanced, the grass is mowed regularly, and every day the bolt gets put on the screw at the factory, day in and day out.

But it’s often the Hunters who are the instruments of social change and leadership. Societies without Hunters among them often require cataclysmic events to stimulate change.

Japanese society, for example, which had been agricultural for thousands of years, was essentially stagnant until Admiral Perry parked his Black Ships off the coast and threatened war if the Japanese wouldn’t let him trade with them.

That signaled the end of a major era in Japanese society. The virtual destruction of Japan during World War II brought about the second great change in their society. It’s interesting to note that in the Japanese language there’s no word that cleanly translates into “leadership.” Rīdāshippu, shidōryoku, and tōsotsuryoku all describe a more collaborative, consensus-driven form of authority than is typically suggested in American culture.

The notion of standing apart from the crowd, going your own way, and challenging existing institutions is — or at least was until the past half-century — largely alien to Japanese culture. And so we see that virtually all the major changes in that very Farmer-like society were brought about by the invading barbarians (an archaic translation of the Japanese word gaijin, which also means foreigner), and happened from without, rather than from within.

This cultural preference for stability rather than change has become less central to Japanese society in the years since WWII, but still produces a contrast to American culture, which arguably embraces change more vigorously than any other society on Earth.

Thus, the leader in innovation in the world is the United States. We invented the transistor, although the careful and methodical Japanese refined it. The same applies to radio, television, VCRs, plastics, and on and on. We even invented a form of government now duplicated all around the world.

And who were we here in America during our early years, so innovative as to create an entirely new form of government and numerous inventions? We were the Hunters: the misfits of European society (and the expelled criminals of British society) daring and brave and crazy enough to undertake the crossing from that continent to America to conquer a new land.

Society needs its Hunters, no matter how much it tries to suppress them in its institutions and schools. ADHD Hunters like Edison and Franklin were responsible for massive social, cultural, and technological change, and even today we find a disproportionate number of high-stimulation-seeking persons among the creative ranks, in every discipline from the arts to politics to the sciences.

For example, Wilson Harrell, former publisher of Inc. Magazine, former CEO of the Formula 409 Corporation, and author of the book For Entrepreneurs Only was one of America’s most famous entrepreneurs. He taught companies a new management technique called Total Quality Entrepreneurship, and was a frequent speaker around the world on entrepreneurial issues. After reading the first draft of my book, Focus Your Energy, he wrote:

“For generations, we entrepreneurs have been asking ourselves: ‘Was I born this way, or was it the circumstances of my childhood that led me to the entrepreneurial life? Was it destiny or accident?’...

“[Now we know that] entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs be¬cause, down through the eons of time, we have inherited the Hunter genes of our ancestors....

“Until I read Thom’s books, I believed that entrepreneurship was inspired by an insatiable desire for freedom. It’s so wonderful to know that it’s more, much more. That we are born. That we are genetically bound together. That we can and will pass these incredible genes on to our children and their children’s children. That, in spite of politicians and Farmer bureaucracies, the entrepreneurial spirit will live on.”

Wilson Harrell views ADHD as a net positive, in that it sparks the entrepreneurialism which has made our nation great.

So yet another possible reason for why we have ADHD is that it keeps society changing. Without their Hunters, our modern Farmer’s societies would become stagnant and technologically primitive.

Wilson Harrell made significant accomplishments in his efforts to help entrepreneurs understand their own ADHD-like nature, and to work with the strengths associated with it while avoiding or overcoming the weaknesses. His book For Entrepreneurs Only is a great example of this.

Until we have a cultural paradigm shift, however, we’ll continue to often label these types of people as disordered when they’re really often only different. These differences can keep our society alive, vital, and at the front of progress throughout the world.

Share

The National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) have shown that the brains of people with ADHD have a different type of glucose metabolism, or at least a different rate of blood flow, from those without ADHD. This validates the neurological/physiological basis of ADHD, but doesn’t explain what it is, how it works, or where it came from. Similarly, researchers at the University of Chicago believe they’ve come close to isolating the gene responsible for ADHD, but they can’t say exactly how that gene affects the brain, or how or why it came to be part of our genetic makeup.

Theories abound positing neurotransmitter imbalances, frontal lobe abnormalities, blood-flow differences, and even the influence of excessive television viewing as a contributor to ADHD, but, at this moment, nobody knows for sure exactly what ADHD is or the mechanism by which it works.

At its core, ADD is generally acknowledged to have three components: distractibility, impulsivity, and risk-taking/restlessness. If you throw in hyperactivity, you have ADHD-Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder—which, until recently, was considered to be “true” ADD, but now is viewed as a separate condition. ADHD is the disorder that children were believed to grow out of sometime around adolescence, but it appears that most ADHD kids simply become adults with ADD, as the hyperactivity of their youth sometimes diminishes, or adults with ADHD into old age (like me!).

So, let’s look at these characteristics and see if they give us any clues as to what ADHD is and where it came from.

Distractability

Distractability is often mischaracterized as the inability of a child or adult to pay attention to a specific thing. Yet people with ADHD can pay attention, even for long periods of time (it’s called “hyperfocusing”), but only to something that excites or interests them. It’s a cliche—but true—that “there is no ADHD in front of a good video game.”

ADHD experts often noted it’s not that ADHDers can’t pay attention to anything, it’s that they pay attention to everything.

A better way to characterize the distractability of ADHD is to describe it as scanning. In a classroom, the child with ADHD is the one who notices the janitor mowing the lawn outside the window, when he should be focusing on the teacher’s lecture on long division. Likewise, the bug crawling across the ceiling, or the class bully preparing to throw a spitball, are infinitely more fascinating than the teacher’s analysis of Columbus’ place in history.

While this constant scanning of the environment is a liability in a classroom setting, it may have been a survival skill for our prehistoric ancestors.

A primitive hunter who didn’t find that he easily and normally fell into a mental state of constant scanning would be at a huge disadvantage. That flash of motion on the periphery of his vision might be either the rabbit that he needed for lunch, or the tiger or bear hoping to make lunch of him. If he were to focus too heavily on the trail, for example, and therefore miss the other details of his environment, he would either starve or be eaten.

On the other hand, when the agricultural revolution began 12,000 years ago, this scanning turned into a liability for those people whose societies changed from hunting to farming. If the day came when the moon was right, the soil was the perfect moisture, and the crops due to be planted, a farmer couldn’t waste his day wandering off into the forest to check out something unusual he’d noticed. He must keep his attention focused on the task at hand, and not be distracted from it.

Impulsivity

The characteristic of impulsivity has two core manifestations among modern people with ADHD. The first is impulsive behavior: the proverbial acting-without-thinking-things-through. Often this takes the form of interrupting others or blurting things out in conversation. Other times it’s reflected in snap judgments or quick decisions.

A prehistoric hunter would describe impulsivity as an asset because it provided him with the ability to act on instant decisions, as well as the willingness to explore new and untested areas. If he were chasing a rabbit through the forest with his spear, and a deer ran by, he wouldn’t have time to stop and calculate a risk/benefit analysis. He must make an instant decision about which animal to pursue, then act on that decision without a second thought.

Thomas Edison eloquently described how his combined distractability and impulsiveness helped him in his “hunt” for world-transforming inventions. He said, “Look, I start here with the intention of going there” (drawing an imaginary line) “in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I have arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon and it leads me off in another direction, to something totally unexpected.”

The second aspect of impulsivity is impatience. For a primitive farmer, however, impatience and impulsivity would be a disaster. If he were to go out into the field and dig up the seeds every day to see if they were growing, the crops would die. (The contemporary manifestation of this is the person who can’t leave the oven door shut, but has to keep opening it to check how the food’s doing, to the detriment of many a souffle.)

A very patient approach, all the way down to the process of picking bugs off plants for hours each day, day after day, would have to be hard-wired into the brain of a farmer. The word “boring” couldn’t be in his vocabulary. His brain would have to be built in such a way that it tolerated, or even enjoyed, sticking with something until it was finished.

Restlessness

Risk-taking, or, as described in their book, Driven to Distraction, by Drs. Hallowell and Ratey, “a restive search for high stimulation,” is perhaps the most destructive of the behaviors associated with ADHD in contemporary society. It probably accounts for the high percentage of people with ADHD among the prison populations, and plays a role in a wide variety of social problems, from the risky driving of a teenager to the infidelity or job-hopping of an adult.

Yet for a primitive hunter, risk and high-stimulation were a necessary part of daily life. If hunters were risk-or adrenaline-averse, they’d never go into the wilds to hunt. For a hunter, the idea of daily risking one’s life would have to feel “normal.” In fact, the urge to experience risk, the desire for that adrenaline high, would be necessary among the members of a hunting society, because it would propel their members out into the forest or jungle in search of stimulation and dinner.

If a farmer were a risk-taker, however, the results could lead to starvation. Because decisions made by farmers have such long-ranging consequences, their brains must be wired to avoid risks and to carefully determine the most risk-free way of doing anything. If a farmer were to decide to take a chance and plant a new and different crop—ragweed, for example, instead of the wheat that grew so well the previous year—it could lead to tragic dietary problems or even starvation for the tribe or family.

That genetic predispositions to behavior can be leftover survival strategies from prehistoric times is a theme most recently echoed in a recent Time magazine cover story on the brain. It pointed out that the craving for fat among some people in parts of the world that experience periodic famine would ensure the survival of those who were able to store large quantities of this nutrient under their skin. “But the same tendencies cause mass heart failure when expressed in a fast-food world,” the authors point out.

Even the genetic inclination to alcoholism may have positive prehistoric roots, according to evolutionists Randolph Nesse and George Williams in their book Why We Get Sick. The persistence of an alcoholic in the face of social, familial, and biological resistance and disaster, they say, reflects an evolutionary tenacity to go after neurochemical rewards despite obstacles. This tenacity may in some way be responsible for the continued growth, survival, and evolution of our species.

So the agricultural revolution highlighted two very different types of human societies: farmers and hunter/gatherers. They lived different lives, in different places.

Those persons in farming societies with the ADHD gene were probably culled out of the gene pool by natural selection, or they became warriors for their society, now hunting other humans as various tribes came into conflict. In some societies, evolving into the countries of Japan and India, this was even institutionalized into a caste system. History is replete with anecdotes about the unique personalities of the warrior castes such as the Kshatriya in India and the Samurai in Japan.

Where Have All the Hunters Gone?

If we accept for a moment the possibility that the gene that causes ADHD was useful in another time and place but has become a liability in our modern, agriculture-derived industrial society, then the question arises: why isn’t there more of it?

How did we reach a point in human evolution where the farmers so massively outnumber the hunters? If the “hunting gene” was useful for the survival of people, why have hunting societies largely died out around the world? Why is ADHD only seen among 3 to 20 percent of the population (depending on how you measure it and whose numbers you use), instead of 50 percent or some other number?

Recent research from several sources shows how hunting societies are always wiped out by farming societies over time. Fewer than 10 percent of hunting society members will normally survive when their culture collides with an agricultural society. And it has nothing to do with the hunter’s “attention deficits,” or with any inherent superiority of the farmers.

In one study reported in Discover magazine, the authors traced the root languages of the peoples living across central Africa. They found that at one time the area was dominated by hunter-gatherers: the Khoisans and the Pygmies. But over a period of several thousand years, virtually all of the Khoisans and Pygmies (the “Hottentots” and the “Bushmen” as they’ve been referred to in Western literature) were wiped out and replaced by Bantu-speaking farmers. Two entire groups of people were destroyed, rendering them nearly extinct, while the Bantu-speaking farmers flooded across the continent, dominating central Africa.

The reasons for this startling transformation are several.

First, agriculture is more efficient at generating calories than hunting. Because the same amount of land can support up to ten times more people when farming rather than hunting/gathering, farming societies generally have roughly ten times the population density of hunting societies. In war, numbers are always an advantage, particularly in these ratios. Few armies in history have survived an onslaught by another army ten times larger.

Second, diseases such as chicken pox, influenza, and measles, which have virtually wiped out vulnerable populations (such as native North and South Americans who died by the millions when exposed to the diseases of the invading Europeans), began as diseases of domesticated animals. The farmers who were regularly exposed to such diseases developed relative immunities. While they would become ill, these germs usually wouldn’t kill them.

Those with no prior exposure and thus no immunity, however, would often die. So when farmers encountered hunters, they were killed off just by exposure to the Farmer’s diseases.

And finally, agriculture provides physical stability to a culture. The tribe stays in one spot while their population grows. This provides them with time to specialize in individual jobs: some people become tool-and weapon-makers, others build devices which can be used in war, and others create governments, armies, and kingdoms. This gives farmers a huge technological advantage over hunting societies, which are generally more focused on day- to-day survival issues.

So now we have an answer to the question: “Where have all the hunters gone?”

Most were killed off, from Europe to Asia, from Africa to the Americas. Those who survived were brought into farming cultures either through assimilation, kidnapping, or cultural change, and provide the genetic material that appears in that small percentage of people with ADHD.

Further evidence of the anthropological basis of ADHD is seen among the modern survivors of ancient hunting societies.

Indigenous Hunters Today

Cultural anthropologist Jay Fikes, Ph.D., points out that members of traditional Native American hunting tribes behave, as a norm, differently from those who have traditionally been farmers.

The farmers, such as the Hopi and other Pueblo Indian tribes, are relatively sedate and risk-averse, he says, whereas the hunters, such as the Navajo, are “constantly scanning their environment and more immediately sensitive to nuances. They’re also the ultimate risk-takers. They and the Apaches were great raiders and warriors.”

A physician who recently read my first book, and concluded that he saw proof of the Hunter/Farmer concept in his work with some of the Native Americans in Southwest Arizona, dropped me the following unsolicited note over the Internet:

“Many of these descendants of the Athabaskan Indians of Western Canada have never chosen to adapt to farming. They had no written language until an Anglo minister, fairly recently, wrote down their language for the first time. They talk ‘heart to heart,’ and there is little ‘clutter’ between you and them when you are communicating. They hear and consider everything you say. They are scanning all the time, both visually and auditorially. Time has no special meaning unless it is absolutely necessary (that’s something we Anglos have imposed on them). They don’t use small talk, but get right to the point, and have a deep understanding of people and the spiritual. And their history shows that they have a love of risk-taking.”

Will Krynen, M.D., noted the same differences when he worked for the Canadian government as the physician for several native North American tribes, and during the years he worked for the Red Cross as a physician in Southeast Asia. After reading my first book, he wrote:

“I’ve worked among indigenous hunting societies in many parts of the world, from Asia to the Americas. Over and over again I see among their adults and children that constellation of behaviors we call ADHD. In those societies, however, these behaviors are highly adaptive and actually contribute to the societies’ success.

“Among the members of the tribes of northern Canada, such as the caribou hunters of the McKenzie Basin, these adaptive characteristics—constantly scanning their environment, quick decision-making (impulsiveness), and a willingness to take risks— contribute every year to the tribe’s survival.

“These same behaviors, however, often make it difficult for tribal children to succeed in western schools when we try to impose our western curriculum on them.”

But what sent humankind onto the radical social departure from hunting to farming? Few other animals, with the exception of highly organized insects such as ants, have developed a society that is based on anything that approaches agriculture.

In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski points out that 20,000 years ago every human on earth was a hunter and forager. The most advanced hunting societies had started following wild herd animals, as is still done by modern Laplanders. This had been the basis of human and pre-human society and lifestyle for several million years.

Until 1995, the earliest hard evidence of human activity (and hunting activity at that) came from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Africa, with fragments of stone tools and weapons that dated back 2.5 million years. More recently, University of Southern California anthropologist Craig Stanford is quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying that recent research he conducted in Africa indicates that early hominids may have been tribally hunting as early as 6 million years ago.

So for 6 million years we and our ancestors were hunters, and suddenly, in a tiny moment of time (10,000 years is to 6 million as less than 3 minutes is to a 24-hour day) the entire human race veered in a totally new direction.

The Agricultural Revolution

The reason for the change, according to Bronowski and many anthropologists, probably has to do with the end of the last ice age, which roughly corresponds to the beginning of the agricultural revolution. (Bronowski and most authorities place the agricultural revolution as occurring roughly 7,000 to 12,000 years ago.) At that time, mutated grasses appeared simultaneously on several continents, probably in response to the sudden and radical change in climate. These grasses were the first high-yield, edible ancestors of modern rice and wheat, and provided the humans who lived near where they appeared with an opportunity to nurture and grow these staple foods.

Those people with the Farmer-like patience to grow the crops evolved into the farming societies, and rid their ranks of the impulsive, sensation-seeking Hunters among them. Those persons who were not patient enough to wait for rice to grow maintained their hunting tribes, the last remnants of which we see today in a few remaining indigenous peoples on the earth. The Old Testament, for example, is in large part the story of a nomadic hunting tribe moving through the wrenching process, over several generations, of becoming a settled farming tribe.

Eastern Religious Views of ADHD

In India there also appears to be a very different view of ADHD than is conventional in the United States. During the monsoon season of 1993, the week of the Hyderabad earthquake, I took a 12-hour train ride halfway across the subcontinent to visit an obscure town near the Bay of Bengal. In the train compartment with me were two Indian businessmen and a physician; we had plenty of time to talk as the countryside flew by from sunrise to sunset.

Curious about how they viewed ADHD, I said, “Are you familiar with the personality type where people seem to crave stimulation but have a hard time staying with any one thing? They hop from career to career, and sometimes even from relationship to relationship, and never seem to settle down.”

“Ah, we know this type well,” one of the businessmen said, the other two nodding in agreement.

“What do you call it?” I asked.

“Very holy,” he said. “These are old souls, near the end of their karmic cycle.” Again the other three nodded agreement, perhaps a bit more vigorously in response to my startled look.

“Old souls?” I said, thinking that a very odd description for what we call a disorder.

“Yes,” the physician said, taking his turn in the conversation. “In our religion, we believe that the purpose of reincarnation is to eventually free oneself from worldly entanglement and desire. In each lifetime we experience certain lessons, until finally we are free of this earth and can merge into the oneness of what you would call God. When a soul is very close to the end of those thousands of incarnations, he must take a few lifetimes and do many, many things, to clean up the little threads left over from his previous lifetimes.”

“This is a man very close to becoming enlightened,” the second businessman added. “We have great respect for such individuals, although their lives may be difficult.”

The first businessmen raised a finger and interjected: “But it is the difficulties of such lives that purify the soul.” The other two nodded in solemn agreement.

“In America we consider this a psychiatric disorder,” I said.

All three looked startled, then laughed.

“In America, you consider our most holy men, our yogis and swamis, to be crazy people, too,” said the physician with a touch of sadness in his voice. “So it is with different cultures. We live in different worlds.”

In the Hunter/warrior societies of northern India and Europe, religious rituals were developed to teach focusing and concentration. These include saying the Rosary in the Roman Catholic tradition, with the beads serving to provide a form of biofeedback, constantly reminding the person not to allow their mind to wander. In Hinduism prayer beads called a Mala are often used in Mantra meditation, where a single sound (such as “Om”) is repeated over and over again.

That the Hunting societies, with their culturally-ingrained prevalence of ADHD-like behaviors and highly distractible people, would create concentrative religious rituals to teach them to focus makes perfect sense. Focusing is something which doesn’t come naturally to their people, so it’s evolved as a learned behavior in the culture.

In traditionally agricultural societies, however, the meditative techniques are quite different.

From Trungpa Rimpoche and Osel Tensig I learned Vipassana, or mindfulness, and practiced the technique for ten to fifteen hours a day at the Karmé Chöling retreat center in Vermont.

In this Tibetan Buddhist system, the goal is not to concentrate the mind on one point, but to empty the mind and be fully aware. It’s practiced with the eyes open; whenever a thought arises which may become the focus of concentration, we visualized it as a bubble we would mentally reach out and pop as we noted to ourselves that we were thinking. This released the thought and returned the mind to empty awareness.

The goal of this form of meditation is not focus, but its opposite. As Berkeley-based Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo wrote in his essay, On the Psychology of Meditation, Vipassana and Zen represent “the negative way” form of meditation, and come from the East. Mantra, rosary, mandala, and prayer represent the opposite, Western “concentrative or absorptive meditation.”

Thus, the agricultural societies of southern Asia, farmers for millennia with a highly focused society and people, naturally developed cultural rituals which train awareness and distractibility. These systems teach them to resist their natural impulse to concentrate their attention.

Shunryu Suzuki (1905-1971), one of Japan’s most famous Zen masters, founded the Zen Center in San Francisco, which I visited briefly in the late 1960s. In the prologue to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a collection of his talks, he writes:

“In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means ‘beginner’s mind.’ The goal of [Zen] practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind....

That in the West we have missed this distinction between types of religious rituals and their significance when viewing context-or spectrum-disorders like ADHD is largely attributable to the influence of Sigmund Freud on modern psychological and philosophical thought.

He wrote forcefully against religion and its seductions, noting that “the derivation of religious needs [come] from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father.”

Carl Jung was the first psychologist of any stature to challenge Freud’s view and assert that meditative practice wasn’t itself an expression of neurosis, but perhaps even a potential treatment for illness. Erich Fromm later developed these ideas even more fully, but Fromm and Jung are still both largely outside the mainstream of contemporary psychotherapeutic thought.

A view ranging from world history to entrepreneurship to religion and culture amply shows the distinctions between Hunters and Farmers. And we see that the institutions of contemporary Western society, rooted as they are in the agricultural/industrial model, tend to make misfits of Hunters.

Solutions

Whether or not the Hunter/Farmer model as a way of viewing ADHD is ultimately demonstrated to be good science or not may be less than vital. For the moment, it provides us with a way to view this condition that leaves self-esteem intact. It accurately models and predicts how and why medications are helpful, and reframes our techniques for working with Hunter-type individuals in schools, the work place, and in relationships.

Like the (as yet unproved) electron-flow model for explaining electricity, the Hunter/Farmer paradigm allows us to get our hands around a phenomenon, wield it to our benefit, and empower the lives of people.

If ADHD is part of our genetic heritage, it cannot be seen as an excuse for a person’s failings. It’s merely an explanation of behavior, one that then provides the first steps toward overcoming those obstacles which, in the past, so often caused failure.

Nonetheless, we can reform our schools, in particular, to make them more Hunter-friendly. This would include having more active instructional methods, more hands-on work for children, shorter class times, smaller class sizes, and exercise between classes whenever possible.

Share

Looking at people with ADHD as the descendants of Hunters, with a neurochemistry and thalamic gain set-point which causes them to seek stimulation and sensation, puts a lot of behaviors and problems in context. However, there’s a third and final step in this perspective which, in part, answers the question: “What can be done to help these low-gain Hunters?”

Stress Responses

When we are faced with danger, real or perceived, we’re driven by our reptilian and mammalian brains, which have two primary instincts: fight or flight.

The stress doesn’t need to be something as obvious as the danger of a mugger. It can be the fear of being alone or rejected, the fear of not being loved, the fear of failure, the fear of criticism, or anything else that people interpret as a threat or attack.

People with ADHD often have a hypervigilant and hyper-responsive stress-sensing mechanism. This may be a vestigial Hunter survival mechanism: if you weren’t constantly vigilant in the jungle or forest, you’d get eaten. (This also may partly explain why one of the Adult ADHD diagnostic criteria suggested by psychiatrists John Ratey and Edward Hallowell was “A feeling of impending doom.” This feeling of doom would spur the hunter to constantly be looking over his shoulder.)

Distractability — The Effect of Hypervigilance

Whatever the cause or reason, though, the effect of this hypervigilance is what we often call distractability. The person with ADHD is constantly scanning his or her environment for danger. (Distractability is the first of the three primary characteristics of ADHD, the second is impulsivity and the third is sensation/risk-seeking behaviors.)

Impulsivity — A Response to Threat

When the person with ADHD senses a real or perceived threat, they tend to have a hair-trigger response to that threat. This often takes the form of interrupting, acting without thinking the consequences through first, or saying or doing whatever comes to mind. While it probably always begins as a response to stress/threat, it may also become a learned behavior which generalizes to other aspects of life. A person can thus end up responding very quickly to just about any sort of stimuli, including internal ones such as thoughts, impulses, and desires.

Forms of “Flight”

When confronted with a threat or stress, it’s usually inappropriate to “fight” in modern society. Punching out the manager who might fire us, throwing something at the person who jumped in front of us in line, or shooting out the windshield of the fellow who cut us off in traffic are generally regarded as less-than-useful behaviors. Most of us have learned to control our response to stress, at least to sublimate the “fight” component of the response.

This leaves us with “flight” as a response. Instead of confronting threats, problems, or individuals whom we perceive as a threat, we usually figure out a way to escape from the source of the stress. Common patterns here include changing relationships frequently, hopping from job to job, or even moving from town to town. Or the pattern may be more subtle than that, because the flight response has two submodalities: run or hide.

When running isn’t possible, as is usually the case in “civilized” society, then we often choose to “hide.” While for some people this takes an exaggerated form, in such conditions as agoraphobia where a person is afraid to even leave the house, the hiding behavior more often shows up in people who have learned how to avoid conflict to the point of paralysis, or who seem emotionally unresponsive. This is sometimes seen as a form of coldness or withdrawal, but, paradoxically, in persons with ADHD it may often show up as an exaggerated sociability or apparent extroversion. (The reason for this will become clear in a moment.)

Since it’s usually difficult to “run away” in modern society, a sub-mode of flight that’s commonly used is what I call the “opossum response”: overwhelm the brain with stimulation and cause it to be distracted or freed from the source of the stress. When an opossum rolls over and pretends to be dead, it actually slips into a comatose state brought about by the conscious brain being overwhelmed by a flood of sensation from the limbic brain.

Our culture is replete with stories of people who “throw themselves into” things, using work, sex, drugs, alcohol, or gambling in order to “get away from” some perceived stress or loss. When taken to an extreme, this throwing oneself into something shows up as addictive, compulsive, or obsessive behaviors, all of which seem to be over-represented among the ADHD population.

So we now have a person who is experiencing stress, is incapable of fighting, and can’t run away either. In order to cope they choose to hide, to bury themselves within something that’s sufficiently strong, high-stimulation, and/or overwhelming to provide enough of a distraction that they can then become oblivious to the stress. This is just like the opossum, so deeply gone when “hiding” that he won’t respond to being poked, rolled over, or even picked up and dropped.

In order to call up the hiding “opossum response,” a person finds either outside or within themselves an overwhelming distraction or point to focus on. It must be something so powerful, so stimulating, and occasionally so rewarding that it exceeds the strength and power of the threat/stress.

Some people with ADHD have trained their brains to become very efficient at collecting and seeking out high-energy, high-stimulation, powerfully-overwhelming stimuli. This provides them with a useful catalog of distracting behaviors to fall back into when the opossum response is necessary to flee from stress.

Collection and maintenance of these “distraction tools” often shows up as risk-taking and sensation-seeking behaviors.

Throughout their lives, these individuals have searched for and discovered ways to flood their brains with neurochemicals. We call this “feeling good,” or “getting high,” and people with ADHD are particularly well-tuned to this. These can include sex and masturbation; use of substances such as alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and other harder drugs; gambling; eating; extreme exercise (running, competitive sports); shopping; compulsive talking; compulsive promiscuity; extreme religious behaviors such as joining cults or becoming fanatic evangelists; criminal behaviors; workaholism; and other behaviors described as compulsive or addictive.

So, when stress or threat come along, and fight or flight aren’t available, the brain just naturally tumbles into the flight submodality of the opossum response. To do this, it will automatically seek out or roll into one of the modes it has historically used to overwhelm it with stimulation.

In other words, if a person has found that drugs, or sex, or running, or alcohol, or even work have given him or her a high or a strong charge, the brain will remember this and seek out that behavior again in order to bring up a flood of neurochemicals that blocks out the stress. This is why ADHD people report that engaging in compulsive or risk-taking behavior “reduces stress” or “relaxes” them, even though these behaviors would be described by a non-ADHD person as stressful, frightening, or overwhelming.

When Hiding becomes Addiction or Compulsion

If the stimulus is something that leaves a neurochemical crash afterwards, such as sex, alcohol, gambling, or drugs, among others, the resulting crash will itself then become a new source of stress. This new stress will cause the brain to again look for an overwhelming neurochemical wash, again triggering the behavior. The hangover, the departure of the sexual partner, or the results of the gambling loss, become the trigger, even when the original source of stress is long gone, resolved, or far less threatening than the addiction or behavior itself.

Once trapped into one of these addictive cycles, it’s extremely difficult for anybody, and particularly for the hypervigilant/hyper-responsive ADHD person to break out of the cycle.

Breaking the Addictive Cycle

Two methods are traditionally used to break this cycle of stress leading to addictive behavior.

The first way is to interrupt the neurotransmitter cycles. This is most often done with drugs such as the SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) such as Prozac, which have been demonstrated to be useful in reducing compulsive, obsessive, and addictive behaviors.

While these drugs have an often miraculous short-term effect on breaking addictive or compulsive behavior patterns, the problem here is that the person is now dependent upon an external chemical. Unless the drug therapy is combined with good psychotherapy, the person hasn’t learned new ways to cope with stress or the addiction and so when the chemical is withdrawn the old pattern often emerges with a vengeance.

A second way to break the pattern is to create new responses to stress: giving the brain new addictions, essentially, but choosing those that hopefully are less destructive than the original ones.

Reports in the psychiatric literature show that this is a strategy the brain will adopt naturally. People in recovery from one addiction often quickly cycle into another one. The most common reports are of people going from substance abuse to sexual compulsion, or from substance abuse to alcohol abuse, although there are legions of examples with virtually every form of compulsive behavior.

These people will universally describe their compulsive substance, alcohol, or sexual acting-out as a response to stress, saying that it makes them feel “relieved,” or “calmer,” or using other similar terms. The results are unfortunately short-lived however, and a new addiction cycle is merely starting up.

The strategy of replacing one addiction with another (sexual with running, for example) may be useful in preventing people from engaging in self-destructive behavior, but the “new” addiction can often prove destructive itself. Witness the explosion in sports-related injuries from people who say they’re “hooked” by the “runner’s high,” or the number of people in AA who will die from smoking-related illnesses.

There is a third way to break the addictive cycle, and that is by building inner strength.

SOLUTIONS — The Third Way: Building Inner Strength

A third strategy, one that’s central to Gestalt therapy but often overlooked in mainstream addiction literature, is to address head-on the hypervigilance and hyper-responsiveness to stress: make a person so strong internally that they no longer need resort to the opossum response.

The basic premise which this strategy is founded on is the realization that much of our response to stress comes from not being in touch with our own inner strengths. We perceive things as stressful because we think of ourselves as weak.

After all, who would consider a child on a tricycle to be a threat, unless he thought of himself as an even smaller child? Who would be afraid of losing their job if they were absolutely confident and certain that they could get a better one in a matter of days? Who would be intimidated by somebody physically threatening them if they were a black-belt in karate?

When we operate out of a place of strength, then most things we’d normally find stressful become transformed into non-stressful events. We simply make appropriate choices, deal with them, and go on with life.

Consider the extreme example above of the karate black-belt. Gary Grooms is a Shao Lin martial arts master in Atlanta. He can literally kill a man with his hand, and do it in a matter of seconds. When I asked him how this sort of training transforms people’s experience of physical threats (do they get in more fights, for example?), Gary told me something that at first seemed counter-intuitive.

“My students report that they’re far less likely to get into a fight once they’ve mastered our techniques,” he told me. “When you know in advance that you’re going to win, that you could even seriously damage or kill the other person, then the urge to fight seems to go away. You don’t see the other person as a threat anymore, but more like an annoyance or a nuisance, and it’s easier to ignore them and carry on with your life.”

So a good way to address the hypervigilance and hyper-responsiveness of ADHD is to develop a strong inner core, an emotional strength that allows us to brush off the small stresses of life, the way Gary would ignore a rude person at a sporting event. As my mentor Gottfried Müller said, “When you walk through the world as a spiritual warrior, you quickly learn what is important and what you can ignore.”

Accessing Our Inner Strengths

The mind organizes itself into separate and discrete areas to deal with life’s circumstances. These areas are created, organized, and segregated from the conscious mind during childhood for the largest part, and represent much of what is often referred to as “the unconscious.” They work to keep us alive and protected, but because so many of them are created during childhood when cognitive abilities aren’t well-developed (regardless of age), they are developed at the level of instinct. These areas of the unconscious that control much of our conscious behavior often appear to act in an irrational fashion.

Thus, someone who is hypercritical of others may have developed this as a way of trying to train himself to be more competent. While this may occasionally be useful, more often than not hypercriticalness has destructive consequences. Because it’s operating at a level below consciousness, it’s nearly impossible to stop it with conscious interventions. Signs on the wall that say “Don’t criticize others,” or positive-thinking courses, or sessions with a therapist about how your mother was hypercritical herself don’t usually produce long-term change.

So, the Third Way is to rewire the brain’s response to stress in the first place. This involves two steps:

1. Reach through each of the various stress-response behaviors one at a time and find the inner strength for each that will enable a person to no longer see those “stress-producing” circumstances in life as being stressful. This acts the same way as the SSRI drugs, in that it breaks the cycle of stress-response-behavior-stress.

2. Give the unconscious mind permission and the ability to come up with new behaviors to use in response to formerly (or currently) stressful situations. When these new behaviors are grounded or rooted in this newly established inner strength, the intermediate behaviors that lead to the addiction/compulsion cycle are then no longer necessary and no longer are summoned by the mind.

Solutions

There is a specific set of steps that a therapist or friend can walk a person through to facilitate this process. I was first exposed to it in 1986 when I was living in Germany and working for the international relief organization, Salem. Herr Müller, Salem’s founder, sat me down a week before Christmas in his office and asked what was bothering me.

I’d just come back from spending most of November in Beijing studying acupuncture at the international teaching hospital there, and then working with Father Ben Carrion to try to raise money for his program in Manila to help the children living there in the garbage dumps. That had been exciting stuff which I’d enjoyed, but now I was back in Germany where it was gray and cold. I felt, culturally, like an alien and of course I literally was.

Herr Müller just kept asking me why I felt this way, and in response to every answer he would again ask, “Why do you feel that way?” Finally, we hit a bottom-line question where I said that I wanted to feel the presence of God all the time. The next time he probed, suddenly I felt that presence. Herr Muller was playing Handel’s Messiah in the background as we had the discussion, and to this day I always associate that music with the very real power of the love and presence of God that I felt in his office that day. Since that time, I’ve brought that feeling and presence into many situations in my life; it’s been a constant and powerful and enduring source of strength for me.

So, you can imagine my surprise when George Lynn, a psychotherapist in Washington state, suggested I pick up a book called Core Transformation by ConnieRae and Tamara Andreas. The book outlines a specific technique, rooted in NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) and Gestalt therapy, whereby a person is walked through a certain process. They start with a behavior or feeling they’d like to have better control over or be free from, and then use that behavior the way a deep-sea diver uses an air-hose. This carries a person all the way down through layers of consciousness, behavior, and response to what the Andreas’ refer to as a “core state.”

This core is the place where a feeling of oneness with God, or infinite bliss, or all-encompassing love lives. The person is then taught to bring that state up through the layers of behavior into their normal waking daily life. While the technique transforms people’s specific behaviors (and originally in NLP was probably developed largely just for that purpose), in the Andreas’ system that’s almost a by-product. The real goal is to dive into the core state, and then bring the power and strength from that back into normal life. It’s like becoming a spiritual and emotional black-belt!

While the Andreas’ don’t specifically address ADHD at all in their book, they do talk at length about issues of emotional fragility and building emotional strength. These are often weakness carried around by people with ADHD, perhaps as a result of a lifetime of paradox, confusion, and self-doubt. (“I know I’m smart, but then why can’t I do well in school?)

This posed for me the question: Could the technique Herr Müller had developed out of his experience as a prisoner-of-war and used on me, and the Andreas sisters had developed out of their training in NLP and Gestalt therapy, be useful in helping people with ADHD? Could this help to recover their balance, poise, and internal strength?

In theory, at least, if this system reduces hypervigilance and hyperresponsiveness, then the ADHD behaviors of distractibility and impulsivity could be reduced or eliminated. Since the person would now be operating from a sense of strength and core competency rather than hypervigilance and fear, the need for these behaviors would now be gone. Could the result be that their ADHD is fully or partly “cured?” Or at the least, could many of the side effects of ADHD — the pain and self-loathing and confusion — be resolved?

To test the hypothesis, I got together with a psychotherapist in Atlanta, and we lined up people to do the technique. The results aren’t in yet, but the preliminary results are very encouraging. On the other side of the country, George Lynn, the psychotherapist in Washington state, told me that he’s been using his version of the Core Transformation technique for some time with ADHD patients, and found that it had a significant and positive effect on them.