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When a research team from the University of Southampton and two French institutions published what may be the most comprehensive review of ADHD treatments ever conducted, the coverage was predictable. Medication works best, the headlines said. Medication is the most reliable option for children and adults. Medication, medication, medication. And that part is true, as far as it goes, and I’ll come back to it.

But there was a footnote buried in the findings that almost nobody wrote about. And in thirty years of watching the way the medical establishment talks about ADHD, I’ve learned that the thing nobody writes about is often the most interesting thing in the room.

The study, published in The BMJ, examined more than 200 meta-analyses covering every significant ADHD treatment approach researchers have studied. Medication. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Neurofeedback. Diet. Exercise. Parent training. Even mindfulness.

The researchers looked at short-term effects, medium-term effects, and where the data existed, long-term effects. What they found at extended follow-up — meaning the outcomes that lasted, the ones that held up after the studies ended and the participants went back to their actual lives — was that medication’s advantage shrank considerably.

Short-term, the pills are clearly the most powerful tool available. Long-term, the picture gets murkier, partly because almost nobody has bothered to study long-term outcomes rigorously, which is a scandal in its own right given how many people take these medications for decades.

The one intervention that showed large benefits at extended follow-up was mindfulness.

Not a little benefit. Not a marginal, statistically-significant-but-clinically-modest benefit. Large benefits. The kind of finding that, if it had been attached to a pharmaceutical compound, would have been on the front page of every newspaper that covered the story.

Instead it got a sentence, a caveat about the limited evidence base, and then the coverage moved on to talk about the pills some more.

Here’s why that finding didn’t surprise me at all, and why I think the limited evidence base is itself part of the story.

Mindfulness, in its most basic form, is the practice of bringing your full attention to the present moment. Not to the meeting you have tomorrow or the thing you said badly last week or the seventeen tabs open in your browser. Here. Now. This breath, this sensation, this moment.

For Farmer brains, this is apparently quite difficult to learn and requires sustained instruction and practice. For Hunter brains, it is something else entirely.

Think about what hunting actually requires. Not the romantic movie version, but the real thing, the way our ancestors did it for hundreds of thousands of years before anyone plowed a field.

You’re tracking an animal across terrain that is trying to kill you in at least four different ways simultaneously. Your attention can’t be on the past or the future, or be divided across abstract concerns. It has to be fully, completely, almost violently present.

The snap of a twig. The shift in the wind. The way the grass is bent fifteen yards ahead. Everything that is not this moment is noise, and noise gets you killed or send you home hungry.

That quality of present-moment awareness is not a skill that Hunter brains lack: it’s a skill that Hunter brains were built for. What we lack, or rather what we struggle with, is the ability to summon it on demand for tasks that our nervous systems correctly identify as not worth hunting.

You can’t make a Hunter brain go fully present for a thing it has assessed as trivial. But you can teach a Hunter brain to recognize what full presence feels like, to return to it deliberately, and to use it as an anchor when the Farmer world is pulling in seventeen directions at once.

That is what mindfulness does. And it makes complete sense that the benefits would compound over time, because mindfulness isn’t a treatment that works while you’re receiving it and fades when you stop, the way medication does. It’s a skill. Once you have it, you have it. The Hunter who learns to hunt doesn’t forget how to hunt when the teacher goes home.

The researchers were careful to note that the evidence base for mindfulness in ADHD is still limited compared to the evidence base for medication, and that’s a fair point.

But I’d ask you to consider why the evidence base is limited. Mindfulness doesn’t have a pharmaceutical company behind it. Nobody is funding a thirty-year, multi-site longitudinal study of meditation because nobody can patent it.

The research that gets done is the research that gets funded, and the research that gets funded is the research that has a product attached to it. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s how medical research has worked for as long as there has been medical research.

The fact that mindfulness showed up as strongly as it did in the extended follow-up data, despite receiving a tiny fraction of the research investment that medication has received, strikes me as significant in a way the headlines completely missed.

Now, about the medication finding, because I want to be straightforward about it.

Yes, the study confirmed that medication is the most reliable short-term treatment for ADHD symptoms. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that for some Hunters in some circumstances, medication is genuinely transformative, and dismissing it categorically does real harm to real people who need it.

What this study adds to that picture, though, is something I’ve been arguing for years: medication is a tool, not a solution. It does something specific, in a specific timeframe, and the effects are real while you’re taking it.

What it doesn’t do is teach you anything. It doesn’t change how you understand yourself. It doesn’t build the kind of durable, portable skill that you carry with you into every room you’ll ever be in for the rest of your life.

Mindfulness does that. So does understanding yourself as a Hunter in a Farmer’s world, which is why I’ve spent thirty years arguing that the story matters as much as the prescription. When you understand why your brain works the way it does, when you stop fighting your own nature and start working with it, you develop something no pill can provide: a relationship with your own mind that actually functions.

I’ve seen this play out in my own life. When I began practicing mindfulness meditation years ago, I realized it wasn’t trying to turn my Hunter brain into a Farmer brain. It was teaching me how to return to the kind of intense present-moment awareness that Hunters evolved to have in the first place — and to do it intentionally, even in the middle of the modern world.

The researchers who put this study together did something genuinely useful by building a public interactive tool that lets patients and clinicians explore all the treatment evidence together, which is the kind of shared decision-making approach that respects people’s intelligence and autonomy. I’d encourage anyone navigating these decisions to use it. The address is ebiadhd-database.org.

But I’d also encourage you to notice what the biggest ADHD treatment study in history quietly found when it looked past the first six weeks and asked what actually lasts.

It found the one thing that teaches Hunters to be at home in their own minds. The thing that doesn’t require a prescription, doesn’t have side effects, and gets better the longer you practice it.

They buried it in a footnote. I thought you should know it was there.

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One of the more damaging myths of modern life is the idea that efficiency is always good and impulsivity is always bad. We treat efficiency as a moral virtue and impulsivity as a character flaw.

If you’re methodical, predictable, and optimized, you’re “responsible.” If you jump, pivot, change your mind, or follow instincts, you’re suspect. But that moral framing collapses the moment you look at how humans actually survive and adapt in the real world.

I’ve been called impulsive more times than I can count. By bosses, teachers, editors, and even well-meaning friends who couldn’t understand why I’d walk away from a stable situation to chase something uncertain. And yet, nearly every important success in my life came from doing precisely that. From taking a leap before all the data was in. From exploring when the “rational” move was to keep optimizing what already existed.

Only later did I learn that what looks like impulsivity from a Farmer’s point of view often isn’t impulsivity at all. It’s random exploration. And from an evolutionary and cognitive standpoint, random exploration isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Cognitive scientists studying decision-making have identified something that maps almost perfectly onto the Hunter versus Farmer divide. In stable environments, the optimal strategy is exploitation: pick the best known option and keep refining it. But in unstable, noisy, or changing environments, pure exploitation leads to stagnation and collapse. You get locked into yesterday’s solution while the world moves on. That’s where random exploration comes in.

Random exploration is not about being reckless. It’s about deliberately injecting unpredictability into your behavior so you don’t get trapped. It’s what pushes someone to try a new route, test a weird idea, start a business no spreadsheet can fully justify, or ask a question nobody else is asking. From the outside, it looks inefficient. From the inside, it’s how you discover options that don’t yet have names.

There’s real science behind this. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals like Nature Communications show that people who engage in higher levels of random exploration often score higher on traits we usually label as impulsivity. But the same research also shows that these traits can be advantageous in environments where rewards shift, information is incomplete, or conditions change rapidly.

In other words, the behavior that gets punished in a classroom or cubicle can be exactly what keeps a group adaptive over time.

This resonates deeply with my own experience. Every time I’ve started something new, it looked irresponsible to someone. Why leave a known income stream? Why jump into an industry you haven’t mastered yet? Why abandon a working model instead of refining it?

The answer was always the same, even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time: because, as my old friend Richard Bandler would say, the map no longer matched the territory.

Farmers are extraordinary at running stable systems. They make things reliable. Repeatable. Scalable. But Hunters are the ones who sense when the system itself is becoming brittle. When optimization starts producing diminishing returns. When yesterday’s success is quietly turning into tomorrow’s trap.

What worries me is that modern society has almost entirely lost the ability to distinguish between destructive impulsivity and adaptive exploration. We lump them together, label them as pathology, and try to suppress them. We design institutions that minimize variance, eliminate randomness, and punish deviation. And then we act shocked when those institutions fail catastrophically in moments of crisis.

History tells a different story.

Groups that survive long-term uncertainty almost always include a minority of people who behave “inefficiently.” Who waste energy exploring dead ends. Who chase ideas that don’t pan out. From a narrow accounting perspective, they look like liabilities. From a systems perspective, they are insurance policies against collapse.

I’ve seen this in business ecosystems. Startups that look chaotic from the outside are often the only ones positioned to pivot when markets shift. Legacy firms optimized for efficiency keep squeezing the same processes until the ground disappears beneath them.

The same dynamic shows up in politics, media, and culture. When norms tighten and deviation is punished, societies lose their ability to adapt.

This is where the Hunter versus Farmer frame becomes more than metaphor.

Farmers want predictability. Hunters tolerate ambiguity. Farmers eliminate randomness. Hunters understand that some randomness is essential. Without it, systems become fragile. They look strong right up until the moment they shatter.

Personally, I’ve learned to stop apologizing for this. The restlessness. The urge to move on once something becomes routinized. The instinct to explore instead of optimize. These aren’t signs that I failed to grow up. They’re signs that I’ve been navigating a world that keeps changing faster than our institutions can admit.

The real danger isn’t that we have too many impulsive people. It’s that we’ve built a culture that treats all exploration as a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be managed.

We don’t need everyone to behave like a Hunter. But we absolutely need some people to do so, and we need systems that can absorb their volatility without trying to crush it.

Civilization needs Farmers to keep the lights on. But it also needs Hunters to notice when the power grid is being built on sand.

As Thomas Edison proved with so many of his inventions (as I detail in my book Hunter in a Farmer’s World) random exploration is messy. It wastes effort. It produces failures. But it also produces breakthroughs, adaptations, and escape routes when the old paths close off. Strip it out entirely and you don’t get a perfect system. You get a brittle one.

I didn’t build my life by being efficient. I built it by being willing to explore when efficiency no longer made sense. From the outside, that often looked impulsive. From the inside, it was the most rational response I could imagine to a world that refuses to stay still.

We don’t need fewer Hunters. We need to stop mistaking their randomness for recklessness and start recognizing it for what it is: one of the ways humans and human societies survive uncertainty.

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There’s a pattern many Hunters recognize instantly but have never been given language for.

They’re calm in emergencies, decisive under pressure, and super-clear when things fall apart. When others freeze, Hunters organize. When systems fail, we improvise. We can walk into chaos and start making sense of it almost immediately.

Then the crisis ends.

The same person who was focused, effective, and confident now can’t answer emails, misses appointments, forgets routine tasks, and feels inexplicably exhausted by things that look trivial from the outside.

This contradiction gets labeled inconsistency.

It isn’t.

Hunter brains are tuned for crisis because crisis resembles the environment we evolved in. Uncertainty, urgency, real stakes, immediate feedback in the field, jungle, or savanna.

In those conditions of both ancient and modern life, Hunter attention locks in, noise drops away, and the nervous system aligns around a clear problem that actually matters.

Routine offers none of that.

Modern routine is abstract, repetitive, and disconnected from immediate consequence. The stakes are symbolic rather than real. Deadlines float. Tasks repeat without resolution. Feedback is delayed or meaningless.

For a Hunter’s nervous system, this registers as low signal, so the system powers down. This isn’t laziness: it’s conservation.

In crisis, every action has consequence. There’s a clear before and after. You do the thing and something changes. The Hunter brain thrives on this loop. It’s designed to assess, act, adapt, and move on.

Routine breaks that loop.

Making things even worse, most routines don’t end. They recur. They don’t resolve danger or complete a hunt. They just continue, seemingly forever. For Farmer systems, this is fine: stability and repetition are their brain’s main features.

For Hunters, though, it’s draining, as the nervous system never gets closure. So it starts to resist.

This resistance often shows up as procrastination, avoidance, forgetfulness, or mental fog. People assume something is wrong. The Hunter assumes something is wrong with them. In reality, the brain is responding correctly to an environment it was never meant to inhabit full time.

The tragedy is that Hunters are often punished for their strengths and shamed for their biology.

They’re praised in emergencies but criticized in daily life. They become the person everyone relies on when things go sideways, then the person everyone side-eyes when things are calm.

This creates a deep confusion about identity: “Am I competent or not?”

The answer is both simpler and more uncomfortable: competence is contextual.

Hunter competence is situational. It’s not evenly distributed across all tasks and timelines. It spikes, instead, where the stakes are real and the meaning is clear. But it collapses where demands are artificial and endless.

This doesn’t mean Hunters should live in constant crisis: chronic crisis burns anyone out. But it does mean Hunters need work and lives with arcs, not flat lines.

We need projects that begin and end. Problems that matter. Roles where our ability to see patterns quickly, act decisively, and tolerate uncertainty is valued rather than treated as disruptive.

When Hunters are forced into routine-heavy environments without variation or autonomy, our nervous systems start seeking stimulation elsewhere. Distraction increases. Risk-taking may rise. Motivation evaporates. This is often misdiagnosed as lack of discipline when it’s actually unmet neurological need.

That collapse in routine is the Hunter’s nervous system saying, “This isn’t what I’m built for.”

Many Hunters spend years trying to fix this by imposing stricter routines on themselves. More planners, more reminders, more rules. Sometimes this helps temporarily. Often it deepens the problem by increasing friction without increasing meaning.

A better approach starts with honesty.

Hunters do better when routine is minimized, externalized, or automated, and when their core energy is reserved for work that actually requires judgment and responsiveness. We benefit from environments that allow for movement, variation, and bursts of intensity followed by real rest.

We also need permission to stop pretending we should function like Farmers.

Once that permission is granted, something shifts. Hunters stop pathologizing their own patterns. They stop expecting crisis-level performance from routine-level tasks. They start designing lives that respect how their nervous systems actually engage.

The irony is that when Hunters are allowed to structure their lives this way, routine often becomes easier, not harder. With energy no longer drained by constant self-control, basic tasks stop feeling insurmountable.

Thriving in crisis and collapsing in routine isn’t a contradiction: it’s a clue to how we’re wired.

It tells you where your brain shines and where it struggles. It points toward environments where you’ll contribute most and away from ones that will slowly wear you down.

Hunter brains aren’t broken because we don’t tolerate routine well: they’re simply telling the truth.

The question is whether our society is willing to listen to it, or keep insisting us Hunters should be someone else.

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Hunters hear the phrase “just try harder” so often that it begins to sound like background noise.

It shows up in classrooms, workplaces, relationships, and even therapy offices. It’s offered as encouragement, as accountability, and as common sense. If something isn’t working, the assumption is simple: more effort will fix it.

For Hunters, this advice is not just unhelpful. It’s destructive.

The idea that effort automatically produces results assumes a nervous system that responds linearly to pressure. Farmer’s nervous systems are built around this assumption: apply consistent effort, get consistent output; miss the mark, add more discipline.

Hunter nervous systems, however, don’t work that way.

Effort for a Hunter is expensive. It requires overriding instinct, suppressing curiosity, and forcing attention onto low-signal tasks. Doing this occasionally is possible, but doing it constantly drains the system. Over time, the cost compounds.

So when Hunters struggle and are told to try harder, what we hear is that the pain we’re experiencing is proof of insufficient character.

We try harder anyway.

We stay up later. We push through exhaustion. We shame themselves into compliance. We adopt productivity systems designed for other minds. From the outside, it can look like determination. From the inside, it feels like self-erasure.

The lie at the heart of “just try harder” is that all effort is interchangeable.

It isn’t.

Effort aligned with the way a Hunter’s mind is organized feels energizing. Effort applied against that organization, however, is simply corrosive. One builds capacity, while the other burns it.

This is why Hunters can show astonishing persistence in some areas and complete paralysis in others. When effort connects to meaning, novelty, or urgency, it’s sustainable for us Hunters. When it connects to monotony, surveillance, or abstract obligation, though, we can collapse.

This isn’t a failure of will: it’s just biology.

The “just try harder” narrative also ignores context. It treats performance as a personal trait rather than an interaction between each person and their environment. If someone can’t function in a given system, the system is assumed to be fine, so the person defective.

Hunters internalize this deeply, to our own detriment. We begin to see every struggle as proof we’re broken. We stop trusting their signals. We keep applying pressure long after our nervous system has begun to shut down.

Eventually, effort stops working altogether.

This is often the moment Farmers point at us and call out our “laziness.” In reality, it’s a form of protective withdrawal. The system has learned that effort leads to pain, not reward, so it disengages.

What Hunters need in these moments isn’t more pressure, it’s permission to stop forcing.

And, tragically in our culture, that permission is rare.

Instead of asking “What if the system is wrong?” our culture doubles down. More discipline. More accountability. More monitoring. More consequences. These measures might increase compliance temporarily, but they accelerate burnout.

Hunter recovery usually begins with a radical reframe like the one I offer here and in my books about ADHD. It requires the realization that effort itself isn’t virtuous, that suffering isn’t proof of commitment, and that exhaustion isn’t a moral badge.

From there, a different question emerges: “Where does effort actually work for me?”

This shifts the focus from quantity to quality, from endurance to alignment, and from forcing to designing.

Hunters who stop trying harder and start trying differently often see dramatic changes. Energy returns. Focus sharpens. Confidence rebuilds. Not because they became more disciplined, but because they stopped waging war against their own nervous system.

This doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility; it means redefining it. Responsibility becomes choosing environments, rhythms, and roles that don’t require constant self-violation.

The lie of “just try harder” persists because it’s simple and morally satisfying. It lets systems avoid change. It keeps blame neatly contained within individuals. But it doesn’t produce health; instead, it produces compliance until collapse.

Hunters don’t need to try harder. They’ve already tried harder than most people ever will. What they need is truth.

The truth is that effort only works when it’s aligned with how a nervous system is built to engage the world. Anything else isn’t grit and grind.

And grind always breaks something in the end.

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I still remember Second Grade at Kendon Elementary School in Lansing, Michigan. It was 1958 and Mrs. Clark, a wonderfully well-intentioned woman with a thick South Carolina accent, was constantly frustrated with my wandering attention.

“Even a fish doesn’t get caught if it keeps its mouth shut,” she’d tell me, or, “You can’t learn anything if your mind is somewhere else,” or “If you don’t listen, you don’t learn.”

She loved me — my friend Terry and I were in her “gifted” class, thanks to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sputnik — but my ADHD was her constant curse. And mine, too.

Attention is one of the most misunderstood human traits, and Hunter attention may be the most misunderstood of all.

From an early age, us Hunters are taught that their way of attending to the world is defective. If we don’t focus on demand, follow linear instruction, or remain engaged with low-interest tasks, we’re told something is wrong with us. The language varies, but the message is consistent: “Pay attention the way you’re supposed to!”

What no one explains to us, particularly as children, is that attention isn’t a moral behavior.

It isn’t a choice. It isn’t a measure of effort. It isn’t even a reflection of character. Attention is a biological system designed to allocate energy toward what matters in a given environment. When the environment changes, attention adapts. When the environment is mismatched, attention resists.

Hunter attention evolved for scanning, detection, and rapid prioritization. It’s sensitive to novelty, threat, movement, and meaning. It turns on hard when something matters and turns off just as hard when it doesn’t. This isn’t a flaw. It’s an optimization strategy.

Farmer systems reward a different kind of attention, one that’s sustained, even, predictable, and externally directed. This works well for repetitive tasks and long-term maintenance, but it fails to recognize that not all minds are designed for constant engagement with low-signal information.

So Hunters are placed into environments that dull their nervous systems and then blamed when those systems rebel.

The moral language that surrounds attention does real damage: “Lazy, irresponsible, unmotivated, careless.” These labels that I still remember from elementary school don’t describe behavior, they assign guilt. They imply that if a Hunter just cared more, just tried harder, just respected authority better, then attention would magically appear.

But attention doesn’t respond to shame. It shuts down under it.

What actually happens is that Hunters begin to monitor themselves constantly. They try to force attention through effort, pressure, and fear of failure. This consumes enormous cognitive energy, so that by the time the task even begins, the system is already exhausted.

This is why Hunters can focus intensely on some things and not at all on others. When attention aligns with curiosity, urgency, or intrinsic meaning, it floods the system. Hyperfocus isn’t a mystery. It’s attention working exactly as designed.

The problem isn’t inconsistency. The problem is context.

Hunter attention is situational, not moral. It responds to signal strength, not obligation. When the signal is weak, the system conserves energy by disengaging. That looks like distraction in a Farmer frame, but in an evolutionary frame, it’s actually an extraordinary form of mental efficiency.

The tragedy here is that most Hunters internalize the wrong lesson. Instead of learning how their attention system actually works, they learn to distrust it. They override it. They suppress it. They treat their own nervous system as an enemy to be conquered.

This creates a lifetime of tension.

Many adult Hunters live with constant low-grade shame around attention. They apologize for it. They hide it. They overprepare to compensate for it. They feel guilty even when they’re deeply engaged, because they know it won’t last forever.

This guilt is unnecessary.

When Hunters stop moralizing attention and start studying it, everything changes. They learn what conditions activate it, what conditions drain it, and how to design environments that work with their biology instead of against it.

This might mean shorter work blocks, higher stakes, more autonomy, fewer interruptions, or more novelty. It might mean working in bursts, switching contexts, or allowing physical movement. These aren’t hacks: they’re accommodations for a nervous system that evolved for a different job.

Hunter attention doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be respected.

There’s also a cultural implication here. Societies that only value Farmer attention miss out on Hunter contributions. Pattern detection, creative leaps, early warning signals, and unconventional solutions often come from minds that don’t attend politely or predictably (see: Thomas Edison).

When those minds are shamed into conformity, our culture loses some of its resilience.

Our Hunter attention isn’t broken, it’s specialized. It doesn’t fail randomly, it fails in environments that refuse to meet it halfway.

Once Hunters understand this, the shame loosens its grip. Attention becomes something to work with rather than fight. The question shifts from “Why can’t I pay attention?” to “What does my attention respond to?”

That shift isn’t just liberating, it’s corrective because Hunter-style attention was never a moral failing. It was always just information and an unique way of experiencing the world for the survival of the human race.

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There’s a quiet truth that almost nobody says out loud, but everyone who lives with ADHD knows in their bones: the very traits that make school hard, office life frustrating, and daily chores feel impossible are the same traits that make ADHD adults show up as the rescuers, innovators, and problem-solvers when life goes off the rails.

It’s one of the strange gifts of our wiring. The world may not always understand us, but it leans on us far more than people realize.

Think back on the people you’ve known with ADHD. How many of them were the ones who took the big risks in their careers? How many of them stepped in during crises with a clarity that startled everyone else? How many found their way into creative work, emergency response, entrepreneurship, activism, or any space where intensity meets unpredictability?

When the routine tasks of ordinary life suffocate them, they come alive in the exact environments that paralyze others. It’s not a coincidence. It’s an evolutionary inheritance.

In a hunter-gatherer band, the brain wired for quick pattern recognition, fast shifts in attention, and intuitive leaps wasn’t a problem, it was an asset. Those were the people who noticed the storm coming before anyone else saw the clouds. They were the ones who spotted animal tracks half hidden under leaves or heard danger in the sound nobody else registered.

They were the ones who could drop the task they were doing and move instantly when something changed in the environment. In a world full of uncertainty, that kind of mind helped keep everyone alive.

Drop that same mind into a classroom or an office, and suddenly it’s labeled disordered. But notice where ADHD adults actually excel.

They gravitate toward firefighting, EMT work, military service, aviation, journalism, entrepreneurship, crisis management, filmmaking, politics, teaching, counseling, the arts: any arena where events shift quickly and require rapid reorientation.

They do well in disasters. They thrive under pressure. They’re at their best when something unexpected drops out of the sky and everyone else freezes. That’s when their brain finally matches the environment. That’s when peers stop mistaking their intensity for distraction and see the gift underneath.

The tragedy is that most Hunter adults don’t hear this story about themselves until much later in life, if ever. They hear instead that they’re “too much,” “scattered,” “disorganized,” or “lazy.” They hear that they “don’t apply themselves” or “keep getting in their own way.”

They internalize a lifetime of being misunderstood. But that misunderstanding isn’t about their character. It’s about the mismatch between their neural wiring and the expectations of a world built for people who thrive on routine.

Imagine taking a natural sprinter and forcing them to run marathons every day. Imagine taking a jazz musician and making them play scales for hours but never letting them improvise. That’s what happens when a hunter brain is forced into a farmer world.

But when that same brain hits the right environment—fast, dynamic, unpredictable—everyone around them starts saying, “I don’t know what we would have done without you.” That’s not heroism; that’s alignment.

Look at the entrepreneurs who build something from nothing. Look at the activists who stick their necks out to defend what matters. Look at the artists who transform their restlessness into beauty. Look at the nurses and paramedics who thrive in controlled chaos. Look at the people who run toward burning buildings.

These aren’t people who failed to fit into society. These are people society leans on when reality becomes too wild for linear thinkers. In the most literal sense, they are the descendants of hunters. Their nervous systems were built for challenge, not compliance.

The research is finally catching up to what many of us have said for decades: Hunter brains show strengths in divergent thinking, innovation, crisis response, intuition, creativity, and rapid problem-solving under pressure.

These are not side effects of a disorder: they’re central features of an evolutionary profile that helped humans survive for most of our history. Only in the last few thousand years—really, the last few hundred—did we build an environment where routine was rewarded more than responsiveness.

If you’re an adult with ADHD, you’ve probably spent years trying to make yourself into someone you’re not. But the world doesn’t need another perfect inbox-zero desk worker.

The world needs people who can respond in a heartbeat when the unexpected happens. It needs people who can see solutions sideways. It needs the ones who challenge assumptions, push boundaries, try new approaches, and refuse to settle for the safe, predictable path.

It needs the people who have been told all their lives that they’re “too impulsive” or “too emotional” or “too intense.” Because those are the people who drag civilization forward.

Being wired this way is not always easy. The mismatch between your brain and the structures of modern life can be painful. But there’s a reason you feel most alive when the stakes are high or the situation is fluid. There’s a reason you get restless when things get too controlled or predictable. There’s a reason you’ve found yourself leading the charge when something goes wrong, even if moments earlier you couldn’t find your keys. There’s a reason people come to you when the script breaks.

You’re not “broken.” You’re a member of a forgotten tribe that has always been essential to the human story. You’re one of the explorers, the innovators, the protectors, the improvisers, the ones who move first when life demands movement. And when you start seeing your wiring not as a flaw but as a calling, you reclaim a part of yourself that was never lost, but only misunderstood.

If you live with ADHD, you’re not a failed version of normal. You’re a successful version of something older, wilder, and still profoundly necessary. The world has always needed people like you. It still does.

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For generations, people with ADHD have been told that something is wrong with them. Parents of ADHD kids are handed diagnoses wrapped in fear, lists of deficits, and warnings about what their children will struggle with or fail at. Adults who discover their ADHD later in life often describe a kind of grief: “Why couldn’t I just be normal?”

But what if — as I’ve argued for three decades — the problem was never the people with ADHD at all? What if the real problem is that our culture, schools, and workplaces were built for one kind of mind, while millions of us are naturally wired for another?

A new study out of Norway’s University of Bergen adds powerful evidence to a truth many of us have known intuitively for years: people with ADHD don’t just have challenges; they also have strengths—real, measurable, life-enhancing strengths—creativity, adaptability, resilience, and an unconventional way of seeing the world that often leads to original solutions where others hit walls.

The researchers found that many adults with ADHD described their traits not as handicaps but as double-edged gifts.

— High energy, for example, can be chaotic in tightly structured environments but incredibly valuable when quick decisions, rapid action, or persistence are needed.

— Hyperfocus can derail a school day, but in the right environment it becomes laser-sharp mastery of a subject or skill.

— Even the impulsivity that schools try to train out of children is a form of rapid-response decision-making that, in some contexts, saves lives.

This idea isn’t new. Over 30 years ago I developed the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis of ADHD to explain why these traits are not random or broken but evolved.

For most of human history, people lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands. Hunters were the individuals who had to scan the environment constantly, respond instantly to change, and pursue rapid bursts of activity when opportunity appeared.

They needed a mind that jumped quickly from one stimulus to another, that noticed what others missed, that could hyperfocus on the rustle in the grass, and that leapt into action without hesitation. Those traits were essential to survival.

Later, when humans settled into agricultural communities, the Farmer temperament became dominant: steady, predictable, routine-oriented, comfortable with repetitive tasks, and able to work methodically from dawn to dusk without distraction.

For the last few thousand years, most societies have been built around the Farmer way of thinking. Schools, factories, bureaucracies, law firms, and corporate offices all reward the same thing: sit still, follow directions, do one task at a time, and don’t question the structure. And so the Hunters among us—people with ADHD—are told they are defective when, in fact, they’re simply living in systems that don’t match their natural wiring.

What’s remarkable about the new University of Bergen study is that it confirms this evolutionary perspective in the lived experience of ADHD adults.

When asked to describe positive aspects of their condition, participants consistently highlighted creativity, innovation, curiosity, novelty-seeking, resilience, and a willingness to take risks. These are exactly the traits that would make an effective hunter.

One participant said they could spot opportunities or dangers others overlooked. Another said their drive to try new things had led to skills and adventures their non-ADHD peers never experienced. Many said their struggles gave them empathy and unusual emotional intelligence, because they’d spent a lifetime navigating obstacles the rest of the Farmer world didn’t even see.

One of the most powerful findings was the theme of resilience. People with ADHD—especially those diagnosed in adulthood—often had spent decades believing they’re failing at things that “should” be easy: organizing tasks, keeping schedules, staying inside narrow lines.

Yet that constant friction, according to the new research, forges a deep kind of psychological strength. You learn to get up after setbacks, to find workarounds, to experiment, to reinvent yourself, to adapt quickly when plans fall apart. The very path that causes difficulty also cultivates a toughness and flexibility that many neurotypical people/Farmers never develop.

And there’s something even deeper: a sense of relief.

Many participants said that receiving an ADHD diagnosis helped them understand themselves for the first time. They weren’t broken. They weren’t lazy. They weren’t incompetent. They were different, and that difference came with value. The diagnosis didn’t just explain their challenges; it explained their gifts.

This is where the Hunter/Farmer framework offers an even more hopeful reframe.

If a person with ADHD is a Hunter trying to survive in a Farmer’s world, the answer isn’t to eliminate their Hunter traits. The answer is to build a life—school, work, relationships—where those traits are assets, not liabilities.

Hunters thrive in environments with novelty, movement, challenge, and creativity. Entrepreneurial work, emergency response, journalism, the arts, activism, engineering, design, caregiving, politics, teaching, environmental science, research, and dozens of other fields are filled with adults who grew up labeled “disordered” only to discover that the very traits criticized in childhood became advantages in adulthood.

Parents of ADHD children should know this: your child does not have a “broken” brain. Your child has a Hunter’s brain living in a Farmer’s classroom.

That same child will likely grow into an adult who can improvise solutions under pressure, think divergently, generate ideas that break old patterns, care deeply, and persist through adversity. The research shows it, the evolutionary history supports it, and millions of successful ADHD adults embody it.

The world has always needed both Hunters and Farmers. The tragedy is that we built our modern systems as if one type were superior to the other.

But the tide is turning. Science is catching up to what many ADHD adults have been saying for years: this is not a defect. It’s a difference. And when that difference is understood and supported, it becomes a strength.

If you or your child lives with ADHD, the message is simple: there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not alone. Your mind is built for a world that still desperately needs Hunters.

And the more we recognize and value that truth, the more opportunities will open for individuals, families, workplaces, and society as a whole.

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One popular theory to explain Hunters suggests that people with ADHD are very independent, and tend to dislike being told what to do. They prefer to think for themselves, and may there­fore place less importance on others’ directions.

But another explanation for this, according to some authorities in the field, is that some people with ADHD easily process auditory or ver­bal information but have more of a challenge with visual inputs (this is the “auditory subset” of Hunters). Perhaps it’s the result of being so sensitive to so many inputs simultaneously (“distractability”). Or the preference for auditory processing. Or maybe it’s just not having learned memory strategies as kids.

When you say to a “normal” person, “Go to the store and pick up a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread, and some orange juice, then stop at the gas station and fill up the car on the way home,” the “normal” person will create a mental picture of each of those things as they hear them described. They picture the store, the milk, the bread, the juice, and the gas station. This congruence of verbal and visual images makes for high-quality memory.

But a highly auditory ADHD person may only hear the words, with­out creating the mental pictures so vital to memory. They drive off to the store, repeating to themselves, “Milk, bread, juice, gas; milk, bread, juice, gas ...” until some­thing distracts them and they lose the entire memory.

This problem with auditory processing is fairly well documented among many children with ADHD. However, the percentage of its prevalence among the general, non-ADHD population is unknown. It may be that ADHD people are only slightly more likely to have this problem, or it may be a cardinal symptom/problem.

One ADHD adult described it this way:

“I find my comprehension of long chains of words is improved, vastly, by a picture. That way my brain can directly absorb the pattern. If you un-pattern it and translate it into a linear string of words, then I’m forced to ab­sorb the string and reconstruct the pattern.”

This may also account for the so-very-common reports from parents of ADHD children that their kids are tele­vision addicts and hate to read. Reading requires the pro­cessing of auditory information (words sounded out within the brain into internal pictures), whereas television is purely external visualization. At the residential treatment facil­ity Louise and I ran in New Hampshire, we found it useful to remove the televisions altogether from the residences of ADHD chil­dren. After a few months, the kids began reading, and the habit persisted after the reintroduction of television.

There’s also a debate about the cause of the ADHD/auditory processing problem. One camp says that it’s the result of a hard-wiring problem in the brain, the same mis-wiring problem that’s presumed to cause other ADHD symptoms.

The other camp theorizes that converting auditory information to visual information is a learned behav­ior, acquired by most people about the time they be­come proficient with language, between ages two and five. Because ADHD people “weren’t paying attention,” they may be more likely to have simply missed out on learning this vital skill.

Since the skill of converting words to pictures can be taught to ADHD people with relative ease, the latter theory appears probable.

The visual cortex, taking up much of the back of our heads, is vastly larger than the brain regions that process words, which is probably why making pictures produces a more enduring and vivid memory than trying to memorize lists of words.

Just say to an ADHD child, “Will you please visualize that?” and watch for the characteristic movement of their eyes toward the ceiling, which usually means they’re creating an internal mental image.

If this is done each time instructions are given to an ADD child, eventually (often in a matter of weeks) the child will learn this basic skill of auditory processing and it becomes sec­ond nature.

For ADHD adults, Harry Lorayne’s Memory Book is wonderful, with its heavy emphasis on several methods to teach this skill, along with what Lorayne calls “original awareness,” which is merely a painless method of teaching yourself to pay attention.

Probably the easiest is to imaging absurd or exaggerated pictures when trying to memorize a list. A store so full of bottles of milk that they’re breaking and spilling out of the front door, with the store workers trying to soak the milk with loaves of bread, while the workers are fortifying themselves for the job by drinking giant glasses of orange juice they’re getting from the orange juice fountain that’s been added to the gas pump in front of the store.

The wild nature of the pictures makes them memorable, and if you tie each item to the one before and after it, you can quickly memorize entire lists from front to back and vice-versa.

There are lots of great memory tricks out there (again, Lorayne’s book is a gold mine) that can help both Hunter kids and adults to improve their ability to optimally function in this Farmer’s world!

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Most people think rest is the default human state. Sit still, relax, unwind, unplug, quiet the mind. But for those of us wired as Hunters, rest can feel wrong in our bodies in a way that’s hard to explain to the Farmers around us.

We’re built to scan the horizon, track movement, listen between the lines, and stay ready to move. When the world gets quiet, our nervous systems don’t relax: they get jumpy. Peace and calm aren’t soothing; they can feel like something’s about to go wrong.

There’s a reason so many people with ADHD say they do their best work the night before a deadline or feel more focused during a crisis than during a routine afternoon. Our brains evolved for threat detection, novelty response, and rapid adaptation.

There’s solid neuroscience behind this. Research shows that the ADHD brain has reduced baseline dopamine and increased sensitivity to stimulation, which makes urgency, danger, or high stakes feel regulating rather than disruptive. Farmers, by contrast, have nervous systems optimized for predictability, repetition, and slow rewards. They don’t need adrenaline or novelty to keep their attention online.

This is why a quiet afternoon with nothing pressing can feel unbearable to a Hunter. It’s not laziness or even restlessness, it’s biology. Our nervous systems equate “nothing happening” with vulnerability.

When crops fail, Farmers recalibrate, but when a storm comes over the ridge, Hunters mobilize. In crisis, our brains finally match the environment around us, and that click into alignment can feel like relief. The cortisol and adrenaline rush that stresses Farmers can make a Hunter’s mind sharpen and settle. It isn’t pathology, it’s wiring.

Think about firefighters, war correspondents, ER doctors, company founders, investigative journalists, first responders, and certain kinds of artists and activists. These aren’t random career choices. Hunters gravitate toward work where intensity, unpredictability, and immediacy are part of the deal.

It’s also why so many of us have been called “chaos magnets” or accused of creating drama when life gets too calm. But we’re not addicted to chaos: we’re calibrated for motion.

Stillness is not the same thing as restoration for a Hunter. Sitting still with nothing engaging the mind can feel like being trapped in a stalled car with the engine idling and no gears to shift into. The popular idea of self-care—lounging, silence, doing nothing—often makes us more anxious, not less.

Farmers restore through stillness; Hunters restore through movement, variety, imagination, or intense focus on something compelling. For some, that might be hiking, playing music, diving into a project, repairing something, learning a new skill, or immersing completely in a fictional world. For others it might be working out, paddleboarding, or getting lost in research at 2 AM. What looks like “doing” to a Farmer might actually be rest for a Hunter.

And real rest does matter. Without it, burnout comes fast and hard. But Hunter-rest is active, not passive. Our version of recovery often looks like switching gears rather than shutting down entirely.

It might be rapid-fire conversation with an interesting person, traveling somewhere new, reorganizing a workspace while listening to a podcast, or immersing in a hobby with total focus. Flow is the Hunter’s sanctuary. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow states makes the case that humans feel grounded when a challenge is just hard enough to fully capture attention. Hunters tend to live at the doorstep of that threshold.

The other challenge is that many of us grew up being told to “calm down,” “sit still,” “stop overreacting,” or “relax.” We learned to equate our own regulation system with being dysfunctional.

But look at where humanity needed Hunters: tracking prey, navigating danger, scanning for threats, ranging across territory. You don’t do those things by zoning out and breathing slowly for 20 minutes. You do it by staying alert, moving fast, reacting quickly, and trusting your instincts.

The trick isn’t to learn how to be a Farmer. It’s to learn how to let your nervous system downshift in ways that work for it.

That might mean interval rest rather than long stretches of inactivity. It might mean controlled novelty instead of total disengagement. It might mean embracing the fact that your version of calm is a quiet hum instead of silence. A lot of so-called “bad habits” are actually regulation strategies that were shamed out of us: stimming, pacing, fidgeting, talking to think, bouncing between tasks, or seeking stimulation. When recast as intentional rather than impulsive, they become tools instead of liabilities.

There’s nothing wrong with you if peace feels like pressure and pressure feels like clarity. The world still needs Farmers to stabilize systems, but it needs Hunters to respond when systems fail, shift, or surprise.

The goal isn’t to suppress the wiring; it’s to recognize it, honor it, and learn how to rest in motion rather than shutting down to prove you can. The nervous system you have isn’t a flaw. It’s a survival design. The more you live in line with it, the less exhausted you’ll be by pretending otherwise.

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Why do so many of us Hunters with ADHD feel boredom in a way that’s almost unbearable? It’s not just “I’d rather be doing something else.” It’s like a kind of suffocation, a buzzing sense that you have to escape the moment or crawl out of your own skin.

Teachers, bosses, even friends sometimes mistake it for laziness or lack of interest, but new research suggests something deeper: people with ADHD may experience boredom more intensely because of the way our brains handle attention and working memory. In other words, it’s not a character flaw. It’s a wiring difference.

A recent study, published in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and summarized by PsyPost, examined 88 college students. About a third scored high on ADHD traits, while the rest served as controls. The researchers asked participants to complete tasks that measured their ability to sustain attention, juggle information in working memory, and manage distractions. They also gave them an eight-item “boredom proneness” scale.

The results were striking: the students with ADHD traits reported much higher boredom proneness — almost two full standard deviations above their peers — and they performed worse on tasks requiring attention control and working memory. The pattern was clear: weaker executive function predicted higher susceptibility to boredom.

That’s a big deal, because boredom isn’t just an annoyance. For Hunters with ADHD, it can derail school, jobs, and relationships. Think of sitting in a long meeting where nothing new happens for twenty minutes. A neurotypical brain may find it dull but manageable. An ADHD brain feels like it’s starving for input.

That hunger for stimulation often pushes us into fidgeting, daydreaming, or, if escape is possible, jumping to something else entirely. It’s not a lack of willpower: it’s the nervous system begging for oxygen.

The researchers behind this study point to two cognitive mechanisms: attention control and working memory. Attention control is the ability to resist distractions and keep your focus on one thing. Working memory is the ability to hold and manipulate information over short periods.

If either system lags, even mildly, tasks that demand sustained mental effort feel like pushing a boulder uphill. Add in a lecture that’s poorly structured or a job task with little novelty, and boredom becomes almost inevitable. The effort required to keep your brain engaged simply outweighs the payoff.

This also fits with what neuroscientists call the low-arousal theory of ADHD. Our brains tend to operate in a state of under-stimulation. We Hunters seek novelty, challenge, and movement because they temporarily raise arousal to a level that feels normal. That’s why many ADHD kids doodle, tap their feet, or interrupt: they’re not trying to be rude, they’re trying to wake up their brains. When stimulation is missing, boredom rushes in like a vacuum.

You can see this play out in everyday life. A Hunter student with ADHD might be fascinated by organic chemistry in principle, but if the lecture is monotone and dense, their working memory overloads and attention collapses. The subjective experience isn’t “this is difficult” but “this is boring.”

At work, the Hunter employee with ADHD might start strong on a project but fall apart when the task shifts into repetitive detail. The mind drifts, emails get checked, snacks get eaten, and suddenly the task becomes intolerable.

Friends and colleagues may not understand that this is the same brain that can hyperfocus on video games or creative projects for hours. To us Hunters, the distinction between “boring” and “stimulating” is a gulf as wide as night and day.

So what do we do about it? The first step is reframing boredom as a signal rather than a personal failure. When someone with ADHD feels bored, it doesn’t mean they don’t care. It means their attention systems are struggling to meet the demands of the environment. Instead of shaming ourselves for not being “disciplined enough,” we can experiment with strategies that help balance stimulation and focus.

One strategy is to break tasks into smaller, more varied chunks. Rather than slogging through a two-hour writing session, divide it into 20-minute sprints with breaks in between. Novelty itself is a form of stimulation, so simply changing the way a task is structured can reduce boredom.

Another approach is to add external stimulators. Background music, fidget tools, or even standing instead of sitting can give the nervous system just enough input to stay engaged. A popular technique called “body doubling” pairs you with another person — virtually or in person — so the shared presence provides accountability and stimulation that counteracts boredom.

Environment also matters. ADHD brains often perk up when the scenery shifts. Rotating between a coffee shop, a library, and a home office can give each work session a different flavor. Even small sensory changes — like chewing gum, using scented candles, or switching playlists — can refresh focus. These tricks aren’t about avoiding work; they’re about building an environment where attention systems can function without constant collapse.

There’s also a deeper cultural piece here. For too long, society has equated boredom with laziness or lack of grit. But this research shows boredom can be an involuntary state tied to brain function.

If we treat it as a moral failing, we stigmatize people with ADHD and miss opportunities to support them. If we treat it as a neurological signal, we can design classrooms, workplaces, and homes that recognize and accommodate different attention needs.

A Farmer may be content plowing straight lines in the same field all day. A Hunter’s mind, wired to scan the horizon for prey and danger, needs constant shifts in focus. Both are valid human strategies. The danger comes when one is mistaken for weakness.

Of course, the study has its limits. The sample was small, mostly female, and didn’t include formal ADHD diagnoses, just self-reported traits. We can’t assume the findings apply equally to children, older adults, or clinically diagnosed ADHD populations.

But the direction is promising. The researchers plan to expand their work to larger groups and test how boredom interacts with academic performance. They also want to experimentally induce boredom in controlled settings to better understand cause and effect. Each step adds nuance to a picture that many of us with ADHD already know in our bones: boredom hits harder, and it’s not by choice.

The bottom line is this: when people with ADHD say they’re bored, they’re not whining. They’re describing a brain state that can feel unbearable and destructive if ignored. But with the right strategies—novelty, stimulation, environment shifts, body doubling—boredom can become a cue for action rather than a dead end.

The research backs up what our lived experience has always told us. We’re not broken. We’re wired differently. Hunters don’t thrive in a Farmer’s world by pretending to be Farmers. We thrive by recognizing our wiring, using the tools that work for us, and reshaping environments so our attention can lock onto what matters. When we do, boredom stops being our enemy and becomes our compass.

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When society talks about ADHD it too often frames it as a deficit, a disorder, a problem to be managed. The stereotype is the distracted child in class, unable to sit still, or the adult missing deadlines and losing keys.

But what happens when we turn that lens around and look instead at the contexts where ADHD traits are not just useful, but essential? It turns out that what frustrates teachers and managers in rigid environments are the same traits that allow people to thrive in fast‑moving, creative, unpredictable worlds.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of ADHD is hyperfocus. Popular culture portrays ADHD as endless distraction—but anyone who lives it knows distraction is only half the story. The other half is the power to lock onto a task so deeply that hours vanish and the world fades away.

Studies show that those with ADHD traits experience hyperfocus more acutely. In traditional classrooms that may look like ignoring math homework to build complex Lego structures. In modern offices it looks like tuning out email to crack a stubborn problem. Hyperfocus is disruptive when misaligned with expectations. But when channeled into meaningful work it’s nothing short of creative alchemy.

Creativity is another pillar of the Hunter mind, as my old friend Dr. Richard Silberstein pointed out recently. Research consistently links elevated divergent thinking — the ability to generate multiple, unexpected ideas — to ADHD traits, particularly in those with subclinical symptoms. Historic accounts describe how ADHD minds find novel connections, unconstrained by convention.

That’s not chaos: that’s evolutionary advantage. In a farmer’s world, predictability is king. But in a hunter’s world, it's adaptability and innovation that carry the day. A hunter who quickly reimagines a path, tool, or tactic keeps the tribe alive. In the modern world, the same creative energy shows up in art, startups, problem‑solving, activism, even leadership.

Adaptability is often overshadowed, but its importance cannot be overstated. ADHD minds are used to bumping against systems not designed for them. They don’t just survive; they improvise, recover, pivot when plans fail. This adaptability is precisely what kept nomadic hunters alive. Storm hits the camp, prey shifts migration patterns, the water source dries and hunters adjusted quickly.

Today that same trait shines in careers that demand improvisation: emergency response, creative media, politics, even caregiving. ADHD brains don’t crack under pressure: they flex.

Resilience, too, is forged by struggle. People with ADHD have been told they’re lazy, disorganized, distracted. By adulthood, they’ve endured countless failures. Yet here we stand: building businesses, nurturing families, creating work. That persistence is not coincidence: it’s baptism by fire. When life upends plans, they’ve retrained themselves to stand again, act again. In a world buffeted by disruption, resilience is not optional; it’s essential.

None of this — hyperfocus, creativity, adaptability, resilience — translates neatly into the language of Farmer‑world expectations. Hyperfocus looks like absenteeism; creativity like unpredictability; adaptability like noncompliance; resilience like stubbornness. But shift the environment, and the view shifts too. In boardrooms, ADHD can look like innovation. In crises, like leadership. In art, like genius. The problem isn’t the person, it’s the cultural measuring stick.

This is not romanticizing ADHD or ignoring its very real challenges. Impulsivity can damage relationships. Disorganization can derail careers. Inattention can irritate coworkers.

But pathology often lies in environment, not person. If you measure a hunter by plowing a straight row, you’ll call him broken. But measure his ability to spot distant movement, and you see a protector. Likewise, when you align ADHD traits with the right contexts, the so‑called weaknesses become superpowers.

The tide is changing. Employers are rediscovering the power of neurodiversity. ADHD minds — once sidelined — are now prized for creativity and pattern recognition in organizations like SAP, Microsoft, and HP. They show that when organizations stop expecting everyone to canal‑adapt to neurotypical norms, the performance of all employees improves. Stories abound of people acing interviews, bosses stepping back, roles pivoting, strength surfacing.

Recent news reminds us that ADHD traits may have been adaptive in humanity’s earliest chapters. One study had adults play an online foraging game, where the goal was to collect berries from bushes that gradually depleted. Participants with higher ADHD‑like traits left low‑yield patches earlier and collected more berries overall.

The researchers interpreted this as modern evidence of an evolutionary trait: flexibility in resource gathering. The Hunter brain thrives on exploration. It was — and remains — a survival tool, not a flaw.

And let’s remember the genetics behind the story. My Hunter‑Farmer Hypothesis proposes that ADHD traits are not mal‐adaptations but holdovers from nomadic societies where hyperfocus, distractibility, and impulsivity were adaptive. Recent genomic research supports the idea that ADHD‑associated alleles persisted — and even thrived — during human evolution because of the advantages they conferred in dynamic hunting/gathering environments.

What does this mean for those who live with ADHD? It means opportunity. To see yourself not as defective, but as different. Not broken, but built for a different world. When environments shift — from assembly lines to startups, from lecture halls to project studios — you begin to sense the places where your mind doesn’t just cope, it excels. That’s the real transformation.

So here’s what I’d say to hunter minds wherever you are: you know who you are. You shine under pressure. You light up around problems, ideas, crises. You bristle at monotony. The world doesn’t always accommodate you, but it needs you. You’re not missing something. You were built to move fast, adapt, think wild. That’s your design.

And once you see yourself that way, everything changes. You stop apologizing for your wiring and start seeking contexts where your traits are gifts. You stop forcing yourself to fit a farmer’s mold because you were born to roam, to discover, to create. The world that has underestimated you is just beginning to realize how much it needs you.

Endnotes:

1. Research in attention physiology finds individuals with ADHD traits report more frequent or intense hyperfocus. L. S. Chutko et al., Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Adults, Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology (June 2024) (Wikipedia).

2. Reviews show that higher levels of divergent thinking correlate with subclinical ADHD traits. M. Hoogman, “Creativity and ADHD: A review of behavioral studies,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (2020) (ScienceDirect); see also ADHD-related creativity discussion in ADHD diagnostic research (Wikipedia).

3. ADHD individuals often perform higher on tasks requiring conceptual expansion and idea generation. “The creativity of ADHD,” Scientific American (2019) (Scientific American); also Gail Saltz on divergent thinking in ADHD contexts (Wikipedia).

4. A foraging study using an online game found participants with ADHD-like traits gathered more resources by leaving depleted patches sooner. David Barack et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2024) as reported in The Guardian and Washington Post (The Guardian).

5. Neurodiverse employees, including those with ADHD, are increasingly recognized for strengths in creativity and deep focus. The Times, “Neurodiverse staff well suited to a changing world” (March 20, 2025) (The Times).

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Every September, countless ADHD kids return to school full of promise, only to feel like failures by October. It’s not because they’re lazy, stupid, or broken. It’s because the system was never designed for them in the first place.

We built our modern education system during the Industrial Revolution. Its purpose wasn’t to foster creativity or honor individual strengths—it was to create obedient factory workers and good soldiers. Schools emphasized conformity, repetition, and hierarchy. Sit still. Follow the rules. Memorize and repeat. Don’t ask too many questions.

For kids with ADHD—what I call Hunter brains in a Farmer’s world—this is a death sentence for the spirit.

The Classroom as a Factory

Think about it: a standard classroom requires kids to sit still for long periods, absorb abstract information, and stay quiet unless called on. That’s not how Hunters are wired. A Hunter scans their environment, reacts quickly to movement, explores, wanders. Their learning is active, kinetic, sensory.

Now imagine putting that child in a chair under fluorescent lights for six hours a day. Penalize them when their minds wander. Shame them for blurting out brilliant but untimely observations. Force them to repeat tasks that bore them to tears. That’s not education—that’s imprisonment.

The Myth of the Lazy Kid

One of the most insidious myths about ADHD kids is that they “just need to try harder.” But ADHD isn’t about willpower. It’s about neurological wiring. The hunter brain isn’t motivated by future rewards; it responds to immediate stimuli. It craves novelty, intensity, and challenge. Long-term projects, repetitive drills, or quiet reading time simply don’t register as important. It’s not a choice. It’s chemistry.

This leads to an avalanche of negative feedback: low grades, constant reprimands, damaged self-esteem. The message they internalize is clear: you’re not good enough. And so they begin to disengage, act out, or give up altogether.

Rebellion Is Not a Flaw

We treat rebelliousness in children as a character defect. But sometimes it’s wisdom. Hunter kids resist systems that don’t serve them. That resistance, if nurtured, becomes the same trait that leads adults to become inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, and change-makers.

But too often we crush it early. We reward conformity. We punish curiosity. We drug children into silence.

This isn’t just a tragedy. It’s a massive loss of potential. How many future Einsteins and Edisons have we labeled as disruptive? How many future innovators dropped out to escape systems that refused to see their genius?

Real Learning Happens in Motion

Look at how young children naturally learn: by touching, exploring, imitating, asking questions. That’s a Hunter’s learning style. The farther we move from that model, the more we lose those kids.

Project-based learning, outdoor education, apprenticeships—these approaches work brilliantly for ADHD brains. They restore meaning to the learning process. They offer feedback in real-time. They respect movement, engagement, and challenge.

Why do so many ADHD kids come alive in summer camp, theater, robotics, or sports? Because those environments match their wiring.

What Can We Do?

First, we stop blaming the child.

Then we fight to reform the system. Advocate for alternative learning models that honor multiple intelligences. Support teachers who think outside the box. Push back against standardized testing regimes that reduce learning to a number.

And at home, we tell our Hunter kids the truth: You’re not broken. You’re different. And in many ways, you’re better suited to thrive in a world that desperately needs new thinking.

The modern school system wasn’t built with the hunter in mind. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep using it.

Let’s rebuild it. Let’s build schools where Hunters can run.

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When Jack McFerran, a Goldman Sachs managing director, organized what he called a “parents evening” in London last year, he expected a modest turnout of colleagues dealing with similar challenges. Instead, 600 people flooded the room—executives, their spouses, and partners—all united by a common thread: they were either neurodivergent themselves or parents of neurodivergent children. The success was so overwhelming that Goldman organized another event in New York, drawing 900 attendees, including “heads of one of the largest hedge funds and one of the largest trading institutions flying in with their spouses.”

This isn’t your typical corporate diversity initiative. This is Wall Street’s quiet revolution—a fundamental recognition that the traits historically labeled as “attention deficits” are actually competitive advantages in the world’s most demanding financial markets. And it perfectly validates what the “Hunter in a Farmer’s World” framework has argued for over three decades: ADHD isn’t a disorder to be managed, but a powerful cognitive toolkit that evolved for exactly these kinds of high-stakes, fast-moving environments.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: Hunters Are Outperforming

While Goldman Sachs executives were discovering they weren’t alone in their neurodivergence, research was quietly building an overwhelming case for the Hunter advantage. JPMorgan Chase found that employees hired through their neurodiversity programs were 90% to 140% more productive than neurotypical employees who had been with the company for five to ten years. Hewlett Packard Enterprise reported that neurodiverse teams were 30% more productive than neurotypical ones and made fewer errors.

These aren’t feel-good diversity statistics—they’re bottom-line business results that are impossible to ignore. A report by JPMorgan Chase found that professionals in its Autism at Work initiative made fewer errors and were 90% to 140% more productive than neurotypical employees. In the demanding world of financial services, where a single error can cost millions and split-second decisions determine success, these productivity gains represent a massive competitive advantage.

The Hunter’s Edge in High Finance

A debt capital markets banker who worked at Goldman Sachs for over ten years told eFinancialCareers that “Goldman’s trading floor was full of people with ADHD,” noting that “People with ADHD thrive at places like Goldman—We’re fine if you give us a mission and make the most of our creativity and determination to achieve what might at first seem impossible.”

This observation captures something profound about the Hunter mindset. In our ancestral environments, Hunters needed to rapidly assess changing situations, make quick decisions under pressure, and maintain intense focus when tracking prey. These same traits—hyperfocus, rapid decision-making, comfort with risk, and the ability to spot patterns others miss—are exactly what drive success in modern financial markets.

West Virginia University researcher Nancy McIntyre’s groundbreaking study of 581 entrepreneurs revealed how ADHD functions as a cognitive advantage. She found that entrepreneurs with ADHD use “routines, patterns and habits like a big net that captures and stores stimuli from the environment for later use.” As McIntyre explained, “Someone with ADHD and high entrepreneurial intent might go to a big event and meet person after person with knowledge, advice, contact information, venture capital or other resources to offer. Because their mind tends to hop all over the place, they’re making lots of connections and filing them in a way that allows them to use those resources in the future.”

Corporate America’s Great Awakening

The Goldman Sachs parents evenings represent just the tip of a massive shift in corporate thinking. Goldman Sachs launched its Neurodiversity Hiring Initiative in 2019, providing eight-week paid internships for individuals with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other neurodivergent conditions. In 2024, candidates brought forward by their partner organization Specialisterne had a 100% offer and acceptance rate.

But Goldman is far from alone in this revolution. JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, IBM, Ford Motor Company, EY, SAP, and DXC Technology have all implemented comprehensive neurodiversity programs. These companies aren’t hiring neurodivergent employees out of charity—they’re doing it because the business case is overwhelming.

Tony Lloyd, CEO of the UK ADHD Foundation, reports that “30% of entrepreneurs have ADHD or dyslexia or both and that university graduates with ADHD are twice as likely to start their own business.” Major corporations are waking up to the fact that they’ve been overlooking a talent pool that consistently outperforms in key metrics.

The Science Behind the Hunter Advantage

The corporate world’s embrace of neurodivergence isn’t just anecdotal—it’s backed by solid science. Research suggests that teams with neurodivergent professionals in some roles can be 30% more productive than those without them, with inclusion and integration of neurodivergent professionals also boosting team morale.

McIntyre’s research identified three key qualities that make ADHD entrepreneurs successful: alertness (recognizing business opportunities, reading voraciously, and maintaining environmental awareness), adaptability (changing course when appropriate and challenging assumptions), and entrepreneurial intent (commitment to establishing their own business and actively searching for opportunities).

This aligns perfectly with the Hunter profile: individuals whose brains are wired for constant environmental scanning, rapid adaptation to changing circumstances, and the willingness to take calculated risks. As one researcher noted, “entrepreneurs with ADHD are likely to be very responsive to innovation while underreacting to potential risks”—exactly the mindset needed for breakthrough thinking.

The Mismatch Problem: Square Pegs, Round Holes

Despite this potential, current statistics remain stark: just 29% of people aged 16-64 with autism are employed, and even fewer people with severe or specific learning difficulties are employed at just 26.2%. The unemployment rate for neurodivergent adults runs as high as 30-40%, three times higher than the rate for people with physical disabilities.

This massive unemployment rate isn’t a reflection of capability—it’s evidence of systematic mismatch between Hunter traits and Farmer institutions. The CIPD February 2024 Neuroinclusion at Work Report found that just 51% of managers appreciated the value of neurodiversity, and worse still, just 46% felt capable and confident to support neurodivergent individuals in the workplace.

The Hunter Renaissance

What we’re witnessing isn’t just corporate adaptation—it’s the beginning of a Hunter renaissance. The latest 2025 Neurodiversity Index Report from the City & Guilds Foundation focuses on “understanding the power of different minds at work,” marking a fundamental shift from viewing neurodivergence as accommodation to recognizing it as competitive advantage.

The World Economic Forum’s October 2024 briefing paper on neurodiversity presents evidence that integrating neuro-inclusion strategies not only promotes mental and behavioral health of all employees but also leverages unique perspectives and strengths to drive innovation and complex problem-solving.

Companies are finally recognizing what the Hunter framework has long argued: that the same traits that make traditional school and corporate environments challenging for people with ADHD—constant environmental scanning, rapid task-switching, comfort with uncertainty, and hyperfocus on areas of interest—are precisely the cognitive tools needed for innovation, entrepreneurship, and complex problem-solving in our rapidly changing economy.

The Future is Neurodivergent

As Goldman’s Jack McFerran noted after witnessing the overwhelming response to their parents evenings, “When people see that leaders are open to conversations and inclusive, when they take a chance and are able to share, then others will reach out.” This represents “a new and welcome era of vulnerability” where financial leaders are recognizing that their neurodivergence isn’t a limitation—it’s their competitive edge.

The Hunter traits that helped our ancestors survive in unpredictable environments—rapid decision-making, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, and the ability to maintain intense focus when necessary—are exactly what modern organizations need to thrive in an increasingly complex and fast-moving business landscape.

We’re not witnessing the accommodation of a disability; we’re seeing the recognition of a cognitive superpower. The question isn’t whether companies can afford to hire neurodivergent talent—it’s whether they can afford not to. In a world where innovation determines survival and adaptation drives success, the Hunters aren’t just joining the corporate world—they’re leading it.

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I’m probably a poster boy for ADHD; it’s been, throughout my life, my biggest blessing and my biggest curse. Particularly when I need to focus on something boring.

My Hunter brain is easily distracted, subject to flights of fancy when I’m trying to concentrate, and constantly on alert for danger or new opportunities for stimulation. While this made my high school and college studies hell, it’s also led me all over the world through several lifetimes of learnings and adventures.

Sitting down in front of a computer — as I am as I write this — to produce a thoughtful article (or any other sort of “homework”) has always been a challenge. But somewhere in my twenties I discovered that if I’m listening to music it somehow keeps my brain in a focused groove.

Now science is catching up with my discovery from fifty years ago. A new study published by Northeastern University music professor Psyche Loui finds that music appears to “tune” the brain in ways that cause it to ignore external distractions.

Loui and her researchers took both EEG readings and MRI scans of around 40 study participants while they engaged in computer tasks that required sustained attention. They compared the readings and scans with music, pink noise, and silence, and found that music alone had the ability to enhance focus.

“The brain actually oscillates at certain frequencies,” Dr. Loui noted. “If you insert those frequencies into the music, that might influence your activity in those same frequencies in the brain — we saw that the brain was very clearly ‘phase locking,’ or [working] in time to these amplitude modulations that were inserted in the music.”

She added:

“People who experience ADHD symptoms are more sensitive to this.”

My experience has been that when I listen to music it must not have words; music and words are processed by different parts of the brain (Wernicke’s and Broca’s regions, near the left and right ears) and when I’m trying to organize words for the page the words in the songs get in the way.

As a result, I’ve developed a few instrumental playlists that correspond with the mood of my writing. When I’m writing something upbeat, I listen to upbeat easy listening music; when I’m writing about politics I listen to Carmina Burana type music; and for general stuff I mostly listen to George Winston’s piano or John Fahey’s guitar albums.

Dr. Loui notes that kids often want to listen to music when doing their homework, particularly ADHD kids, and parents tend to try to discourage it for fear it’ll cause a distraction. Instead, I’d suggest, parents should be encouraging music: it’s a lot cheaper and has fewer side effects than Ritalin!

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One of the easiest ways to learn something is to learn it backwards.

Over the years, a number of NLP practitioners reported that their “learning disabled” and ADHD clients, both children and adults, had difficulty making stable, clear imaginary pictures. Somehow, for some reason that nobody knows but more than a few suspect has to do with watching television, these people have either lost or never developed in the first place the ability to consciously create pictures in their heads.

The visual cortex, that part of the occipital portion of the brain that processes images, is absolutely huge when compared to just about any other single-function part of the brain. It’s ten to fifty times larger (depending on how narrowly you define it), for example, than the temporal-region auditory processing areas such as Wernicke’s or Broca’s regions on either side of the head. It occupies most of the back of the head and is huge.

The reason for this is pretty obvious when you think of it. In the one microsecond-long picture — what you see right now when you look up quickly from this article and then back — there are literally billions of individual elements which go to make up that image. For the brain to process this, for us to be able to discriminate between over a million different colors, and to remember these images for years at a time, takes enormous brain processing horsepower.

For this reason, the visual part of the brain is one of the most powerful tools you have available in your mental toolkit. And it’s why if you can see something, or make a picture of it, you’ll remember it long, long, long after the “rote memory” (trying to remember the words by repeating them) part has gone.

Unfortunately, this simple fact about how we learn hasn’t yet made a complete transit from the laboratory to the classroom. Teachers still ask kids to recite things over and over, trying to cram them into those tiny auditory-processing parts of the brain, in order to memorize them. Very little emphasis is put on making pictures, except perhaps by the occasional highly-visual teacher.

So, to learn something, make a picture of it.

Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom, and over your head is one of those thought-balloons like in the comic strips. And in that thought balloon is a picture of you drawing a picture on an easel. If you can make that picture, one of the strongest memories you’ll carry away from this book is that you can learn things when you make a picture of them.

But, as mentioned earlier, many “learning disabled” people — those with “deficits” and “disorders” — have a difficult time making pictures. Their imagination apparatus has become sluggish.

Fortunately, the solution is easy and painless. As with learning to ride a bike or drive a car or read or type or anything else, there is one main thing which will quickly produce proficiency at making mental pictures: practice.

But how does a person know when they’re making good mental pictures? This is where the “backwards” part comes in.

Try this experiment. Find somebody — child or adult — who thinks of themselves as a poor speller. Get a few vocabulary words that they don’t know how to spell and would like to learn. Let’s say that one of those words is, for example, Connecticut. Or for the younger set, perhaps llama.

Now, have them make a mental picture of the map of the state of Connecticut or of a llama. When they say they have the picture, ask them to use a mental paintbrush to paint the word on the picture, one letter at a time, saying the letters out loud as they do it.

Now comes the reality test. If they’re really a “disabled” poor speller, odds are that they made a fuzzy, jiggling, poorly defined picture, and therefore can’t easily pull it back up and read the word off it.

So, ask them to look at the picture and to read the word off of it backwards. In order to do this, they must stabilize their picture. And that exercise of stabilizing the picture, done just a few times (sometimes it takes as many as twenty or thirty repetitions, each time with a different word), teaches them how to make clear, stable, useful pictures.

Memory teacher Harry Lorayne takes this a step further. If you can make a picture, he says, and make it an absurd picture, then you’ll have instantly committed something to memory.

This method, which Aristotle first taught as a way of memorizing speeches (he called it the Loci method, since he used absurd objects mentally placed in his house as speech-item reminders), has been around for a long time.

This is the basis of techniques to remember people’s names: think of Pat running around and patting everybody on the butt, or Loraine having rain pouring out of her hair and over her face, or Bill covered with dollar bills, or Dick…well…with an ice-pick for a nose. (See how hard it is not to imagine things?)

If you need to remember a to-do list, just make each item absurd and then link them together. The store is exploding with loaves of bread popping out of the windows. They’re raining down on the bank down the street. This is causing money to flow out the front door of the bank like a river, right into the front door of the dry-cleaner’s shop.

Pick up the bread, cash the check, pick up the clothes. The list could as easily be twenty items as three.

When NLP practitioners began teaching kids — particularly ADHD kids — how to dissolve their spelling disability by reading off pictures backwards and practicing making absurd images, many noticed an interesting side effect: the kids became more proficient learners in virtually every area of academics.

They became better and faster learners of life skills. They could follow directions. They didn’t lose things as often. They had learned how to learn.

It’s all about those pictures and harnessing the horsepower evolution or the gods gave us to see and instantly process our world.

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Leif Roland is one of the most effective psychologists I know. He runs Gestalt and NLP therapy groups, does individual therapy in Atlanta, and is solidly grounded in the notion that people are individuals and not labels.

Over lunch some years ago, Leif presented to me a startling and fascinating view of one possible reason for why we have ADHD.

“I grew up in Denmark in the 1950s,” Leif said. “My parents told me stories and read to me. In school we read constantly, and for recreation at night at home we’d either read or listen to the radio.

“As a consequence, I’m a very competent auditory learner. When I hear things, I’m quite good at understanding them and processing the information within them. When I’m doing therapy, I find it easy to listen to a person and discover what they’re really saying, what their deeper levels of meaning are. I can hear subtleties in their tone of voice that others may miss, for example, and this is useful in my work.

“But what I’m seeing increasingly among my clients is that more and more people, particularly here in America, are visual learners. They don’t listen well, or at least don’t understand or process what they’re hearing, but instead they use their eyes to experience and learn from the world.”

After that lunch with Leif, I went home and dug out a picture book of The New York Times which dated back to the last century. Reading articles written a hundred years ago, I was struck by how detailed they were, how linear and methodical, and how dense and turgid was the writing style.

My father had given me some textbooks he’d kept from high school in the 1940s, and I dug them out. His 7th grade history text would intimidate a modern college freshman. The tests in his 8th grade English textbook would overwhelm most college graduates I’ve interviewed for employment in the past ten years (and there have been dozens, if not over a hundred).

The Conservative Curmudgeon view of this transition in education is that our schools have become more permissive, weaker in their emphasis on learning, and less willing or able to discipline, threaten, or force children to learn. This has spawned a back-to-the-basics movement that’s most visible in the Christian schools and military academies, but even there the levels of academic achievement which were the norms in 1920 are rarely achieved.

Certainly modern children have more distractions and more alternatives to paying attention in school. There are TV, movies, phones, the mall, the mobility of automobiles, social media, and all the many lures of modern society (many provided by companies with a specific profit/sales agenda). There’s also an increased lack of parental involvement in the educational process as more parents are divorcing or, in this post-Reagan “gut the middle class” era, both parents must work to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

But many educators say these simple answers couldn’t possibly be at the real core of modern children’s relative inability to learn in the classroom.

“It’s gotta be something deeper, something more structural within the brain,” one 60ish Southern California teacher told me when we were discussing this after a speech I’d given in suburban Los Angeles. “These kids are somehow fundamentally different from the way I was and from the way my parents were.”

Could it be that this difference is real, and that what it’s really about is the transition people are making from an auditory to a visual learning style?

While some educators point to the 1960s as the time when our schools “collapsed” or became too permissive, that period of time also coincides with the first generation of children raised with TV.

So much of our information now comes to us visually. More than two decades ago, television replaced newspapers as the primary way most people obtain their news. And newspapers, even though they’re silent, are essentially auditory: we hear the words in our head as we read them.

About the time that TV really set in, studies began to show that children spent more time watching TV than they did interacting with their family or their peers.

Print media has become more visual: USA Today is sometimes referred to by old-school newspaper reporters as “TV journalism in print,” and probably the publishers wouldn’t altogether disavow that description. The news is presented in highly visual, easily digested bites, perfect for both the busy executive and the attention-span-deficient person.

Advertising, compared with 40 years ago, is wildly more visual and less verbal. Rare are the ads with more than a few paragraphs of copy, whereas ads from the last century were often nothing but words. Best-selling books are translated into movies to reach wider audiences: that simple transition can increase dramatically the audience for a writer’s work.

Even the nature of best-selling books has changed. Modern novels are highly visual and easy to read and sell in the millions. On the other hand, do you know anybody who has chosen to take Melville or Joyce or Dostyevsky with him or her for vacation reading? If even one name comes to mind, that’s no doubt the proverbial exception that proves the rule: writing that has depth is no longer popular with the masses.

Both our society and the world in general are becoming more visual. But many of our institutions, particularly our schools, have not kept up. Our educational institutions were developed over hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of years during which the oral, and then the written, tradition reigned. We moved from telling stories around the fire to lecturing in class. Speech-making is still the primary educational model, augmented by reading assignments—all auditory teaching methods.

Yet the children who are in these school and college classrooms are now conditioned virtually from birth to learn by visual means. The result is that while the teacher is speaking English (at least in American schools), it may as well be Greek, because after ten or fifteen minutes the auditory-learning attention-span has been exceeded and the child is no longer paying attention.

Until our children are again taught to be good auditory processors (not likely to happen in any home that has a TV or gives their kids smartphones), or our educational institutions begin to offer far more visual and stimulating forms of education (not likely to happen in these days of budget crises), there will continue to be an epidemic of children who seemingly just can’t learn. And they are often diagnosed as having ADHD.

The first solution to this is to read to your children, from birth to their teenage years. Reduce the amount of TV that your kids are allowed to watch and keep them away from screens. And engage them in conversation whenever possible, challenging them to think and reason.

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Criminologists note that two of the fastest growing segments of the criminal population are teen and pre-teen murderers. Children are being convicted of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and one of the shocking qualities of these young killers, robbers, and rapists is that they often express no remorse whatever for their crimes. They lack empathy, the ability to imagine what it must be like to be another person, to live within another person’s skin, to feel the feelings that another person might have.

Startling evidence of this is trend in its early stages was found in the 1996 report of the U.S. Justice Department, which found that murders committed by teenagers in the United States had tripled in just ten years. The number of teenagers using guns to commit murder had quadrupled. Numbers are down substantially since the 2021, but this is still a very real crisis.

This is of concern since both children and adults with ADHD often score low on tests that measure empathy. And the trend seems to be increasing: children are more likely to be non-empathetic than are their equally-ADHD parents. Some psychologists speculate that they’ll also grow up to be less empathetic adults than their parents (although at this moment no studies of this have been done that I could find.)

Why would this be?

So far, no one has offered a reasonable explanation, other than to note the fact that children and adults with ADHD are often less empathetic than their non-ADHD peers.

I believe, however, that there is a cause. It’s specific and definable, and when considered carefully makes perfect sense. When I first thought of this I was in California at dinner, before giving a speech to an ADHD support group. So I bounced the idea off two psychologists and a psychiatrist who had joined us at dinner. All thought it had merit, so I shared it with others, got similar responses, and now I offer it up for your consideration.

The Loss of Fiction

To have and express empathy requires that a person has had opportunities in life to imagine what it’s like to be another person. While some may say this is an inborn characteristic, studies of sociopaths who grew up in violently abusive situations, and animal studies (yes, animals can show empathy, particularly primates), indicate that to a large extent empathy is learned.

So how and where and when do we learn empathy?

Certainly to some extent it’s learned in the family, observing how parents and siblings express their feelings and hearing them tell stories of how they feel or how they reacted to certain situations. But in our modern TV- and screen-driven society, this type of interaction is diminishing.

Another source of empathy-learning opportunity comes from peer groups, although children are notoriously cruel and pre-empathetic. While peer-group interaction provides an important opportunity for children to learn empathy, it may not be the most important. And when the peer groups themselves are based in non-empathetic behaviors (such as gangs), peer groups may actually serve to either deter the learning of empathy or to cause children or adults to suppress empathetic behaviors.

Television, the movies, and the theater all seem as if they would represent opportunities for children to learn empathy, but in fact none offers the opportunity to really get inside another person’s skin. We can observe people’s reactions in these media, but we don’t know what they’re really thinking.

Only fiction, principally in the form of the novel (and, lesser, in short stories), offers the opportunity to get inside the mind of another person.

While it’s true that our internal world literally ends at the edge of our skin, with a well-written novel the reader actually has an opportunity to vicariously inhabit the body and mind and soul of another human being. Novels don’t just show action and dialogue like TV and movies; they present thoughts.

The reader knows what the scene looks like not because of the novelist’s description, but because the skillful novelist shows us what the character is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting.

When reading a well-written novel, we’re actually inside the mind of another person; we sense the world with their senses, feel their reactions, and know their thoughts.

This is a powerful tool to teach and build empathy.

For the first hundred millennia of human history this was played out by oral tradition. Zog sat around the campfire and regaled the tribe with tales of his ancestors or of his hunt, how he felt, what he saw, how terrified he was as the tiger chased him through the forest.

With the advent of written language and then the printing press, the oral tradition was replaced by the written word and then the book. For the past five or six thousand years this was the main way stories were told and empathy was taught.

Then came television and screens.

Numerous researchers have chronicled the rise in television viewing since it spread like Kudzu across the American landscape in the 1960s. They’ve noted over and over again that the more television children watch, the less likely they are to perform well academically, and the less likely they are to read for recreation.

Marie Winn, author of The Plug-In Drug, and others have carefully chronicled the correlation between TV watching and criminal behavior, particularly violent behavior. Many point to the content of the TV shows as feeding violent instincts and tendencies.

But literature and oral tradition have been filled with violence for nearly all of human history. The Bible, for example, has books within it that recite one gory story of mass murder after another, along with rules of behavior which have death as the penalty for breaking. Traditional fairy tales and children’s stories are filled with violence. TV may be drenching children with violence, or at least educating them how to be violent, but it may not be as responsible for the loss of empathy as is the loss of what TV has come to replace: reading fiction that lets us into the minds, the inner thoughts, the feelings, the internal realities of the lives of other people.

This is not to suggest that ADHD is caused by people not reading, but some symptoms and co-morbidities, particularly lack of empathy and poor academic skills, certainly could be.

Reading is a focusing exercise, training young brains to maintain their attention on a single thing for a long period of time. Unlike TV and the internet, which have fast-moving images and therefore don’t train a longer attention span, reading requires effort, thus training the brain in this regard.

Reading is also an academic exercise. It trains the processing of language into visual imagery which is so essential to functional long-term memory, and with practice people learn to read faster and faster. This, of course, can only benefit schoolwork.

Finally, reading is an empathy exercise. When a child is reading Tom Sawyer or a teenager is reading one of Toni Morrison’s novels, they are engaging in the core-activity of empathy: vicariously experiencing the life of another.

But there’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon at work here. Children with ADHD are less likely to become excited about reading at a young age, perhaps because of ADHD is, in part, often a learning disability or perhaps because our schools are so poorly set up to teach ADHD children to read. Whatever the cause, the effect is that kids with ADHD tend to read less well, and so recreational reading is difficult for them.

This difficulty means they often don’t become hooked on reading fiction at a young age, and may grow into adulthood without ever having read anything not required by school. Because they’re not reading for recreation they’re not improving their reading skills, making recreational reading an ongoing difficulty.

Try an experiment. Ask several of the ADHD children or adults you know how many novels they’ve read in their lives, and in the past few years. Then ask yourself which of these people seems the most capable or incapable of showing or experiencing empathy. I predict that your results will be the same as were mine when I did this: the less fiction a person reads, the less empathetic they often appear and may, in fact, be.

Read to your children. Get them addicted to good fiction. It may take having them listen to books on tape during a long trip in the car (we did this with all our kids), or reading to them every night before bed (ditto). Read instead of watching TV as a family activity: all these are ways to get kids hooked on fiction and build their learning empathy.

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A few years ago I heard a fellow who was ridiculing the idea that there may be such a thing as ADHD point out that “there is no ADHD in front of a video game.” He went on to conclude that “if ADHD goes away in one environment, like the video arcade, but appears in another environment, like the school, then where is the real problem? Is it in the person or the environment?”

While this argument was meant to imply that there’s no such thing as ADHD, it suffers from a basic flaw in logic. Virtually all children can be transfixed by a video game, yet only a minority (albeit a substantial and growing one) are unable to succeed in school because of attentional problems.

This implies some sort of fragility in their attentional structure or ability to learn that simply doesn’t show up in front of a video game, but becomes apparent in the classroom; it doesn’t indicate that there’s no such thing as ADHD.

A fascinating but largely overlooked study was published a few decades ago that measured how far a child with ADHD could be pushed— with and without medication— to do unfamiliar schoolwork. They found that if the amount of unfamiliar material a child was asked to learn or read exceeded the 15% to 30% range, then ADHD children experienced a breakdown in their ability to complete tasks, to stay on-task, and to comprehend the material.

When they were given stimulant medication, however, their ability to stay on-task dramatically improved and there was a slight improvement in their task comprehension — but their ability to complete tasks actually dropped.

The startling part, however, came when they changed the difficulty of the schoolwork. Shifting the percentage of new material to the 3% to 7% range, suddenly all the ADHD children’s ADHD school problems vanished — both when they were medicated and when they were not.

Non-ADHD children were equally able to handle the 30% new material and the 7% new material, but ADHD kids needed medication to make the transition into the more difficult classroom. On the other hand, when the ADHD children were allowed to move ahead at their own pace, keeping a daily 3% to 7% new material learned rate, they did as well as, and in some cases better than, their “normal” peers.

ADHD kids apparently have a more fragile learning style. They can handle learning as well as anybody, but only so long as their frustration level isn’t exceeded.

This means that in a classroom where instruction is individualized and/or the children are able to determine their own pace, ADHD children didn’t have a problem: they are able to perform as well as other children. Experience with alternative schools where children set their own pace, home schooling, and one-room schoolhouses where the wide variety of grade levels require each student to move at their own pace, all bear this out: ADHD isn’t a significant problem in these environments.

When ADHD children are confronted with high frustration levels, however, either from too much or too little new material, then ADHD manifests. Because our schools now have an increasing emphasis on standardization of curriculum and scores (with teachers measured on their ability to keep children within these “norms”), it’s not surprising that we see so much ADHD suddenly popping up.

The underfunded, too-large classroom environment is unintentionally designed to bring it out: Johnny’s way ahead of his class, and therefore bored/frustrated in English, while he’s overwhelmed/frustrated in Algebra. In neither case can he control the level of challenge or speed, or amount of information that’s being thrown at him. In both cases he will crash and burn.

This study also points out that while the medication helps children with staying on-task, it’s not doing much at all for their comprehension. But since class-work and homework require staying on-task behavior, and are the primary measurements of grades, medication seems to have a significant and positive effect on a child’s ability to perform in school. It’s important to note, though, that when the medication was withdrawn and the frustration level was brought down from 30% to 7%, these ADHD children performed more than twice as well, medicated or not, in the area of comprehension.

In other words, management and customization of curriculum to keep daily frustration levels above 3% and below 7% has more than twice the positive effect on an ADHD child’s ability to learn than does their taking medication.

It’s unlikely, however, that this customization of curriculum is going to happen anytime soon in our schools. In order to process the largest number of students through the system with the greatest efficiency at the lowest cost, every one must be plugged into a standardized slot, regardless of his or her particular level of comprehension or ability. And this, of course, is a prescription for disaster for ADHD children.

While I know of no similar studies done on adults, it’s probably reasonable to conclude that an adult with ADHD would not have a problem if their job and life situation offered a reasonable but not excessive amount of challenge and stimulation. On the other hand, if they were confronted with continual boredom, or with challenges which overwhelmed them, they’d probably begin to fail in the ways that are classically described in the literature.

Parents must work with the schools to provide more diversity in their curriculum and their teaching methods.

When that’s not available, political action from the local to the national level may be useful. In addition, tutoring, home-schooling, or placing children in a private school have all proved to be viable alternatives to allowing kids to fail in our under-funded and today under-attack public schools.

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It not surprising that it would take Forbes, the magazine that for years had as its slogan “Capitalist Tool,” to point out that the way money is spent in the field of education is truly bizarre. An article some years ago by Peter Brimelow asks the question: “Would any management worth a damn put most of its dollars into its weakest divisions and starve the promising ones of capital?”

The next sentence answers: “Not and live for long.”

Yet, as the article goes on to show in eloquent detail, that is exactly what is happening with funding for our brightest and most gifted children in the U.S. educational system. According to the Department of Education, state and local spending on gifted and talented children is less than two cents per hundred dollars spent. And federal funding for gifted children is never more than one-tenth of one percent.

According to the Department of Education, this is the way federal spending on education is generally allocated:

— 49.8% to “Disadvantaged” ($6.9 billion)
— 30.13% to “Other” including bilingual, vocational, & impact aid ($4.1 billion)
— 20.0% to “Handicapped” ($2.8 billion)
— 0.07% to “Gifted” ($.0096 billion)

What makes this so very distressing is the number of children who are labeled as ADHD but who are also gifted or have above-average intelligence.

James T. Webb and Diane Latimer in a recent issue of the ERIC Digest, list the entire diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Version Three, Revised (DSM-1IIR), and then follow it with: “Almost all of these behaviors, however, might be found in bright, talented, creative, gifted children.”

The specific behavioral characteristics associated with giftedness that Webb identifies are:

1. Poor attention, boredom, daydreaming in specific situations.
2. Low tolerance for persistence on tasks that seem irrelevant.
3. Judgment lags behind development of intellect.
4. Intensity may lead to power struggles with authorities.
5. High activity level; may need less sleep.
6. Questions rules, customs and traditions.

Compare those with Russell Barkley’s list of behaviors associated with ADHD from his “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment,” as summarized by Webb, et al:

1. Poorly sustained attention in almost all situations.
2. Diminished persistence on tasks not having immediate consequences.
3. Impulsivity, poor delay of gratification.
4. Impaired adherence to commands to regulate or inhibit behavior in social contexts.
5. More active, restless, than normal children.
6. Difficulty adhering to rules and regulations.

Which brings us back to our schools. For bright children there’s often only a subtle distinction between giftedness and ADHD, and gifted kids are often misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Rarely, however, are ADHD kids diagnosed as being gifted. Even worse, children who are both gifted and ADHD are almost always merely diagnosed as having ADHD while their giftedness is ignored.

Psychotherapist Lamar Waldron (and my co-author of 2 books) is fond of pointing out that people will almost always frame problems in terms of the tools or experience they can offer as solutions. (As Abraham Maslow famously said: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem in the world looks like a nail.”)

Drug addiction, for example, is viewed by a physician as a medical problem, while a police officer sees it as a criminal problem. Over 80% of our national school resources for special education are for the handicapped, slower, less functional, or learning disabled children.

Since less than one percent is for gifted children, it should come as no surprise to anybody that the standard school response to a gifted ADHD child is to treat the ADHD and ignore the giftedness. Adding insult to injury, many gifted ADHD children find themselves, as a result of their ADHD diagnosis, in a slower-than-normal classroom environment, since they’ve been identified as having a “learning disability.”

Webbs, et al, point out that in a typical classroom, a gifted child may spend one-fourth to one-half of their entire time simply waiting for others to catch up:

“Such children often respond to non-challenging or slow-moving classroom situations by ‘off-task’ behavior, disruptions, or other attempts at self-amusement. This use of extra time is often the cause of the referral for an ADHD evaluation.”

And, in a rather depressing conclusion, they say:

“Do not be surprised if the professional [to whom your child was referred for the ADHD evaluation] has little training in recognizing the characteristics of gifted/talented children.”

Bright children with ADHD are often not identified as having ADHD until the fourth- through ninth-grade levels. This is because they can usually maintain grade-level work with a minimum amount of effort, and don’t “crash and burn” until they hit a grade level or classroom where a high level of performance is required.

By this time, however, they’ve developed a lifetime of skills to just get by, and have missed learning critical study-habit skills, usually absorbed by normal children in the middle elementary years. The result is that the child’s old strategies don’t work, and there are no fallback strategies to call upon.

This explains, in part, both the proliferation and the success of the study-skill classes that so many private tutoring institutions are offering; these are popping up like dandelions in middle and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. They teach children in junior and senior high school the basic study skills that their peers acquired in elementary school, but that they missed.

Those children who are most in need of these skills to make it through boring, mandatory classes (or when they hit challenging, demanding classes) have also missed out on the early-years opportunity to integrate these organizational and study skills seamlessly into their set of skills. Even when they learn how to organize their materials, learn how to study, etc., these skills are not yet habits. They’re not supported by years of practice and reinforcement, and are so far from second-nature that they seem counterintuitive to the child.

And so we see a consistent unevenness in the ability of these gifted ADHD kids to keep it together in school. They attend the study skills class, and their grades shoot up for a month or two. Then they crash and burn and need another dose of technique reminders, all largely because in elementary school their abilities weren’t recognized. The schools don’t usually have specific programs for the gifted even if they have identified them.

The schools’ response to this situation has been to encourage the use of medication and support groups, essentially pointing the finger of blame at the victims, instead of acknowledging the responsibility of an underfunded educational system.

In fact the problem for these bright children is often primarily in the structure of the schools. With less than 1% of total federal and state monies going to programs for gifted children, it’s small wonder that so many psychologists and psychiatrists marvel at the high number of very bright children being referred to them for ADHD diagnoses from schools.

Medication, Smaller Classes

Further evidence of this situation can be seen from the results that innovative schools can obtain with children who have failed in “old fashioned” schools, both public and private. There is no doubt that medication can produce a huge difference in a child’s performance in a school setting, but many schools obtain similar results by simply using smaller classes. This instruction moves at a pace commensurate with the child’s ability to learn, and the teaching is in an active, visual, hands-on fashion consistent with an ADHD child’s learning style.

During the “Ritalin scare” of 1993, stocks of the drug were depleted nationwide. Parents across the country petitioned government agencies and called their congresspersons and senators to demand that Ritalin be reclassified as a Class III controlled substance, easing up on its being lumped into the Class II category along with pharmaceutical cocaine and morphine.

How many of those parents, however, ever bothered to call or write to demand that our schools challenge our children to learn? How many asked that funding for bright children be increased from .07% to some higher number?

The vast majority of parents reading this are probably parents of children who are both ADHD and of above-average intelligence. There’s a self-selection process that’s hard to avoid. Those parents who make the effort to find, buy and read a book tend to be higher in income, and usually higher in intelligence than the average. Such parents tend to produce above-average-intelligence offspring both through genetics and environment.

Over and over again on the ADHD Forum on CompuServe we saw parents complaining that their ADHD-diagnosed children are acting-out in school more out of boredom than anything else.

“My son reads five grade levels above his class,” one parent commented. “He spends most of his time in class trying to sit quietly while the teacher is holding the hands of the slower students. It’s no wonder he gets bored and fidgets.”

The teacher’s prescription, of course, was to medicate this woman’s son. While that would have helped him sit in his seat for the entire class day, and thereby increased his grade scores, it would have done nothing to address the fact he was ready to learn more than the teacher was able or willing to offer.

There was a brief window during the late 1950s and early 1960s when America was shocked by the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik. As a result, numerous programs for gifted children were instituted in elementary and secondary schools across the country. There was a refreshing new emphasis on experimenting with new teaching styles, and teaching more of the hard sciences at early ages.

I was fortunate to be enrolled in these gifted programs from second through sixth grade, which kept me performing well in school and able to read and do math at a college level before entering middle school.

Unfortunately, the Vietnam War brought an end to virtually all of those programs, as national resources were siphoned away from education and moved toward the military. Today, the cost of a single B-2 bomber aircraft is greater than the entire national expenditure on programs for gifted children from 2000 to today combined.

Again, this is not a diatribe against medication or funding the military. The point is that our values have become scrambled in the years since the Nixon administration and then the Reagan Revolution both took an axe to public school funding. Private schools and home schooling grew in popularity because they filled a post-Nixon void left by public schools: educational opportunity for gifted children.

As Brimelow points out in Forbes:

“So the problem appears to be a classic one in economics: Resources are limited — where should they be allocated to get the best return?”

Here again, we see how some really bright ADHD children are identified as being distractible and impulsive: they’re too intelligent for their grade level and our educational system offers them no options. In short, they’re bored silly.

Programs for gifted children need the levels of funding they enjoyed during the Kennedy administration, before they were slashed by Nixon to pay for the Vietnam war and never revived. And we need to restore the funding that’s been repeatedly cut since Reagan took office and the GOP began to vilify public schools

This is an area where parents can advocate on levels from the local school board all the way to their Congressperson, Senator, and the President.

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Learn from criticism...and then let go of the blame

One of the most common and recurring strategies that successful Hunters tell about is how they’ve learned to handle criticism.

A successful ADHD entrepreneur tells the story of how devastated he was in a high school presentation that he’d spent the better part of two months on for English class. He read dozens of books, dug out arcane facts, sifted through quotes and stories and information, all to find what he thought was the absolutely perfect summary to make his point.

With great enthusiasm he pulled an all-nighter, writing the final paper, and marched off to school the next day with his head high and the smell of academic victory in his nostrils.

At two o’clock he walked into his English classroom and marched up to the teacher’s desk, the paper in his hand. “Here it is,” he said, and handed it to her with a dramatic flourish.

She took one glance at it, leaned over the side of the desk, and dropped it into the wastebasket. “You didn’t double-space it,” she said. “When are you going to learn to read the directions?”

Stunned, he began to protest, to tell her about the hours of work he’d done. She shook her head, as if shaking his words out of her ears, and interrupted him, saying, “You have to learn how to do things right. This will be a good lesson for you. I’m giving you an F for that paper, and there’s no appeal because today was the last day you could hand it in.”

He went home that night and, at the ripe old age of fourteen, cried himself to sleep.

“I learned two important lessons from that experience,” he told me, twenty years later. “The first was that I needed to slow down, to force myself to read directions. In that regard, it was probably a positive experience. But it also almost destroyed my commitment to her, to the class, to the school, and to any future academic achievement. And that was where I learned my second, and most important, lesson: When you fall down, stand back up, dust yourself off, and carry on.”

“That sounds easy,” I said, “but how do you do it? How could you keep from being angry with her, from blaming her, or, for that matter, from blaming yourself?”

“I have a picture in my mind,” he said, “of a man who’s walking down a dusty rural road. He trips on a stone and falls, face-first, into the dirt. And then he reaches over to the side of the road, grabs a stick, and begins to beat himself over the head with the stick, yelling at himself about how stupid he was to trip and fall. Between these comments, he’s cursing the stone for being there and blaming it for tripping him.

“That’s absurd, isn’t it? But it’s just what many people do. When I imagine that picture, and see how absurd it is to wallow in self-blame, I feel empowered to get on with my life.”

Unfortunately, the “absurd” behavior that this entrepreneur de­scribed is just what so many people do-particularly those who’ve spent their lives feeling like they’ve never quite lived up to their potential.

They respond to criticism first by blaming the critic, and then by beating themselves up. They rationalize the former by taking a debating posi­tion, finding flaws in the criticism or the critic, and then rationalize the latter by telling themselves that if they beat themselves up emotionally they’ll “learn from the experience.”

In real life, it rarely works that way. People who pursue this strategy instead just end up bruised and ineffectual, paralyzed by fear of criti­cism, or by the damage they do to themselves in the name of lesson- learning.

So how can we best handle criticism?

The first step is to examine the criticism to see if there’s any truth in it.

Usually there is some truth to criticism and, if we can separate out the kernel of truth from the emotional baggage associated with it, we can often learn something useful.

For example, when my first book about ADHD was published in 1993 (Atten­tion Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception), one reviewer wrote a scath­ing and sarcastic commentary about it. While much of the commentary was off-base or factually inaccurate, he did point out one very real deficiency: my premise of Hunters and Farmers was based in anthropol­ogy, but I hadn’t gotten the endorsement of any anthropologists or cited any anthropological texts in my bibliography.

So, deciding that he had a point, I sought out people with the requisite knowledge of hunting and farming cultures. I first found Will Krynen, M.D., who, while not an anthropologist, was one of the few medical doctors in the world to have spent years of his career as the physician to an indigenous hunting society, with one of the Native American tribes of Canada.

Every year he followed them with his small airplane as they made their annual 300-mile trek following the caribou they hunted. He told me that when he first arrived, he found that the previous doctor had diagnosed 100% of their children as ADHD, and had put their entire school on Ritalin. That was pretty good valida­tion to him of the Hunter/Farmer theory.

Then I met cultural anthropologist Jay Fikes, PhD, who wrote the famous (in anthropological circles) book debunking Carlos Castenada. Dr. Fikes obtained his PhD by studying the few remaining native Ameri­can hunting societies of the American southwest and northern Mexico.

After reading my book, he wrote a ringing endorsement of it, saying that his experience taught him that hunting and agricultural societies were profoundly different, and that the individuals who make them up are profoundly different. There is a startlingly high percentage of what we would call ADHD among the members of the native hunting tribes Jay had lived among and written about.

So that criticism of my book, as sarcastic and stinging as it was intended to be, nonetheless led to a strengthening of the science behind what I’d first presented only as a model or a paradigm. It improved my book and gave new credibility to the thesis that people with ADHD really are descendants of ancient hunting societies.

The second step to handling criticism is to let the pain in it roll off your shoulders.

After learning what we can from our critics, we have to let go of the emotions that criticism arouses in us.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was attacked by every armchair general in the world: every move he made, every speech he gave, every law he proposed was mercilessly torn apart by his critics. Yet Lincoln endured.

When someone told Lincoln that his Secretary of War, Edward M. Stanton, had called him a “damn fool” for one of his orders, he went to Stanton to ask what was foolish about the order. Stanton made his case, and Lincoln agreed, rescinding the order.

And then he took the second step: he let the pain of being publicly called a “damn fool” roll off his back. To use the entrepreneur’s metaphor, Lincoln stood up and dusted himself off and continued walking along the road.

Lincoln, reflecting on this need to carry on regardless of the emo­tional sting of criticism, wrote:

“I do the very best I know how — the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, then what is said against me won’t matter. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.” (These words were so inspiring to Winston Churchill that he had them framed and hung in his office during World War 11.)

So whether the criticism originates from others or from within us, the two-step process to deal with it is to first learn from it, and then to let go of it, turning the emotions associated with blaming into the process of learning

Stand back up, dust yourself off, and get back to walking down that road of life!