Are “Normal” People Really “Abnormal”?
Are “Normal” People Really “Abnormal”?
So what if the people without ADHD are the abnormals, the mutants, as it were, and those with ADHD are the human norm?
“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.”
—Aldous Huxley
There’s an old cliche to the effect that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Similarly, in a land of jewelers, the farsighted man is disabled, whereas in the world of sailing ship lookouts the nearsighted man is disabled. Among basketball players, being under six feet tall is a disability, whereas among football players it’s a disability to be tall and skinny.
So what’s normal and what’s a disability?
We know that if a person uses a particular muscle group heavily, that particular part of the body will strengthen and swell. This is the basis of body-building. We also know that when particular parts of the brain are used a lot, they grow: blood vessels increase in size and number, and the actual size of the brain area and number of neural interconnections in it increases.
So what if the people without ADHD are the abnormals, the mutants, as it were, and those with ADHD are the human norm?
This may sound fantastic at first, what with ADHD being considered a disability or a disorder, but consider the world in which we live.
Dr. Marc Lappe says in Evolutionary Medicine: Rethinking the Origins of Disease, “My premise is simple—most medical problems are problems of evolution.” He goes on to show how the world in which earlier humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years is radically different from that in which we’ve spent the past few hundred years. Many of the “diseases” of modern life—ranging from diabetes to sickle-cell anemia—were once really useful.
Lappe added:
“Given the radical transformations of environments by humankind, we can expect that many human ‘adaptations’ are not well-suited to contemporary circumstances. In a more extreme sense, certain previously adaptive traits are now maladaptive.”
Although this demonstrates the basis of my Hunter/Farmer theory, let’s flip it upside-down.
Modern society requires a level of self-control probably unknown in primitive societies. Hunter-gatherers of 20,000 years ago didn’t have to wait for traffic lights, sit in doctor’s waiting rooms, or suffer through boring classrooms listening to subjects of dubious relevance. Their world was more immediate and reaction-driven, and scanning/distractability and quick decision-making/impulsivity were useful assets.
But modern society requires patience. It requires a level of self-control and discipline largely unseen in primitive societies. We must learn to postpone gratification, to think in terms of times which may extend for years or even generations, and to control even our most subtle nuances of expression in some social, school, or business situations.
This is highly abnormal for any animal, including humans.
We see evidence of the difficulty of such behavior in such statistics as the doubling of the rates of depression in industrialized countries roughly every ten years. Suicide is the third most common cause of death among young adults, and fifteen percent of Americans are right now being treated for a clinical anxiety disorder.
Freud pointed to this in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents, when he noted that although we are told to love our neighbor, our modern society instead drives us to “humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.” Freud concluded that modern civilization had created “Flomo homini lupus”: man is the wolf to man.
Even the last century’s Unabomber both illustrates and asserts evidence of this. In his 35,000 word essay published in the Washington Post, he noted:
“[I] attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved...”
Yet when anthropologists set out to determine the rate of depression among the primitive Kaluli people of New Guinea, they were unable to detect any. Similarly, rural Samoan villagers have extraordinarily low levels of cortisol in their blood, a chemical considered an accurate marker for levels of anxiety.
The agricultural revolution is considered by many to be a huge evolutionary leap in human society. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution rates it as, “after fire, mankind’s greatest harnessing of the world’s natural energy. It certainly led to changes, setting the stage for the more recent industrial revolution.”
But some look less kindly on the results of the agricultural revolution, and the type of people who emerged during it and then proceeded to wipe out 98% of all the hunter-gatherer humans who then populated the earth.
In his book The Third Generation, Jared Diamond suggests the agricultural revolution was in many ways a negative turning point in human history. It brought about, he says, the “gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse modern human existence.”
Diamond pointed out that along with these social ills came physical ills as well. Hunter-gatherer era skeletons of American Indians dug up in the Illinois and Ohio River valleys differ so dramatically from the later, smaller, and less healthy agriculture-era skeletons in the same region that Diamond called corn, often thought to be an agricultural wonder, “a public health disaster.”
But once people lived on the same piece of land for generations, elite hierarchies developed within groups and wars broke out for control of the food-producing land. While agriculture led to Athenian notions of democracy and the Renaissance, it also gave us standing armies of professional killers, Diamond points out.
During the Hunter-gatherer era, anthropological evidence suggests men and women had more equal roles in terms of the power and politics of the tribe. In Food In History, Reay Tannahill points out that the cultivation of crops “increased women’s burdens while it lightened man’s.”
Tannahill added that while women bore the brunt of the agricultural work, men were “released from the physical and mental strains of the hunt to the peaceable tending of his flocks, which gave him both time and opportunity for constructive thinking, formulating plans, setting up and attending village councils, and criticizing women’s lack of inventiveness’ in the matter of crop-raising.”
We in Western society live in a disordered world, from the viewpoint of the evolution of our species. We must learn a whole new set of behaviors, and incorporate them thoroughly to become part of our nature.
Since science tells us that these behaviors are mostly controlled by the right frontal lobes of the brain, it would make sense that a person who had successfully adapted to modern society-mutated from the human norm — would have an abnormally large right frontal lobe.
And that, of course, is exactly what the National Institutes of Mental Health found when they compared the brains of “normal” and “ADHD” children: the “normals” had slightly enlarged right-front lobes.
So perhaps we have ADHD because those with ADHD haven’t yet made the transition necessary for life in post-agricultural revolution, post-industrial revolution society. Either for lack of early exercise of those parts of their brains, or because of a genetic predisposition not to be strong in that area, they haven’t mutated into the new “Homo modernus.”
Alternatively, it may be that those without ADHD are the ones who are doomed as we move into a brand-new era of radical and rapid change. Although ideally suited to the agricultural revolution, able to extend from one continent to another, murdering and conquering everything and everybody in their path, “Farmers” may in the next century find themselves at a mental disadvantage.
ADHD individuals thrive in the Information Age, and may well do better than “normal people” in the chaos that some predict will engulf the Earth as the surplus of people and climate change collide in the next few decades.
To the extent that it’s possible, then, modern people with ADHD who live in Western society have two options: find a niche in society which is more Hunter-like, or learn to at least behave like Homo modernus.
The former has to do with job and lifestyle choices, as I’ve outlined in considerable detail in previous books (particularly Adult ADHD: How to Succeed as a Hunter in a Farmer’s World).
The latter includes learning about new work and lifestyle strategies, ways to retrain the brain such as meditation or EEG Neurofeedback, and possibly medications that alter brain chemistry to make it more similar to Homo modernus.
But none of this should be considered a “disorder” when both ADHD and “normal” people are simply both exhibiting adaptations to ancient and modern environments.