ADHD: The Butterfly Chaser and the Seed Planter

How two ancient archetypes shaped the spectrum of human attention and ambition.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.

— Daniel Webster (On Agriculture, January 13, 1840)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunters and Farmers.

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

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

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

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