It was almost thirty years ago when my son was diagnosed with ADHD (and I was later) that I went on a search for explanations and came up with my “Hunter in a Farmer’s World” hypothesis. I argued that what we’re calling a disorder was actually a collection of traits specifically designed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help us survive in the hunting/gathering environment in which humanity evolved.
These traits only became problematic, I argued, when most of humanity (there are still aboriginal hunter/gatherers) settled down and started farming, a way of producing food that requires a very different skill set from those of hunter/gatherers.
Just four months ago, some new research was published that not only backs up my hypothesis but even takes it a step further. A study published in BMC Psychology comparing a group of people diagnosed with ADHD to a similar group (521 adults) who definitely don’t have ADHD found that there’s another characteristic we need to add to the diagnostic criteria for ADHD: curiosity.
After measuring their subjects’ levels of ADHD traits and characteristics, they tried something no researchers had before: testing people for their levels of curiosity, which they defined as the urge to seek novelty, embrace uncertainty, and crave “new” experiences.
To their amazement, they found that the higher people scored on classic ADHD characteristics like hyperactivity, impulsivity, and risk-taking the higher they also scored on curiosity.
The correlation was almost shockingly high: people with the highest levels of ADHD traits were more than four times more likely than the normies in the study to show higher-than-normal levels of curiosity.
Was it ADHD-driven curiosity that led Columbus and Leif Erickson to North America? Or Native Americans across the Pacific? Or created some of our most amazing inventions? Increasingly, this research suggests that’s exactly what was going on.
Call it “the urge to explore.”
Looking at it this way, the kid who’s distracted in class by the bug crawling across the ceiling is just as curious about the bug as Columbus was about the New World.
This fits perfectly with my Hunter/Farmer hypothesis (in fact, in my first book on the subject, I profiled one of history’s great explorers, Sir Richard Burton [not the actor]).
This willingness to abandon a boring task for a more interesting one may also have been an evolutionary advantage for the gatherers among our hunter/gatherer ancestors.
Two years ago, researchers tested this hypothesis based on the observation that indigenous hunter/gatherer tribes today usually abandoned berry patches or other areas rich in food before they’d exhausted them, allowing them to regenerate in ways that guaranteed the plants’ survival into the following year.
To find out if this was associated with ADHD, they had people with and without ADHD play an online foraging game gathering berries from a virtual patch on a computer screen, and watched who abandoned a patch and moved onto the next one and how quickly they arrived at that decision.
People scoring highest on ADHD characteristics abandoned the somewhat depleted patches faster than their Farmer peers, who basically wiped them out.
They concluded that the ADHD people “favored exploration over exploitation,” thus enhancing survival probabilities over the long term, a finding that nestles neatly into this most recent discovery of curiosity as a primary characteristic of ADHD.
Back in 2024, one of the authors of this new King’s College study (Anne-Laure Le Cunff) proposed what she called “an evolutionary mismatch theory of hypercuriosity.”
Echoing my work from the 1990s (although she was probably unaware of it), she argued that this urge to investigate new things, chase novelty, and explore unfamiliar territory were actually survival skills in an “ancestral environment” where resources could be thin, dangers were everywhere, and information was scarce.
In today’s modern environment, though, we’re torn. Our phones and screens are constantly demanding our attention and Hunters are unusually vulnerable to things like screen addiction according to some researchers. On the other hand, our workplaces and schools demand Farmer-like attention spans that can crush a curious Hunter.
The solution, of course, is what I’ve been proposing ever since my first book on the subject, ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World, was first published in 1996. Find work that challenges you, that carries high levels of novelty, and that’s constantly new.
In fields like sales, detective work, journalism, and the early stages of entrepreneurialism there are always these things in abundance. (One of the best lessons I’ve learned starting 7 business over the past 50 years is that once the business is stable, bring in a Farmer to run it.)
So, all of this new research suggests that instead of fighting our own curiosity, we just need to learn how to aim it.