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.
I joke about being the human avatar of "Number 5" in the movie "Short Circuit." I-N-P-U-T!!!!! More I-N-P-U-T!!! There is a contribution to creativity, since you absorb a lot of Input to connect in potentially uncommon ways. It can also be uncomfortable socially, since almost everything is interesting to you, but not necessarily to others.
Good info!
I too found all students on the autism spectrum, appearing outwardly curious, but really inwardly curious due to a deep perception ability to...Possibility.
Learning, growing and discovering are inherent in every child at birth; how else would they grow in abilities and their place in society?
However, our Bacon and Descartes think-based societies (the scientific method), is curiosity-based also, but is restricted only to thought-based discovery and proof. That guides our individual and societal boat in only one direction, a circle of repeated and re-invented information, and not to one other important reality: Connection.
A part of spectrum curiosity is this deep, "Is it possible?" search within our makeup. We are open like a satellite dish with our right brain hemisphere, open to and receiving subtle information from the quantum field, the realm of non-linear answers, deep discovery, and even guidance, all from this unified, connected realm.
We were all given two brain hemispheres, and the right one is Our home base, we wired there, and not interested in, and often overwhelmed by our now, thought-driven, left-brain focused, linear information societies, which continues to accelerate.
We now have thinking AI, dangerously thinking and finding its own way of discovery, but thinking only with a programmed left brain thinking ability. AI can creep into hidden outward information, but without a right brain for connection, AI could run out of control, leading to destructive, non-connection results.
Are spectrum people the only ones with right and left brain hemispheres? Of course not. Some people are more inclined to be thinkers, but our history of education, after Bacon and Descartes, has over-focused on the teaching of facts and concepts as our major schooling practices.
We thus are in a circle of repetition and separation (thinking focuses on differences, whereas intuitive right brain perception draws from what inwardly we all share, connection, with a desire for new understandings.) ADHD people have a desire for new connective answers with a driving passion.
We need to rebalance education for all, so that connection is our primary experience with others and the earth, and our thinking is doing that for which it was intended: to shape, with numbers and letters (measuring, describing, allocating...) those inspirations for good that come from our inner knowings living in our right brain perception, and also from the knowings of our deep heart. (The HeartMath Institute).
Project Based Learning (PBL) for all, puts students in their in-born, connective curiosity, which is then shaped into contributions for our world by their left brain.
www.HeartCenteredMinds.com
YouTube: Spectrum Learning Differences, Not Disorders, 1:10.