ADHD: Wrong or Different?

This story, I thought, could be the thing that would save my son from thinking he was “broken” or “disordered.”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.
— James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 1961

Wrong or different?

One night in the midst of my research about six months after my son’s diagnosis, I was lying in bed reading. It was about two o’clock in the morning. I’m a light sleeper, and discovered long ago if I read something truly boring, it will put me to sleep. (I probably learned this in school.) So for years I’ve subscribed to Scientific American magazine. It’s much cheaper then sleeping pills.

The article was an analysis of the genome of wheat and rice; it mentioned that one of the reasons why it’s so impor­tant to understand when wheat and rice appeared in their modern forms is because they were pivotal to what we call the Agricultural Revolution, which was a turning point in the his­tory of the human race. About 7,000 to 12,000 years ago, some tribes began to engage in agriculture because it was so much more efficient at producing food than hunting and gathering. They had more children, they had more food, they had more children, they took more land, and they started displacing the hunter/gatherers until now they’re about 99% of the world’s population. The hunter/gatherers today constitute fewer than 200 million people while there are 6 billion agriculturalists.

As I was drifting off to sleep, I wondered what it would have been like to be alive during the time of my own ancestors from northern Europe ten thousand years ago, before agricul­ture. They were hunter/gatherers, and lived that way for tens of thousands of years before the appearance of agriculture.

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that a hunter going through the forest in search of his family’s dinner would have to be extremely vigilant — noticing everything around him and in his environment — or else he may miss the rabbit which is going to be his dinner, or the lion or bear which wants to make him its dinner. He’d have to be scanning his entire environ­ment, constantly, if he was to be both successful as a hunter and safe as a human being.

Like a flash, the thought came to me that this was a per­fect definition of what we call distractability when it presents as a behavior in public school.

But wait a minute, I thought — I learned that distractability was a pathology, and the proof of that is that when distractible kids are put in an even more boring environment, their distractability increases. But, I continued with the thought, what would a hunter have to do in the forest if he didn’t see anything to eat? He’d have to look harder, to scan more fully, to become even more vigilant.

Wow, I thought, that’s one of the three primary behaviors that make up ADHD. But what about the other two, impulsivity and stimulation seeking behavior?

A hunter chasing a rabbit through a forest or jungle don’t have time to make a well-thought-out decision if a larger animal, say a deer, were to appear on the trail. He can’t pull out a pad and pen and create two columns, one labeled bunny and the other deer, and write under the bunny column, “less meat but easier to catch” and under the deer column “more meat but harder to catch.”

Instead, he would have to make an instant decision. He’d have to be en­gaged in either ignoring or shifting to chase the deer within microseconds. (And such decision-making ability would be even more important if something were chasing him!) This behav­ior engaged before careful thought occurs is the dictionary defi­nition of impulsivity. It wouldn’t just be a useful behavior in a hunting world, it would be essential for survival.

Two out of three, I thought. But what about that stimula­tion seeking behavior?

Again, consider those hunters who wake up in the morning and say, “What sounds like fun to me today is to go out there in the natural world where there are things I want to eat and things that want to eat me, and use my skills and knowledge to find the former and avoid the latter.”

Those risk-takers would be the most likely to be successful hunters. On the other hand, the failing hunters would be the highly risk-averse ones, the people who say, “I think I’ll just stay here in my cave or tepee until all the lions or bears or snakes have gone away.” Such hunters would starve, because the predators never did go away.

Could it be, I thought, that ADHD was adaptive? That it was a collection of neurologically mediated behaviors that would make a person successful in a primitive hunting environment, but are not useful in a modern classroom? What were the ideal characteristics of a Hunter?

♦  They can totally throw themselves into the hunt; time is elastic. Another characteristic of a good Hunter is the ability to totally focus on the moment, utterly aban­doning all consideration of any other time or place. When the Hunter sees the prey he gives chase through gully or ravine, over fields or through trees, giving no thought to the events of the day before, not considering the fu­ture, simply living totally in that one pure moment and immersing himself in it. When involved in the hunt, time seems to speed; when not in the hunt, time be­comes slow. While a Hunter’s ability to concentrate in general may be low, his ability to utterly throw himself into the hunt at the moment is astonishing.

♦  They’re flexible, capable of changing strategy on a moment’s notice. If the wild boar vanishes into the brush and a rabbit appears, the Hunter is off in a new direction. Orderliness is not particularly important to a Hunter, but the ability to make a quick decision and then act on it is vital.

♦  They can throw an incredible burst of energy into the hunt, so much so that they often injure them­selves or exceed “normal” capabilities, without real­izing it until later. Not unlike that quintessential of all Hunters, the lion, they have incredible bursts of energy — but not necessarily a lot of staying power.

Given the choice of describing themselves as the tor­toise or the hare in Aesop’s famous fable, a Hunter would always say that he or she is the hare.

♦  They think visually. Hunters often describe their actions in terms of pictures, rather than words or feel­ings. They create outlines in their heads of where they’ve been and where they’re going. (Aristotle taught a memory method like this, with which a per­son would visualize rooms in a house, then objects in the rooms. When he gave a speech, he’d simply move from room to room in his memory, noticing the ob­jects therein, which were reminders of the next thing he had to talk about.) Hunters often aren’t much in­terested in abstractions, or else want to convert them to a visual form as quickly as possible. They tend to be lousy chess players, disdaining strategy because they prefer to go straight for the jugular.

♦  They love the hunt, but are easily bored by mun­dane tasks such as having to clean the fish, dress the meat, or fill out the paperwork. Donald Haughey, a former senior executive with Holiday Inns, tells the story of how Kemmons Wilson, the legendary founder of Holiday Inns, had a group of executives he called Bear Skinners. Wilson would go out into the world and shoot the bear (negotiate a new hotel site, bring in new financing, open a new division, etc.), and his Bear Skinners would take care of the details of “skin­ning and cleaning” the deal.

♦  They’ll face danger that “normal” individuals would avoid. A wounded boar, or elephant, or bear, can kill you — and many a Hunter has been killed by his would-be prey. If you extend this analogy to war­fare, where the Hunters are often the front line infan­try or the most aggressive officers, the same is true. Hunters take risks. Extending this metaphor, Patton was a Hunter.

♦ They’re hard on themselves and those around them. When your life depends on split-second decisions, your frustration and impatience threshold necessarily tend to be low. A fellow Hunter who doesn’t get out of the way of a shot, or a soldier who defies orders and smokes on a dark night showing the enemy your posi­tion, cannot be tolerated.

So, the question: where did ADHD come from? If you com­pare the list of classic ADHD symptoms, and the list of the char­acteristics of a good Hunter during humanity’s pre-agricultural period, you’ll see that they match almost perfectly.

In other words, an individual with the ADHD collec­tion of characteristics would make an extraordinarily good hunter. A failure to have any one of those characteristics might mean death in the forest, jungle, or the arctic tundra.

This story, I thought, could be the thing that would save my son from thinking he was “broken” or “disordered,” and also give him (and me) clues to techniques and strategies to succeed and even prosper with ADHD. But most important, it gives Hunter children and adults back their self-esteem.