More Thoughts on ADD as Evolution [Archive] - ADD Forums - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Support and Information Resources Community

Revz

08-09-07, 02:09 PM

Explorers

"They are not just tuned-out of this world; they are also tuned in, often to the fresh and the new" ( Hallowell & Ratey, from Driven to Distraction).

By the time a child reaches the age of two or three, few adults can match his (or her) level of spontaneous inventiveness. There must be something about the way children are wired which fosters this incredible creativity. They also learn primarily on an exploratory, intuitive level (like ADDers) because they have so much to learn. But think about the other traits young children possess. These traits, in an older child or adult, would be identified as ADD traits. Eventually they will grow up and lose most of that excess energy and restlessness, they will have longer attention spans, be less impulsive and, you guessed it, be far less creative. Some part of their brain matures and allows them to focus on blackboards for long periods of time, but that maturity, that very braking mechanism that filters out distractions, also inhibits creativity and exploration. This is the tradeoff for being normal. Normal adults buy books on how to be creative, and long for the ability to see the world through the lenses of a child. Many ADD people, however, never completely lost this ability. That child-like enthusiasm for new experiences remains. ADD people are often described as immature. They are less often described as creative, but the two go hand-in-hand.

Now if you were Mother Nature, and had to devise a simple way to increase the creativity of the population so that they could, for example, design better weapons and eradicate their neighbors, how would you do it? That would be easy. The braking mechanism in the brain which allows people to focus narrowly on uninspiring topics would be less developed than normal. And this is exactly what researchers seem to be finding in the brains of both creative and ADD individuals. Of course, every adaptation is a tradeoff. You can't increase inventiveness without decreasing some other ability.

Mother Nature would have to limit the number of people with this brain type, because our population also needs a large number of steadfast workers to survive. If everyone was the "creative" type, not much work would get done, and there would probably be anarchy.

So it is entirely possible that ADD exists because it fosters creativity in our population and makes us more competitive. A corporation needs lots of dedicated workers, but it also needs a few brilliant researchers or inventors in order to compete. I have not yet encountered this exact view in the literature, but it's a rather obvious one, I think. Nearly all books on ADD make mention of an association or similarity between ADD and creativity. Thom Hartmann's popular concept of ADD as a "Hunter" temperament is closely related. "Hunters" are adapted to constantly scanning the horizon for game, improvising, and noticing every little sign (or distraction) from the environment. However, in Hartman's model, the ADD "Hunter" is essentially a relic of a bygone era, which just coincidentally happens to have some positives, including creativity. This is an entirely plausible theory. Then again, who wants to have obsolete genes. A simpler and equally likely explanation is that the genes are not obsolete relics, but are still useful. Obsolete genes do not last long if they are being selected against.

Explorers: I prefer to think of ADDers as "Explorers." The Explorers of today might be descendents of yesterday's Hunters, but Explorers exist because evolution continues to select for them. Whether in the physical or the cerebral sense, Explorers are always looking for something new and exciting. New places, new ideas, and new challenges. When not exploring, ADDers are bored, restless, and easily distracted by something else that might be more interesting and need to be explored. ADD artists explore an abstract world and compete to see who can go the farthest to break boundaries and do something completely original in uncharted artistic territory (normal people prefer a pretty picture of a barn or a simple melody). Inventors explore the limitless possibilities of technology. This is why ADDers find so easy to start projects and so difficult to finish them. Once the project has been explored, it's no longer interesting (let someone else finish it). On to the next exploration!

Young children are the ultimate explorers. The entire world is new and must be learned as fast as possible. Abstract relationships must be grasped quickly and this is accomplished largely on a subconscious, or intuitive level. No one explains the mechanics of grammar, yet they learn how to construct proper sentences amazingly fast. ADDers are known for being intuitive and needing to learn at the exploratory level. Most people look down upon this, but it's probably a faster way of picking up patterns and relationships. Perhaps the impulsivity, restlessness and short attention span of young children are related to the child's critical need to explore and learn. 

If young childhood is a critical age for learning, why is the brain is wired for inattention and hyperactivity (in the same way that an ADDer's brain is wired?). These children learn faster than adults, but they have many of the same traits as an ADDer. Perhaps long attention spans aren't as important for learning as we think. Attention is certainly needed for the mundane chores of adulthood, but not for learning. Note I said "learning," which is not to be confused with the passive memorization so typical of our schools. There is a tremendous difference, which is why some kids who fail classes despite all their efforts actually learn computers very fast when left to their own devices.

I suspect an ADD "explorer" is not wired to work, at least in the mundane sense. They are wired to learn and explore, just like a small child. That they do not learn in school is a failing of the school, not the ADDer. I've heard so many stories of "learning disordered" ADDers who are brilliant on their home computer I cannot think otherwise.

Let's dispel the notion that a consistently focused brain is a more advanced brain. Honeybee "workers" concentrate completely on the task of gathering pollen each day. This does not mean their nervous system is more advanced than ours. Actually, a more commonly used predictor of intelligence in the animal world is playfulness and curiosity. Separating us from the rest of the animal world is not our ability to stay on-task, but rather our ability to solve complex problems and to ask the question "why?" ADD Explorers are great problem solvers because of their creativity and are very often the first ones to ask this question. This is no brain defect. 

Actually, not all honeybees focus so clearly on gathering honey. About 5% of honeybees are called "streaker bees" because their purpose is to locate a new nesting site when the time is right (Grade). A highly social species, honeybee populations need more than one type of temperament in their hive to survive. Do the streaker bees gather honey as well as the worker bees? Probably not. But if the worker bees didn't have the streaker bees to find a new nesting site they would perish. 


The whole article can be found here: http://borntoexplore.org/evolve.htm