They did not say that this is like a superpower or anything like that. What they're basically arguing, actually things like increased motor activity, attentional processes, scanning and rapidly shifting attention, and impulsivity specifically, could be both a deficit and a benefit in different environments. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. It's great to have you here. I am joined by my husband and co-founder Robert Waterson. And today we are going to be talking about evolution and revolution in child psychology. ADHD as a disorder of adaptation. Robbie went into the vault today to find us a paper from 1997, which kind of speaks about something that a lot of you might have heard of in pop psychology, but really wasn't discussed in academia. And so we're going to talk a little bit more about why, which I'm really excited to get into. Before we get started, if you are a business owner and you know you have ADHD symptoms and they are destroying the back end of your business, you can't get a hold of your systems. You wish you had somebody who could help you get things organized, get things simplified and streamlined, but also in a way that works for your brain. That is what we do. You can go ahead, click the links down below. There'll be lots of different resources that can help you out depending on where you're at and what you need. We want to help you get streamlined, get organized, and feel really, really relaxed. So the paper is by Jensen and colleagues. There were some really cool people in there. There is Lawrence Steinberg, who helped abolish the juvenile death penalty. Or his research helped. Oh, his research helped, yeah. One of the interesting things about this paper is sometimes a paper will come out that feels very different and argues very different things. And we're going to talk about this paper and how it argues very different things from what is the sort of presiding assumption about ADHD today. Sometimes those papers come out and people go, why didn't they get discussed? Why didn't it become part of the mainstream? And the answer is because it was a tiny paper in a completely different field that never got read by all of the other, you know, by most of the other people. This is not a paper like that. This paper is from the journal, you know, Child Adolescent Psychiatry. And not only did it have a lot of people who were, you know, in psychiatry, in psychology, including Steinberg, who would go on to become one of the most cited living adolescence researchers, but it also actually references the input and stimulating discussions from members of various committees, including Kupfer, who went on to chair the DSM 5 task force. So the relationship between the people who wrote this paper and the people who are involved in things like the DSM or very much in the psychiatry world in terms of ADHD is very close. And I think that is worth noting as we jump into this paper for sure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I guess especially because it's a review. It's not a study, it doesn't have its own data.
SPEAKER_01It's a review of the literature. It's not a systematic literature review, but it's sort of making an argument. And so it lives and dies a little bit more on who is writing it. And, you know, the people who are writing it were pretty well respected, which is interesting because I would say, I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and you guys can tell me if you think this is correct. I don't think hardly any of the things that they've discussed in this paper have really gone on to be part of a mainstream understanding of ADHD.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's fair to say that overall 230 episodes later. I feel like it's widely considered, still considered a deficit or a disorder and not an evolutionary adaption that's suitable in some more useful in some environments and less in others. Yeah, the reason we're jumping back to have a look at it is jumping back almost 30 years, is this is the first time this idea that we're sort of exploring now is brought up formally in academic circles. This is the first sort of academic review saying, hey, maybe we should reframe uh not just ADHD, but a lot of psychiatric disorders, sort of mental disorders, as from an evolutionary biology lens, are these more a byproduct of environment and less a sort of just a deficit or a disorder? I think they make that point quite early on that at three to five percent of the population, that's quite a high percentage to all be having a disorder.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think it's it is really interesting to have this conversation have happened and and now, you know, it doesn't it feels like it happened and then everybody politely kind of went, yeah, well, we're not gonna go with this. But let's talk about what they what they said. So they did not say that this is like a superpower or anything like that. Like at no point are they saying that. They're fully acknowledging that there are a lot of struggles. But what they're basically arguing using evolutionary models, which, you know, different people have different perspectives on, and I've definitely had my own perspectives on them, but it is a good model to think about. Um, they were basically arguing that when you're looking at these different areas, you can see that actually things like increased motor activity, so the hyperactivity side, attentional processes, scanning and rapidly shifting attention, and impulsivity specifically, could be both a deficit and a benefit in different environments.
SPEAKER_00They could be adaptive and maladaptive, depending on the environment.
SPEAKER_01Exactly, exactly. So if you were to think about these different areas, they're basically saying, okay, well, if ADHD is a classic triad of these struggles, inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity. If we're going with increased motor activity, so the hyperactivity, well, we want to constantly explore the environment for threats and opportunities. And this is kind of comes back to the the paper that started this for us, which was the foraging paper, you know, where they're like, hey, you know, actually being more likely to be driven by a motor, to get up when you're supposed to sit down, to pay attention to things. There is a benefit to this. You are more likely to go to the next berry bush before it, you know, before other people might, so you get sort of the early berries.
SPEAKER_00Their argument is for an organism to adapt successfully, it must constantly explore its environment. And so from this perspective, increased mode of behavior and hyperactivity is just useful in a hunter-gatherer environment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's an exploratory behavior idea.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's gonna assist in effective foraging, like, and that's what they found in the foraging paper that we just looked at.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Um new opportunities, uh anticipating dangers, sort of mapping your environment.
SPEAKER_01I do just want to say I'm not saying this is 100% true and accurate and other things are wrong. They do discuss the deficits and the struggles and all of that kind of stuff with ADHD as well. But it it does kind of behoove us, especially in I think entrepreneurial conversation, to talk about some of the adaptive benefits of ADHD symptoms. So that was uh increased motor activity and hyperactivity, you know, and then they were also talking about attentional processes. So this is scanning and rapidly shifting attention. So this is your classic, like why you keep looking out the window, why when somebody walks past you look up. I mean, I remember having a client um who worked in like this massive organization, very high up in the organization, and she was like, When a bird flies past the window of the conference room, I am just staring at the bird, and I forget what that person is saying. And it's not good when I'm supposed to be the boss.
SPEAKER_00Having the windows open and having cars go past is slightly problematic, but it's also I don't know, it's tricky though. You could lock yourself in a closed-off room and you're also struggling for different reasons.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. It's hard to get the right amount of attention, but basically, they're saying, you know, well, vigilance, the ability to monitor danger and threats is kind of an important evolutionary trait. You know, overfocused attention, just focusing on the thing in front of you and not looking up could be pretty problematic in novel environments. If you're traveling, you know, you think about a world where somebody had to keep watch, somebody had to pay attention, being able to be aware of your environment and not necessarily hone in on the thing you're doing. I mean, we could also talk about hyperfocus here because it's actually kind of, you know, doesn't come up.
SPEAKER_00I think the inattention sort of positive flip side would be vigilance. I am curious what the hyperfocus flip side back into the negative would look like exactly. Because I was kind of thinking in some ways, inattention is sort of our reaction to a perceived low-value, not our wheelhouse, understimulating environment. And then hyperfocus is our reaction when we actually think we've found something of value and we're like, right, nothing else matters. Let's make the most of this.
SPEAKER_01Well, when you think about the hunter farmer scenario, which is the sort of pop psychology shorthand.
SPEAKER_00Probably worth mentioning, by the way. That book came out four years earlier than this paper.
SPEAKER_01Did it really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's not referenced, but yeah, the Hunter Farmer.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting. I knew it came out around then, but I didn't know when. Yeah. So you telling me this paper was just stealing the um Hunter Farmer's lunch, or maybe proposing it.
SPEAKER_00It probably wouldn't have helped them if they'd referenced a I think sort of a pop psychology book.
SPEAKER_01I apologize if it's not pop psychology. That was but it but I think it was, yeah.
SPEAKER_00He was on record himself saying this is a personal model, not a scientific claim.
SPEAKER_01Right, okay.
SPEAKER_00I think sort of written after his son's diagnosis. I think dismissing it as pop psychology is probably a little bit casually contemptuous.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it could be a autobiographical.
SPEAKER_00He's just not an academic, but he's like gone and written a book trying to provide an alternate.
SPEAKER_01A very popular book. People still say to me all the time, what about the Hunter versus Farmer idea? Like it was popular.
SPEAKER_00And yeah, it did become really popular. Time ran it as a 1994 cover story, Hail to the Hyperactive Hunter. So it possibly was sort of an unacknowledged inspiration for this, or it was happening alongside other research. I mean, this review does have a lot of references to other papers while it's making its arguments. So I I'm definitely not underestimating its contribution.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't think so either.
SPEAKER_00And yeah, so I don't think that having opinions on this is like the purview of only academia. In fact, I would say even this was almost 30 years ago, I have heard the idea that in a lot of scientific fields, progress is made one funeral at a time. I think if you look at scientific history, a lot of the time the people who will write about things, I mean, I think germ theory is like this, like died in obscurity. Like the amount of time in scientific history, died in obscurity is the final resting place of people who moved scientific fields forward, but it took an entire generation to die off before their idea could actually be looked at.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well very common story. So again, it wouldn't be that surprising if we're gonna move at the same pace with ADHD, and that this actually does make a lot of sense because this seems sort of self-evident, self-evident to me, not based on hard data, like although we'll be looking at it, but it does seem, and again, the paper mentions at some points that they're putting forward this framework. They're sort of saying our proposed hypotheses are testable through sort of cross-cross-cultural species comparison, various research strategies appropriate and generally accepted among among evolutionary scientists, that they sort of acknowledge, and they're sort of staying here, alluding to that same phenomenon. New ideas often have to be nursed, particularly when one paragraph paradigm has become too dominant, much like a monopoly or an entrenched ideology, especially where it's currently supported by scientific infrastructure, economic incentives, like programs, school systems, and the pharmaceutical industry.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think you're if you support progress and always multiple. I mean, I think if you look at like, yeah, there's examples of this in academia as well. When I was in university, we talked about the lithium idea that lithium was a helpful medication, but it wasn't easy to patent and all that kind of stuff. It's it's been a long time since I've had those conversations, but it's it you could imagine that it's an adaptive thing and we're kind of, you know, adaptive as a result, and it's really about environment is not the easiest thing to sell. Like there's nothing you can sell from that, really. It just means everyone has to change their in the environment that they're in.
SPEAKER_00There would be financial incentives to continuing the current system, changing something like a schooling system to cater to more things rather than just having a mainstream approach.
SPEAKER_01And I think there is a lot of change. Like I will say, this is book uh sorry, this article is from 1997, 1997 classroom and a 2026 classroom in some schools would not even recognize each other.
SPEAKER_00I'm sure, although I wonder how meaningful relating to sort of one size fits all versus something that would actually be genuinely more, I think they call it response-ready friendly, ADHD friendly. Yeah, they actually mention in here the current paradigm of mainstreaming all children without regard for children's personal strengths, weaknesses seems ill-conceived for many ADHD children, especially since many of their outcomes are sort of many of their problematic school and vocational outcomes are partly response to adverse early school experiences.
SPEAKER_01So to get back to the idea of hyperfocus, one of the potential adaptions of hyperfocus is this idea of a hunter. And that's kind of where we went on the the tangent of like hunter versus gatherer in the book. The idea that when you're when you've found something that you want to go after, like being that hunter is helpful. And that's something that we wanna you want to consider. That was attention.
SPEAKER_00And then when you look at rapidly shifting attention, which I thought was a much nicer way of saying inattention.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know, right?
SPEAKER_00More vigilance. So again, you really can positively frame and negatively negatively frame these.
SPEAKER_01It's all about words. If there's one thing I've learned about this everything academia, it's all about word use.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And similarly, you know, obviously adverse outcomes in the school setting are a problem, but that is potentially just a misfit of environment to child.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. To the victor go all the best words when it comes to these things. Um okay, and then then they talked about impulsivity. So they sort of said, well, if you think about impulsivity as somebody's quick response to environmental cues, and I really liked this, they talked about the timing and response of a payoff could be positive. As in if you're in an environment where if you make an impulsive move to do something, and it turns out that you didn't need to do that thing, but the one or two times that you make an impulsive move, that thing saves your life, or it saves the life of your family. So you, you know, we're thinking old school care. So you hear something and you impulsively decide to go check out what it is, and that thing happens to be a lion, you know, or you're in a position. I and I almost think it's the environment of being an entrepreneur, right? If we come back to the idea of entrepreneur, you're impulsively looking into a new potential competitor in the market, and that thing that is a competitor in the market turns out to have been a massive competitor that if you didn't make an adjustment to fit, it would have taken your business down. Those kinds of situations where the the chances of a false positive don't really affect you, but the chances of a real issue really affect you are pro for impulsivity. If impulsivity is action, it really reminded me of all of those false positive tests that we do in in the medical system, where they sort of go, it's good to do the test. And if the test comes back negative, or even if you get a false positive, it's still better to have done it than not done it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And then we could add our personal feelings that they may be discounting. There might be a discounting of the actual downstream health effects of giving people false positives for things like cancer. But they're not wrong that if you're ignoring the psychological impact, catching the cancer more often, even though you've given a false positive to 10 people, is preventing harm.
SPEAKER_01And I guess that's the thing. This is kind of comes back to what we're talking about, which I think might almost be the theme of this episode, which is framing, right? Framing impulsivity as being more likely to make take action because a false positive is still better than not catching something. You know, the idea that you could think of ADHD impulsivity in the same way as you think of getting tests from a doctor's office because it's better to be safe than sorry, is a really interesting connection that I've never seen anyone discuss before.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think they discuss this as um time optional versus time critical. As like the difference in environment where impulsivity is an advantage is when time is critical. And so that quick reaction actually gets you out of danger if you're being preyed upon, or it helps you catch the animal if you're hunting.
SPEAKER_01And I think what you're really seeing here, and they discussed it a little bit, but I think it's worth discussing in more of a modern context, is that a lot of the adaptive potential of ADHD is related to being in a more threatening environment.
SPEAKER_00That's definitely I mean, that is definitely what they're proposing here. Is safe versus not safe, research rich rich versus impoverished, time optional versus time critical. So yeah, I think they they were trying to reframe ADHD as perhaps response ready. They called the opposite problem solving, which I don't love the framing of.
SPEAKER_01There's some research that ADHD people are good at problem solving. I would what would you call it instead?
SPEAKER_00I was wondering if sort of adapted to dynamic environment versus static environment might be slightly better. I mean, they actually have words for each of the three dimensions.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's that's a very I mean yeah, Hunter versus Farmer is a great neutral way of framing it.
SPEAKER_01But essentially there is this idea that there's certain environments, and I am gonna use Hunter versus Farmer because I do think it's the best one, but they talk about it as I'll iterate through some of these.
SPEAKER_00So like hypervigilant, high scan, unsafe, rapidly changing, or novel, impulsive, time critical, and then high motor activity, resource depleted. Um that's again like going back to that foraging study in a scarce environment, moving to another bush and finding one that's gonna give you a better rate of return, basically, is the flip side of that hyperactivity. That's like getting up and leaving before everyone else does.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And if you're wondering what Robbie's talking about a couple of episodes ago, we talked about a really cool foraging study about how ADHD is adaptive, and there was some some research behind that. So definitely check it out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and then versus low motor activity being more of an advantage in a resource-rich environment. So again, if the the bush you're currently foraging is higher than the average, or it's so high that it doesn't matter about moving and moving's not useful, then like you know, ADHD changing career 10 times when you could have just stuck to the one isn't an advantage. But then I think we're moving more and more into a society where changing career often is required. And then the people who are struggling with that shift are gonna be at the disadvantage.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, that's what I really wanted to discuss. That's one of the things I found so interesting was that 1997 academic writing this paper is very much like, well, that was then, this is now. We live in a more industrialized environment now, so we don't need as much dynamism, we don't need as much changing, you know. Zoom hadn't been invented yet. The idea that you could make a living fully online was probably not a thing at the time. Social media wasn't really hitting its stride in the way it is now.
SPEAKER_00I think also just longer careers would have still been much more the norm for the generation writing this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, AI wasn't like the the fact of the matter is, I would argue that we are now in an environment where dynamic movement and impulsivity, hypervigilance. Yeah, they have their advantages. They they're also a little bit audience captured in terms of social media and and all of those, like, you know, the fact that YouTube has reels now, which are here to kind of ruin my life. Yeah, YouTube shorts, guys. What's what is up with that? But you know, there is a lot of benefits to paying attention to things and not necessarily just stick into your lane these days.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I've heard people discussing this in terms of the education system trying to keep up with what jobs are gonna be once the kids graduate. And this will like look, honestly, you just need to learn the skills to acquire the skills for whatever job you end up in. We can't predict it now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a hundred percent a great example. And especially because they're they're talking about schools so much in here, and we're talking about schools. So yeah, they they have this idea of yeah, response ready versus problem solving. And they do talk about, you know, is does this mean everything is adaptive? Is all ADHD adaptive? And this is kind of I would link this to the superpower conversation. Like, is ADHD just a superpower and we're amazing and da-da-da? And, you know, they're saying, look, evolutionary models cannot be all inclusive. There are going to be pathways through which, you know, there are specific behavioral patterns that are a struggle. You know, sometimes symptoms of ADHD can come from things. That's this is what they said, you know, more along the idea of brain injury or abuse or or situations like that. There's there's other factors. This is this is to say that this is just a benefit and you guys are not getting it is um is a little bit of a oversimplification. Oversimplification is a great way.
SPEAKER_00Then calling it just a deficit is also an oversimplif. Yeah, they sort of made the point in clinical implications that our current school environment could hardly be worse for response ready children, as they've put it, demanding attention focus. Passivity in terms of like what motor activity, you know, offering a lot of distractions with large class size, tunneling information through one model modality only, passive listening or passive reading, limiting opportunities for shifting attention or for motor response, and then also like delay of recognition of efforts instead of sort of instantaneous feedback. They also got the whole thing about TV and video games, which I was like, oh yeah, the 90s, like we're worried about TV and video games. And it's like, I mean, God, if they can see where we've got to now, uh video. And I don't think the points they were making were wrong though. They're urging investigation into whether or not because the brain has adapted to more than the species that we're being exposed to us in childhood, we're probably clocked, we're potentially clacking, oh, we need to be response ready. This is a highly novel environment that I have to explore and like rapidly scan. And that's sort of what the increasingly sort of kids' TV shows are gonna be increasingly transitioned, hitting flashing lights and like sort of training young adults to it's a theory, but it is true that the brain can adapt based on its environment in those early years to run a different script. We're potentially accidentally training our kids with TV and video games, or I think now also um what, iPads, TikTok, etc. To switch into this different mode. There's another good reframe here. Response ready, experience in seeking, alert and curious. I was like, oh, this is such positive framing. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01I love how this is just us trying to find better words to describe. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah affected like terminology. Yeah. Clinicians that could counsel the child and family to recognize situations in modern society that might favor such individuals in terms of school environments as well as future careers. So like athlete, air traffic controller, sales person, soldier, entrepreneur.
SPEAKER_01Entrepreneur. Hey, we're on the list.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I don't want to use it more, but they're sort of there 30 years ago. Also just talking about, you know, the harm of all of this negative framing on kids and on and on parents and teachers in terms of how they treat the kids. Whereas if you had this neutral or positive framing, you wouldn't be, I don't know, kind of biasing the kid with this negative framing. You're kind of leading them towards rather than looking for places where they do work well, they're instead of themselves as broken. It's really unhealthy. And it's kind of like self-fulfilling.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I do think there is an interesting, it's an interesting world that we're in because we are like I think this paper really showcases how much language has an impact, like how much an adjustment of language can have an adjustment in your in your mindset around ADHD in general. It's an interesting insight into, I guess, a different direction that we could have taken.
SPEAKER_00Or that we will after a few funeral funerals.
SPEAKER_01The thing they said about ADHD in terms of research implications was basically that this model that they're discussing here, the hunter versus farmer model for all intents and purposes, suggests that, you know, more study of the individual components, so attention, motor activity, and impulsivity as specific traits is warranted. Breaking the syndrome into its specific behavioral components will more easily allow cross-species comparison of these traits with animal behavioral models as well. And they could sort of see some of the neurological underpinnings. And they did go on to do that in the foraging paper.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. The optimal move-on time that's from studying animals. Like animals all find that optimal move on time for their environments.
SPEAKER_01And they sort of said this would be great because it would allow us to explore how such traits may be beneficial in some settings and non-adaptive in others. Um, when is response readiness adaptive? And what are those environments like? You know, those non-safe, impoverished, time critical kind of environments that people can find themselves in. So they were really saying, like, okay, guys, like this is a call to action on this particular idea. Let's talk about it more. I think, you know, it's it's kind of coming up now, and and let's let's do it. They did say at the end, you know, this is not an opportunity to romanticize ADHD or children with ADHD as just a mismatch. There are struggles, there are different reasons why people might struggle with ADHD symptoms. These things all need to be considered as well, and maybe there's just no adaptivity for certain situations. But it is better to have this understanding of response-ready environments than not. And I, 30 plus years later, agree with that statement. A little did they know that someone on a podcast, which I don't even know if there were podcasts around there, would be talking about this and kind of arguing for it at this point.
SPEAKER_00There was barely internet. I mean, there was, but like the 90s. That didn't be the connection with I did just want to jump back to safe, non-safe, resource-rich, impoverished, time optional, slash, time critical in terms of the environment's characterization. And just thinking about from like an entrepreneurial perspective, I wouldn't describe necessarily entrepreneurship as operating in like a non-safe, impoverished time-critical sphere.
SPEAKER_01I mean, it depends.
SPEAKER_00But I think like why just think maybe slightly changing that terminology to be kind of a very competitive that's why you have to find the blue ocean. Yeah, a competitive, often saturated, and yeah, sort of first to market, I think is the term I was looking for. So it can be. Do you think that's a fair reframing in terms of business? You're operating in this like very competitive. If you if you don't succeed, you just there's no you can't, you know, there's no first, second, third warning, written warning. There's everyone stops getting paid and they leave and they go for a job somewhere else.
SPEAKER_01I would say that if I was to connect it, I would say entrepreneurship is a situation where you have to pay attention. You have to pay attention to your customers, to the market, to improvements in the market, to act fast. You need to be able to be aware of these things.
SPEAKER_00Performing a SWOT analysis and like keeping vigilant.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. SWOT analysis, government regulations, all of those kinds of pieces. And that is something that you're probably better at if you are response ready versus not. So it does kind of connect you to the entrepreneurship environment.
SPEAKER_00I don't think they were trying to do this, but I think framing it as only advantageous, because they sort of mention, you know, one theory is that it used to be a lot more useful, and now in modern society it's just a lot less useful. And so we're sort of these legacy.
SPEAKER_01I think they're like a chin.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, where was that? That was what we're coming. That was one of the um discussion papers. We should uh actually. Anyway, uh it's um but it is I didn't realize chins were not useful, they were a non-useful byproduct of other changes.
SPEAKER_01I feel like a lot of Lux Maxes will feel differently about that, yeah. But I do I do think that's a very nineties perspective. Like when I think about the 90s, I think about this, like I mean, again, I was a child in the 90s, so I don't know what it was like to be an adult, but I think of the 90s as a as a slightly a hopeful space of like, well, that was a difficult time. We don't have that now. We have jobs and job security and things like that. And then I'm sure a lot of you will be like, that wasn't the case for my parents or or whatever, or me. But you know, I think now there is that sense of like, ah, this is a lot. And even if you're not running a business, you probably should think about it, you know, like start a side hustle or you know, run a business of having to find a new job every three years, you know, that kind of stuff. So welcome to foraging, everybody. We're back. For better or worse.
SPEAKER_00Schools being a relatively recent invention, the past 400 years. One of the discussion papers kind of refutes that.
SPEAKER_01I agree with the discussion paper. And for those of you who are interesting, this paper really interestingly had two discussion papers afterward that kind of disagreed with it. It was like really open to criticism, this paper, which was cool. And one of them pointed out that the I think it was Greeks and Romans have been doing school and sitting down and debating and things like that for a very long time. So school has been around for more than just modern society. Although I did want to argue with that person that an open-air amphitheater in which people are debating lively in a lively manner, which is one of the you know versions, at least the ones I've heard of, um, is not exactly the same as sitting inside inside listening to a teacher and not being able to have a lively debate.
SPEAKER_00So I was sort of wondering that you would have just had the same problem. Like you would have had either three to five percent or or maybe more back then, I don't know, of ADHD kids who weren't able to do schooling back then as well. What is that?
SPEAKER_01What is that telling us? Yeah, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_00And then also on an evolutionary time frame, I don't think ancient Greece is that significant anyway.
SPEAKER_01The point that I was was gonna make was that I think the thing I liked the most about this paper was one, it was super open to debate. It had a lot of like opportunities for different kinds of debates, different perspectives, but also it really allowed the possibility of what if we reframed this a little bit? Not in a we're the best, nothing could touch us kind of way, but just in a what if this was adaptive? Like what would that look like? How would that work? And and it kind of argued for a different view of ADHD, which had it been taken up by some of the people who had the lively discussion that they quoted at the front in the acknowledgments, we could have had a completely different understanding of ADHD to the one that we have today.
SPEAKER_00I'm like, am I still hopeful that's gonna be the case down the track? I guess we're gonna investigate further.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, we're talking about it, if that counts for something.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I've got a few more papers I want to look at in terms of genetics. We'll see what has been discussed since then in terms of an evolutionary lens. I'm not holding out a huge amount of hope given the sort of general consensus, but yeah, it'll be interesting to see.
SPEAKER_01And I would argue that we exist more than ever in a world where being response ready is not a bad thing. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.