Is ADD/ADHD an adaptation to today’s technophilic culture?
August 27, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Is Mild ADHD a Favorable Evolutionary Adaptation to Technology? asks Russell Shaw in the August 27th Huffington Post:
I think what he was trying to get at is that video games, texting, and other online applications are best performed by minds with the circuitry to jump at a nanosecond’s notice back and forth from screen to screen and application to application.
Following this proposition forward, the seeming inability of some younger folks to concentrate on just one thing, one thought, one application, could be attributed to a rewiring of neurons to keep up with the herky-jerky pace of life. I don’t know how the ability of so many young people to shut themselves up in a room for hours with a Harry Potter book plays into this hypothesis, but I could see how minds now wired for fast reaction could adapt well to our changing tech.
Shaw cites Phil Edholm, CTO & VP Network Architecture, Enterprise at communications technology provider Nortel. as his source for the notion that some form of ADHD “among the ‘millennium generation’ of younger people could actually be the start of an ‘evolutionary adaptation’ to the increasingly fast-paced world of digital technology.”
Or is that, there have always been persons with ADHD (just as there have always been persons with autism), but their abilities are more appropriate for today’s technocentric world, and they are therefore more visible?
Note to Mr. Shaw and Mr. Edholm: My husband, Jim, has always had ADHD (growing up in the 1960s, the nuns used to make him run around the parking lot to make him less hyper; didn’t work). BUt Jim is not the technogeek in our family—-I am (maybe you guessed that) (many of my relatives work in Silicon Valley)—-so I’m not so sure that having ADHD correlates with increased ability to function in the techno-digital-cyber world. In fact, Jim would have, he likes to note, much enjoyed living in the earlier part of this century, in the time of the book he just finished about the New Jersey and New York waterfront, when there were longshoremen and Frank Hague and a certain Mr. Big……..
Apologies for an ADD moment.
Back to autism.
I’m highly skeptical of any idea of genetic evolution occurring within Western society, since very few conditions exist to reduce or increase the breeding rates of certain kinds of people, most especially people who are able to easily thrive in our society. (If anything, they breed LESS.)
I think most of what’s called AD/HD these days is what Ned Hallowell and John Ratey refer to as the cultural phenomenon of “pseudo-ADD” – a short attention span that is easily trained/learned by such outside influences as technological culture, at least in a certain subset of more or less neurologically typical individuals. That is, it is an environmental adaptation, the potential for which is present in a large percentage of the human gene pool, more so than it is a biological adaptation. Or at least, it’s just as much so. No change in the genome has been necessary to produce increases in AD/HD. The genes for the ability to learn a short attention span in an environment that calls for it were already there long ago.
So, IMO, it’s no more of an evolutionary adaptation than literacy. People always had the potential for it.
Thom Hartmann’s “Hunter” theory may point to a possible evolutionary origin to there being certain genotypes who are more strongly prone to learning a short attention span than others.
I agree with reform normal. Evolution is way too slow a process to account for any change in ADHD rates.
Joe
I have to agree with the above comments, evolution is too slow a process. I do however think that parents are jumping on the ADHD bandwagon. 10-15 years ago I coached children struggling academically. 90% of the parents believed that their child was dyslexic. Now it is fashionable to say a child is ADHD, hence the rise in sufferers. That is not to say there are no ADHD children, of course there are, but there are a great many children from disfunctional backgrounds etc trying to cope and being wrongly labelled. Doctors, unable to deal with the real causes, may prescribe medication. Teachers, without the time to practice behavioral management in the classroom, welcome the effect of drugs even if they diapprove the use.
I don’t know enough about evolutionary science to say whether or not ADDH or any other neurological conditions/differences are adaptations to today’s technological world, but I am having a hard time with modern living. Although I have slightly above average math and computer ability, I am in a state of constant overload from the fast pace of modern life and even find the rapidly advancing technology confusing. I am also disillusioned with it because inventors and programmers are creating increasingly complex devices and software upgrades without perfecting any of them. As a result, technology is very failure prone, which makes life for me, as a severely autistic woman who can’t cope with change, much more difficult. Like most products manufactured this millennium, electronics products are cheaply and poorly made. They are expensive but don’t last the way big ticket items used to.
As I move through mid-life and my state of mental burnout deepens, my tolerance for modern living decreases. I find myself wanting less and less stimulation and wishing everything would slow down.
Marla Comm