I’ve been reading books about ADD/ADHD because I suspect I have this disorder. (Once I’m reasonably certain that I have it, I’m going to get a doctor to test me for it.)
I’ve been reading about the most common symptoms and the one that most caught my eye is that most ADD/ADHDers are easily distracted by sound. (I certainly am, which is one reason why I think I have the condition. I can be distracted by the sound of my own typing and forget what I was writing. But not always.) In today’s noisy world, with cell phones everywhere; with people playing Walkmans so loud you can hear the music twenty feet away even though they’re wearing headphones; with fire trucks racing down city streets several times a day, sirens blaring; with TVs found in nearly every bar and many restaurants, bus stations, train stations and airports; and so on and so forth, it’s no wonder that even those with mild cases of ADD/ADHD can become stressed out. It’s mentally tiring, it’s wearying to have all these things vying for your attention and you lack the ability to screen out the junk and focus on the important stuff.
But I wondered if maybe there was a time when this “disorder” was actually an advantage. In what kind of society would being so sensitive to sound be good for someone? It came to me abruptly; it was an epiphany:
Hunters would need this ability. Imagine the hunter going out looking for prey. He looks for signs, he listens for them. There is slight movement nearby and he hears an animal rustling in the grass. Because he is attuned to sound, he knows just where this animal is and can either wait for it to come into view and strike or approach it for a better shot. And this talent is not a liability out on the savannahs of Africa because of the relative silence there. There are no sounds vying for his attention except for the wind or the sounds of birds or other animals. He can ignore those because there are so few of them and because they simply aren’t very loud. But put this same man in a large, bustling city and the cacophony could overwhelm him. And we aren’t really very far removed from this man who lived only 50,000 years ago.
Others could have this “disorder” and, for them, it is neutral: for farmers and fishers, ADD/ADHD would be neither beneficial nor a liability. But the quiet of the water where fishers catch their prey, the silence of the fields would be attractive to such people because of the lack of distractions. (And I say “disorder” because, really, it’s a liability only in the wrong environment.)
(I know one person is not a sufficient example, but, at the moment, it’s the best I can do.) My father was a farmer (cotton, sorghum, alfalfa, cattle). He loved the quiet of the fields. He loved to go on camping trips in the mountains of Colorado and West Texas because of the quiet and the solitude. Crowds made him uneasy. He never lived in a city and he admitted it was because of all the noise (and the dirt and the traffic and the crime, but the noise was the reason he cited most often).
There are other characteristics common to people with ADD/ADHD; why don’t we speculate on the possibility that they, too, are evolutionary adaptations? You can, of course tell me where you think I’m wrong and you might even claim that there is no such thing as ADD/ADHD, but you’d better have a good reason why. I suppose people could claim there is no such thing as evolution, but I think you’d be better off in another thread. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!