Attention Deficit and Adaptation

Over the past decade we see an increasing number of people who suggest Attention Deficit (both ADD and ADHD) may be the early stages of an evolutionary adaptation.
For those who must know, I don’t deny evolution as a fact of biology in the now, but dispute even the mere possibility of using it to explain how we got here. While we experience evolution as a daily fact of life, there is no logical justification for extrapolating it beyond actual evidence. The business of juggling archaeological finds takes entirely too much unknown for granted.
The current tiny incremental changes which we measure as adaptations which seem to affect the whole population of a given species in any particular context are easily found all over the place. If we posit the context is a very high volume data world for humans, there are elements of ADD and ADHD which indicate an adaptive advantage. While you can find research into this going all the way back to the earliest formulations of Attention Deficit as a concrete diagnosis, the terminology has shifted a great deal. It’s easy to find articles addressing some of this research from an adaptive viewpoint:
Born to Explore, 1997
ZDNet/Huffington Post, 2007
The Human Imprint, 2008
Psychology Today, 2010 (rather long)
The Telegraph (UK), 2012
and most recently, a much more speculative, less careful discussion at the Activist Post the past few days.
All of this hits dangerously close to home because I have been diagnosed with the milder ADD (specifically, Adult ADD) as was my son. I find the actual hyperactive version (ADHD) is probably an overshot, missing the putative advantages by going too far. The milder form I have, particularly as an adult, is probably closer to what the articles together suggest.
I’ve noted before, the smallest natural unit of cognition for me is the paragraph. I don’t do well memorizing text as words the way most people do. On the other hand, just about any paragraph of which I can make any sense will likely find a peg in my memory in terms of content. So, for example, I can recall easily the import of the linked articles, though it required some bit of research to recover where and when I found them. I extract and internalize the content but struggle to keep track of the linkages.
More precisely, Adult ADD is a recall disability, not a learning disability. It’s easy for precise bits of data to get lost. I know I know it, but can’t find the path to it’s storage in my brain. However, if the item in question is a larger block of data, it’s always easy to recall. Further, I can make creative linkages across multiple disciplines without much effort. I see parallels more quickly than most people, though quite often those parallels are flawed by incomplete data. I may not know a lot about something, but I recognize trends easily, even if they are inaccurate. It’s how I process and store things.
The central claim is something in this change from the previous norm of human learning and cognition grants an advantage in this modern age of huge volumes of data. Instead of being overwhelmed by too much information, it’s all absorbed as structure, and more of the content is kept that way. Once the structure is in place, it’s easier to keep more of the content, and the structure is detected — or inferred — intuitively. It’s the trademark of intuition itself.
Concrete example: Regular readers know I am fanatical about the Bible, in terms of the effort I expend working with it. In one sense, I’m completely crippled from retention because it takes a monumental effort to rote memorize even small portions of text. In another sense, I’ve already memorized the whole thing. Once I gained ground in the effort to think like a Hebrew, the underlying structure become almost painfully obvious, poking at my mind, as it were. I can recall what the Bible seems to say about almost anything, even if I struggle to offer locations within the text. Naturally, I memorize the content according to my own best understanding, but I have a high degree of confidence in my ability to parse the logic and meaning.
The liability is I can’t easily limit inputs. There’s a paradox: either everything in my context gets in, or almost nothing gets in because I’m too deeply absorbed by something specific. Regarding my previous post about the hypnotic effect of video, I can get utterly lost in the presentation, or find myself deeply annoyed by the distraction. Because I am very conscious of the effects, I react internally with anger to the presence of a TV screen running wherever I am. It makes me very uncomfortable, and I strive to find ways to block them. You can imagine I hate waiting rooms, where it seems they are ubiquitous. Another example of liability is when I drive more than six or eight hours, particularly routes I don’t see often, I have to stop and sleep so my brain can process all the massive visual stimulation I’ve absorbed. Otherwise it leaks back out and I start hallucinating, and enter that half-sleep state which gets people killed in auto crashes. On an average day of reading and Net surfing, I always take a nap mid-day.
So long as our high-tech environment holds, this is fine. Oddly, those years when I played at military maneuvers, I did rather well for noticing odd details even when physically tired, so long as there was no great lull in activity. I’m pretty much useless at waiting alert when I’m tired.
But I want you to notice how the political and institutional trends of public education is fighting all this tooth and nail. Easily 90% of staff attention is given to behavior management, and only some 10% is actual learning. That 90% is contrary to the rising tide of children doing their best to be ready for the massive flood of information, adaptations harshly contrary to what educators demand kids do physically in class. It’s education which needs to adapt, now. Kids simply do not have to sit still and be quiet to learn, because while they squirm and make noise, they are still absorbing from learning activities tailored to allow such activity. I’ve seen this first hand as a teacher.
At any rate, even if we could teach teachers to change their student behavioral expectations, getting closer to reality, I find the adaptive value of Attention Deficit is hit-and-miss.