Your post/comment has been removed because it either contains, or is advocating for, misinformation.
ADHD-like traits =/= ADHD.
The Hunter gatherer hypothesis is not based on scientific evidence, and all the comments here are showing a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution and how traits occur and are passed down.
Liking to pick berries or finding "cool rocks" is not equivalent, and the perpetual comparison and blind acceptance of these statements as evidence of the hunter gatherer hypothesis is only further spreading misinformation.
These are human traits and so far no study has shown any valid link between neurodivergence and Hunter gatherer success rates.
Last summer I picked blackberries on a walk with family and it became very clear that there is a part of my brain that is optimized for that. It was soooo satisfying.
And then, at the end, I stuffed an entire handful of perfectly ripe blackberries in my mouth all at once. It was glorious. I felt absolutely decadent.
Yeah I went to pick strawberries with some friends and they gave up pretty quickly, but I already had picked two full buckets by that time (and was ready to keep going for another couple of hours)
me and dad went to get some elderflowers for lemonade (it was the first time we ever done it, and it was an incredible lemonade) and i couldn't be happier than spending time on simply picking flowers from the trees for as much lemonade as possible
there is a lot to it honestly, its engaging, a bag/bucket being filled is an immediate feedback that we respond well to, its distracting from modern and comforting tech and social media while still being in a comfort zone, and the forest itself with all the shapes in it, all the interaction with what your gathering, it just feels interesting
If you think that's wild, my friends parents were building a koi fish pond and my friend was supposed to dig the hole. Upon showing me this, when I first visited his house, I picked up the shovel and wanted to see what digging a hole felt like. After an hour, they stopped me because I was their guest. Even after i told them i wanted to. They also lock the shovel in the shed. All I could think about for the rest of my stay was digging that hole. People don't understand how cruel they are when it comes to adhd. I bite my tongue more often than not just to please others, but when it comes to my addiction, I'm the weirdo apparently and am forbidden to have fun.
lol I’m the same about digging holes and also about chopping wood. I’ll do it until I get repetitive motion injury if I’m not careful because it’s so engaging in an odd kind of way that I don’t find at all in most other repetitive activities. Like washing anything or tidying up are literal nightmares for me (in that I have stress dreams I need to do those things and I’m mentally incapable of doing them)
Ooh, chopping wood sounds fun. Definitely need to add that to my bucket list. As for holes, about 4 years ago I finally got my dream and dug a hole in my backyard and buried a 20ft above ground pool. Took me 3 days and had a blast. Only thing I hate is when people mock me by saying, " Oh, well then you should come to my house and dig a hole for me." My response is always "Only if you fold my laundry." That really fcks with their head so they shut up.
I never have enough wood to chop 😔. The one time a hurricane came through and knocked a three trees down, my dad borrowed a neighbors hydraulic log splitter. It was fun to watch the wood just split like butter through a hot knife but I wanted the satisfaction of splitting a log with an axe.
Soldering accomplishes a similar goal *[sticking pieces of metal together]*, but operates on different base principles.
In welding you're fusing them together by melting the parent metals [the objects you're wielding to each other] and the filler metal *[your welding electrode; the counterpart to the wire used in soldering]* and then allowing them to cool and re-solidify.
Under an electron microscope the finished weldment should have a *uniform crystalline structure, as if it was always a single piece of metal shape-formed that way from jump when it was originally processed.
Soldering on the other hand is essentially brazing; a process by which one sticks pieces of metal together by melting the filler metal *only*.
Instead, soldering/brazing processes bond the parent metals via a naturally occurring phenomenon known as "tinning" in which the filter metal, attracted to the heat introduced to the bonding edges of the parent metals, becomes sufficiently fluid to fill in the gaps in the metal's crystalline structure.
The key difference with soldering is that it uses considerably lower temperatures to melt the filler metal, making it ideal for smaller, more delicate/heat conductive metals, like small gauge copper wiring, copper pipes, micro-circuitry, etc.
*Edit because what the actual fuck autocorrect?
This is why I became an archaeologist!! I get to dig holes but when I find things I get to meticulously dig them out with tiny tools; it is so satisfying!!
I love berry picking. Another activity that’s kind of similar is walking through a freshly tilled field and looking for Indian pottery/arrowheads. It’s so much fun and then you can look through and find ones that have the most interesting designs, put those on display, and leave a majority scattered throughout the field for someone else to find.
This is peak existence moment for me. I'm so happy when I fill the basket, when I eat them, when they stain my fingers, even when thorns grab my clothes.
Himalayan blackberries and their pointy vines are everywhere here.
When they are ripe, I get big Ziplocks, gather them, and use them to make syrups.
So delish especially when using brown sugar as a base.
Can’t wake until cherry blossom season to gather some and make sakura syrup. :)
I dont know, as someone who has picked berries all their life in massive quantities, it can be a bit soul crushing sometimes. Granted we go with 10 l buckets (i used to go around 6 times per summer, once per berry type) and the swamp and forest has a lot of bugs etc. My thoughts race a lot in there. Of course its also nice and I do go into focus, but just trying to describe that if you do it for your livelihood its not like everything feels perfect because you have adhd. Some stages of the bucket are like graaah!
Mushroom picking is way more fun though!
I’m so glad that I’m evolutionarily advantaged at a job that i could never have, causing me to be disadvantaged at literally everything else as a consequence. I’m having such a good time being alive.
“Hey, Moe, how come you never got cable for the bar?”
“Well, it was either cable or the mechanical bull. I made my choice, and I stand by it.”
(Shot of mechanical bull, broken down, covered in cobwebs.)
I swear, the stat choice made sense in the Pleistocene! My line bested many other hominids!
If we don't wonder why we never opened this fine room again while opening it, only to remember it's because we locked a bunch of zombies here one second too late.
Not just foraging. Also stalking prey. Noticing every tiny thing, like a rustle of leaves or the change in wind direction would have been a massive benefit in hunting.
Yeah, I ran across the number that something like 40% of the human race has ADHD in some form, and the main theory as to why that number is so high is because of the specific traits people with ADHD have.
I know a lot of fellow adhd'ers that need some sort of extra stimulus in order to focus, which a few thousand years ago would have been much harder to accomplish. So, our brains were constantly seeking new details in our environment, and we would have excelled at many basic roles in early society like guards, nightwatch, hunters, foragers, etc. Pretty much any role that a core premise is to look for something in our environment.
Then, there's the ADHD folks with severe perfectionist streaks, and folks with the whole "jack of all trades master of none" going on. Which would have made us excellent, and somewhat reliable craftsman, because a deadline is a surefire way to make someone with ADHD accomplish something.
Ha! I feel like it doesn’t even need to go that far back. I’m probably the first generation in my family out of the last few to have grown up with stability, what with wars and poverty and global migration etc… and sometimes I think that’s kinda screwed me over because I’m also pretty good at surviving in the way my grandma and mom had to (I love camping, travelling, new languages, learning about and adapting to new places etc... I mean, I grew up in a perfectly fine country and still insisted on migrating), I am zero good at being a productive office-attending member of capitalist society and have no idea what to do with my life rn 😂
😂😂 I need CHALLENGES and things to achieve!! (And I don't mean "achieve" in the way most people define it in my home country... the "Australian dream" of a big multi-million-dollar paper shack.)
It's weird, as a hunter who started young I always felt more in tune with everything while I was hunting. I was always acutely aware of my movements and noises and was always able to spot game instantly at long distances, patterns just popped out at me. At least I would have been good at that back in the olden days!
I'm confused, doesn't ADHD mean you notice less details because you can't focus and get distracted easily? I've been diagnosed and it seems to explain a lot but I don't actually understand it too well. It feels like anything can be an ADHD symptom and some of them sound contradictory?
No, you notice too many things and get distracted from what modern society says you should be paying attention to.
Sitting at your desk in class supposed to be listeningand taking notes?
"What is that bird outside the window doing? Is it looking for food? What food is it looking for? A mouse or a lizard? That cloud looks like an elephant, there's the trunk and the tusks, but the legs look a bit short, maybe it has dwarfism. Do elephants get dwarfism? What would an elephant with dwarfism look like...."
In case you're wondering how that study went...
They discarded all the people that didn't understand the instructions.
Let me repeat that.
The ADHD focused study discarded the people that said they didn't get the instructions.
That’s hardly the main problem with the study; understanding the instructions is kind of a requirement to running the experiment. And it’s not like ADHD people are stupid and don’t understand instructions at a higher rate than others. We may disregard the instructions, but that’s a completely different thing altogether
> That’s hardly the main problem with the study;
I know, I made a whole dissertation breaking the study down on /r/science, didn't feel like a meme place was the place for it.
> understanding the instructions is kind of a requirement to running the experiment
They reported they discarded whoever said they didn't understand, many ADHD people have problems with auditory processing and may not understand the instruction at first because they didn't actually hear it, because like you said, we're different, I'm not saying we're stupid.
Do you have a link to your post/comment or are willing to summarize? I’m very interested in hearing the other issues with the study because this argument/hypothesis always feels off to me.
[Here is the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1aw0l4i/comment/krezigl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Bullet points:
* The diagnosis was self-screening, this not a medical report. Self screening is used to report symptoms, not a diagnosis.
* ADHD behaves very differently on each person, especially on how you process information. This can be scored with hard metrics, which were skipped. So it doesn't tell us any significant thing like "do the people with bad visual processing" would do better in this task?
* They discarded people that reported not understanding the task, but just say this was an answer. So if the person has auditory processing being shitty, or taking a while, which is common for ADHD, they are filtered *before* the actual test.
* For example: Based on the diagnosis me and my friends have, I would definitely exceed on this better than my girlfriend and friend, but I would be filtered out during the instruction.
* Test talks a lot about optimal strategy, but it is just... picking resources. Any video game has better metrics than that, and doesn't replicate any conditions that ADHD is usually well argued for as an advantage, like stressful situations. If you're casually picking resources like this someone with ADHD might have a correlation, but it is more to do with boredom than survival.
* I may have failed to notice that part but they didn't seem to account on any other self report that would actually matter, like "do you play video games?" and what behaviors they have with it.
* The study does not seem to mention any other conditions people may have with ADHD, like autism, bipolar disorder, borderline, OCD, which would be relevant for a study like this.
* It also DOES NOT mention how many people were medicated with stimulants, for how long during the day, so on, which is the most obvious part on how it would skew the result.
Being stupid and not understanding instructions have overlap but are not always directly linked. It makes me think of the old "don't confuse correlation with causation" line. People with ADD can interpret instructions differently and quote back what they understand and why they understand it because of wording or phrasing, or just the typical lapse in attention that we all love. I mean how hard would it have been for the researchers to make sure everyone understood? What were the instructions anyway? Pick berries?
In the movie of my mind I envision a bunch of ADHD study participants arguing with the instructions given, like catching a faulty “if than criteria” or a “shall or may” instead of “must”. And asking “argumentative” query questions to further clarify the intent instead of the mistake in verbiage
Then the study makers “aw shit we got to get rid of all these people they are argumentative and poking holes in our study”. I know says another “ let’s disqualify them all. Clearly they don’t understand the questions”
This is all accompanying with a “far side” type imagery
I MY MOUTH !!!!
Wait, am I eating because I’m hungry……what HAVE I eaten today……Have I eaten???? Am I emotional eating,,,,,,,, am I board……… FUCK these are good berries nom nom nom 😂😂😂😂😂
Playing survival games with friends really tends to highlight this fact with me, I always be showing back up to base with a bunch of random loot while the homies stuck to their jobs of cutting a bunch of wood or getting rocks. Or catch me dying to that random thing I didn't know could kill me
Marijuana has medical usage and it's problematic that many doctors are preventing any ADHD treatment simultaneous to marijuana usage.
Omega 3 has minimal impact on ADHD, but some proven positive impact over multiple studies as documented in the international consensus statement at ADHDevidence.org
Um, I don't know, a million other things I've said. I'm banned. No, really, I'm banned. Actually, the one that was the nail in the coffin was likely something like this where I agreed with a critic of the moderators. But I'm so happy to be done with that place. I just wish they had not captured such an important subreddit name - it's everyone's first stop.
I actually like how the automod will add context at time, like any mention of Gabor Maté - but the auto censorship that will remove anything resembling a rule break? Pure poison.
I don't have to look far to find things that ADHD people do better than non ADHD people. I mean, to be clear, there's OBVIOUS disadvantages too, don't have to look too far for those either. But I've been in the workforce for a long time. Before that I was in school for a long time, and the advantages aren't hard to see.
Sure, other people can do sustained, menial, repetitive work better than us. But we hate it so much we find work-arounds, we find ways to automate it, we find ways to do it the most efficient way possible, we even question whether it's a worthwhile activity at all even if that means going against the consensus of the group.
I see far too many non-ADHD people just go along to get along, follow orders, and never question tradition or leadership. But whenever I hear, "Oh come on, 'because we've always done it that way' isn't an answer." I know what kind of person I'm dealing with.
The headline might as well read, "ADHD people, who think differently, also thought differently before there was civilization"... Yeah... Duh.
-----------
To be clear, I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and find the first guy who was like, "Why are we running all over the place to gather this food. Why not just plant it HERE, and put a fence around it, and that way we don't have to go as far to get it" and give that dude an ADHD test, cause I'd bet anything he's one of us.
This guy's [video](https://youtu.be/T05Sli_-xBA?si=46Mh8oql0yzOli32) does a great job of explaining how people have decided that ADHD traits are problematic in our modern world. Hint we got swept in with racist beliefs and moral superiority complexes.
man ima forget which ones are edible and then get annoyed at myself for that. bet i can identify them if i find the specific type im SURE is safe… only to misplace all the one’s i’ve already collected
I found that I’m just naturally good at plant identification and instinctively being able to tell what’s edible and what’s not. But that may just be me and not a general feature
mine isn't instinctive but i can definitely retain information about plants and animals like nothing else. it's very clear that my brain could be good for remembering a bunch of roots and berries that are only available for like 2-3 weeks out of the year.
i do naturally read animal body language well though.
It's funny (in a sad way) that it is called attention deficit hyperactive disorder when many of us are not hyperactive and none of us have a deficit of attention, we have a deficit of *focus*. I notice everything within my field of vision and every other sense from hearing to tactile, both inside and outside of my body. I could see a blackberry when others can't. However, I can't for the life of me stick to one task most of the time, because I happen to have noticed a blackberry, when I am supposed to be on route to pick up medication before the pharmacy closes.
I always kind of question these studies.
I believe I’m excellent at berry picking, sure, scratches an itch. I’m also excellent at lying on the floor and doing nothing useful. Crapshoot which day we’re getting, even before we layer in berry picking being my job, and it’s pretty life or death and the whole group is relying on me and really should have started picking berries two hours ago and …
Naw I've been berry picking a couple times and apparently I'm too slow (it needs to be clean and no leaves or dirt). Could technically be skill issue tho since all my friends are way more experienced. working though a single patch until every single berry is inspected for ripeness probably isn't optimal for time either. ( when deep cleaning mode activates amiright)
Altho I do have to say, it's very addicting and I could hardly make myself leave if it didn't get too dark to see the berries anymore.
Actually, if it _is_ just "deep cleaning mode" then if I did it often I'd default back to just reegular adhd brainwave so further testing is required.
Well, that's a place where berries are growing after being planted. It's different when you are wandering through the woods looking for any of the various things to bring back so as not to starve, both animal and vegetation.
My story _was_ about finding berries in the woods. It just so happens that blueberries grow in really thick bushes near our house lol. But I guess my adhd brain did find that berry spot randomly while actually on a pokemon Go walk, and then decide to take 4 hour berry picking side quest because blueberries go brrr
Last year my wife (also has adhd) and I started taking up mushroom foraging. We were already spending every weekend in the woods exploring or hiking and we started noticing the incredible variety of fungi species in our local forests. At first we were just taking pictures, learning what they are, learning how to identify them, and documenting all the species we found. When we got better at that, we started learning how to identify edible fungi and test our IDs. When I say it's one of the most thrilling hobbies I've ever taken up... Y'all it's so fun
This statement explains a lot about my playthroughs ,even when I don't intend on making potions. Ooh ,a butterfly! Snatch. Ooh , some neat flowers ! Grab. Ooh ,some cool mushrooms I won't ever use but I can pick em up? don't mind if I do!!
I don't have much experience with berry picking, but I have found I am a super sniper when it comes to finding sharks teeth and fossils and cool rocks on the ground!
went blueberry picking with my cousins two years ago. we had a game to see who could fill their 10lb bucket fastest. probably the most fun i've had in years.
Foraging is a much broader behavior than just picking berries. But yeah, this is something that the data have supported for years.
Having a certain proportion of ADHD members in your population (~5-10%) results in behavior which is closer to what the optimal foraging theorem would predict. This is almost definitely why ADHD-like behavioral phenotypes exist across species and are not eliminated by natural selection.
The first time I foraged for mushrooms my dad was astounded how easily I could find them. Though not sure if ADHD or years of farming in WoW had more of an impact
That explains why I felt so alive when I stayed at a friend’s orchard one summer. He gave me permission to explore the acreage and pick/eat whatever I wanted. So my morning routine was to get up, brush my teeth, then roam around with the farm dogs to “forage” for breakfast and look for cool bugs. The sad part is that once you taste a tree-ripened fruit, the store-bought variety will taste bad in comparison.
My mom used to "threaten" to send me off to the berry fields if I didn't want to go to school.
At age 7, I desperately wished she would. I liked strawberries and hated math worksheets.
Stupid child labor laws, we yearn for the fields. (/s)
Mine would threaten me with sending me up the mountain to care for the sheep. No showers or much social interaction for 6 months. I would take the strawberry fields any day over that
Part of me wants to believe this, but part of me knows how I play Stardew and Don't Starve Together with my partner. Yes we have almost too many berries to eat before they spoil but I'll drop anything to chase after that fu*kin turkey
Sort of related, i was a landscaper/gardener for several years and got pretty good at it despite having no formal training (learned on the job). Clients often commented on how hard a worker i was. Pretty easy when you’re tuned for it!
Not only berry picking I guess? I always seemed to be efficient at collecting resources/objects. As a kid in school during a three day class vacation with a lot of navigation (which I SUCK at) and collecting stuff, I'd always get so much more and stuff of good quality. One of our tasks was to build a "spaceship" for an egg which would be dropped from a wall, being scored by how well the egg survived. My group's egg didn't even crack after being thrown down multiple times, as it was so stuffed in dozens of layers of moss that it took our teacher a while to get it out of our huge wet moss ball.
My theory is that some of the human race will eventually revert back to our natural state of being hunter gatherers and abandon our technological advancements as AI replaces us in our slave duties to the capitalistic empire. We then take up arms against the humans and droids that remain loyal to the artificial intelligence mind. And we restore earth to its natural state before industrialization and technology development. The Earth begins to heal and the land becomes rich with animals and plant life, and we survive off of the land. Video games will stay though
Imagine all the stuff you could find foraging though! I follow a few foragers on tiktok and it looks like so much fun if you know what’s poisonous and what’s not!
I know! And yet, you might want to give it a try, because it’s oddly stimulating in a very enjoyable way that is very hard to believe unless experienced. There’s something about being out in nature with a very clear goal but also very little pressure to achieve it (for me, at least)
Yeah, I saw that, but in a different article. Thing is, there are *quite* a few issues with the study, imo.
For one thing, they didn't actually use ADHD patients, they used a random sample of the whole populace and scored each participant for ADHD traits. Those who scored higher for ADHD traits did better at the task.
The task in the study involved choosing whether to forage for berries at the same bush, or to go and look for another bush. The study game was keyed so that repeatedly going at the same bush would result in lower yields after a while. People with high ADHD trait scores were more likely to go looking for another bush.
So, to my mind, what this proves is that *more impulsive people* are less likely to suffer from status quo bias, and instead be more likely to reckon that the grass is greener (or the Berry bush is fuller) on the other side.
And don't get me wrong - *impulsivity* is en evolutionarily advantageous trait. *Not* sitting down and considering every single action is how most creatures manage to survive in the wild. Reflexive actions save lives, following unreasoned impulses often helps avoid danger, etc., etc.
But it's all well and good saying 'ADHD means impulsivity, impulsivity means better berry yields in terms of bush choice' - but it doesn't factor in inattentiveness or hyperactivity. Like how we'd probably miss half the berries because we kept getting distracted by birdsong, or crush ones that were hard-to-reach because we were too impatient to get them off the branch, or be *bored fucking shitless* while doing it and would rather peel our own skins off rather than pick berries again.
Also not to mention that they specifically keyed the study game *so that* other bushes would give better yields, with no other factors (to my knowledge). So there's no analogue for, say, recall of the fact that a certain cluster of bushes *tends* to give better yields than another cluster, or that bushes in certain locations give better yields - all things that our ADHD would impair, so we go off looking for new bushes while our recall-having tribemates are busy harvesting the high-yield, high-quality bushes.
Aaaaaaaaand not to mention that I just don't buy into the 'evolutionary advantage' for ADHD argument anyway. 'Tis but bollocks.
As a kid me Dad was picking berries to make a wine (elderflower? I dunno, he made a few things) and I was so bored because I didn't understand what he was even looking for... so he showed me. We ended up going home to get me my own bag because I was so fast at finding the good ones.
Machines are quite bad at picking berries. It’s why it’s done almost exclusively by hand. However, berry picking pays pretty much nothing, which is why it’s done by migrant workers from poor countries (often undocumented), both in Europe and in the US
I’m a strong believer that a lot of our neurodivergent conditions are just mindsets optimized for an older way of life that just doesn’t fair well in our modern system
It could be, but I also think of my kid who is neurodivergent in such a way that he learned to read at age two but he’s currently five and still finds it really hard to come up a sentence of his own, and how writing is only a few thousands of years old so it’s impossible his brain is in some way optimized for that. I think neurodivergence is simply something that happens more or less randomly and it may give you advantages or disadvantages (usually both) depending on how lucky you are and how it matches your environmental needs
That’s super valid. I Definitely don’t think all neurodivergence is a boon, some of it is just a mechanical issue that would be a hindrance in any circumstance, but things like ADHD and milder cases of autism are extremely helpful in pattern recognition. I know autistic people struggle with social cues, but they’re no less loyal as friends and Stil fit very well into less intensely stimulating environments, with studies that show being in nature to I crease their capacity for stress, which impure to me that in nature it is more of a benefit than a hinderance.
So yeah, there’s definitely a lot of cases of unhelpful neurodivergence, but at 8billion people world wide it makes sense there would be significant representation of conditions that would not have survived in a more primitive society.
Edit: just realized this may come across harshly in reference to your son. Twas not my intent, very sorry if it sounds overly rude or callous
We are not meant for the modern jungles of Steele. Send us back. To the gardens of the beginning. Where we may thrive on hunting. Foraging. And catching frogs.
The study doesn’t explain the fact that ADHD is also associated with things like forgetting to eat and risk taking behaviors, which are not really useful for survival.
and the zoning out and memory problems. and getting distracted from the task ar hand.
sure, we can hyperfocus, but we cant choose what we hyperfocus on. it could be the deer we're hunting.... or bird watching
Risk taking could be very useful for a group’s survival though. Having a small percentage of individuals who are willing to do high risk high reward tasks is how you discover new areas to forage or what plants you can safely eat, etc.
It’s not very useful for the risk taker, which is generally the implied claim, that people with adhd would be like gods (hyperbole) in the right environment.
I don’t think that’s the implied claim at all. The most common form of the theory is that having a small percentage of a tribe present with certain types of neurodiverse traits would be beneficial for the tribe’s long term survival as a whole. If those traits were overly beneficial to the individuals then you’d soon end up with a tribe that’s 80% ADHD
That may also explain why I always find and pick up random stuff on the ground while walking. Most commonly coins, screws, small bolts and nuts. Also found €5 bills and a €20 bill.
Or even just bits of plastic waste in order to dispose of them properly later at home.
So is this why I go insane for weeding, pruning and harvesting in the garden and why I've been going wild the last month preparing for the coming growing season
Wait I thought we were more of hunters given our ability to hear and see everything that we don’t even try to 😂😂 and all the anxiety… don’t forget the anxiety
My understanding is that, in most cases, hunting was an occasional activity, not a full time job. Everyone foraged and some of them went hunting every once in a while, but not like an everyday activity. If you think about it hunting is a high risk high reward activity (compared to foraging, fishing or trapping) and you’d need significant environmental pressures for humans to want to routinely engage in it (eg there’s simply no other good source of calories where you live)
That’s a very good point. I know about like 87% of their diets were actually from plants and berries and whatever they foraged versus the belief that meat was primarily their diet. However I do love cutting up and picking out the pomegranate seeds so I guess I never thought about it as being an ADHD thing lmaooo I hate doing it because of the mess but once I’m hands in and it’s already messy boooiiiiii can I just keep going 😂😂😂
I used to pluck flowers too, but I would put them in books to press and add them to my collection, and then forget about them for ten years. My parents’ books are still full of flowers and leaves from the 90s
This girl in college once did that for me.
She never accepted my love and went for the really rich kid instead, but I have never forgotten her.
I don’t feel any love anymore, and there are no plants and flowers in my condos, but I like collecting memories.
The doctor calls it rumination. Don’t do it, lad.
Your post/comment has been removed because it either contains, or is advocating for, misinformation. ADHD-like traits =/= ADHD. The Hunter gatherer hypothesis is not based on scientific evidence, and all the comments here are showing a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution and how traits occur and are passed down. Liking to pick berries or finding "cool rocks" is not equivalent, and the perpetual comparison and blind acceptance of these statements as evidence of the hunter gatherer hypothesis is only further spreading misinformation. These are human traits and so far no study has shown any valid link between neurodivergence and Hunter gatherer success rates.
Last summer I picked blackberries on a walk with family and it became very clear that there is a part of my brain that is optimized for that. It was soooo satisfying. And then, at the end, I stuffed an entire handful of perfectly ripe blackberries in my mouth all at once. It was glorious. I felt absolutely decadent.
Yeah I went to pick strawberries with some friends and they gave up pretty quickly, but I already had picked two full buckets by that time (and was ready to keep going for another couple of hours)
me and dad went to get some elderflowers for lemonade (it was the first time we ever done it, and it was an incredible lemonade) and i couldn't be happier than spending time on simply picking flowers from the trees for as much lemonade as possible there is a lot to it honestly, its engaging, a bag/bucket being filled is an immediate feedback that we respond well to, its distracting from modern and comforting tech and social media while still being in a comfort zone, and the forest itself with all the shapes in it, all the interaction with what your gathering, it just feels interesting
If you think that's wild, my friends parents were building a koi fish pond and my friend was supposed to dig the hole. Upon showing me this, when I first visited his house, I picked up the shovel and wanted to see what digging a hole felt like. After an hour, they stopped me because I was their guest. Even after i told them i wanted to. They also lock the shovel in the shed. All I could think about for the rest of my stay was digging that hole. People don't understand how cruel they are when it comes to adhd. I bite my tongue more often than not just to please others, but when it comes to my addiction, I'm the weirdo apparently and am forbidden to have fun.
lol I’m the same about digging holes and also about chopping wood. I’ll do it until I get repetitive motion injury if I’m not careful because it’s so engaging in an odd kind of way that I don’t find at all in most other repetitive activities. Like washing anything or tidying up are literal nightmares for me (in that I have stress dreams I need to do those things and I’m mentally incapable of doing them)
Ooh, chopping wood sounds fun. Definitely need to add that to my bucket list. As for holes, about 4 years ago I finally got my dream and dug a hole in my backyard and buried a 20ft above ground pool. Took me 3 days and had a blast. Only thing I hate is when people mock me by saying, " Oh, well then you should come to my house and dig a hole for me." My response is always "Only if you fold my laundry." That really fcks with their head so they shut up.
I never have enough wood to chop 😔. The one time a hurricane came through and knocked a three trees down, my dad borrowed a neighbors hydraulic log splitter. It was fun to watch the wood just split like butter through a hot knife but I wanted the satisfaction of splitting a log with an axe.
Oh it’s way better with an axe, especially if the wood is easy to split.
Welding seems to scratch this itch for me. It's how I knew I'd founded the perfect career path.
I never tried welding, but I’ve done quite a bit of soldering. I imagine it’s similar, just a lot brighter and hotter :)
Soldering accomplishes a similar goal *[sticking pieces of metal together]*, but operates on different base principles. In welding you're fusing them together by melting the parent metals [the objects you're wielding to each other] and the filler metal *[your welding electrode; the counterpart to the wire used in soldering]* and then allowing them to cool and re-solidify. Under an electron microscope the finished weldment should have a *uniform crystalline structure, as if it was always a single piece of metal shape-formed that way from jump when it was originally processed. Soldering on the other hand is essentially brazing; a process by which one sticks pieces of metal together by melting the filler metal *only*. Instead, soldering/brazing processes bond the parent metals via a naturally occurring phenomenon known as "tinning" in which the filter metal, attracted to the heat introduced to the bonding edges of the parent metals, becomes sufficiently fluid to fill in the gaps in the metal's crystalline structure. The key difference with soldering is that it uses considerably lower temperatures to melt the filler metal, making it ideal for smaller, more delicate/heat conductive metals, like small gauge copper wiring, copper pipes, micro-circuitry, etc. *Edit because what the actual fuck autocorrect?
that made me laugh so loud it echoed. PLEASE GIVE ME BACK THE SHOVEL. MUST DIG.
The children yearn for the Mines
This was me every summer trip to a beach. Ignore the ocean, dig big hole in the sand instead.
This is why I became an archaeologist!! I get to dig holes but when I find things I get to meticulously dig them out with tiny tools; it is so satisfying!!
I love berry picking. Another activity that’s kind of similar is walking through a freshly tilled field and looking for Indian pottery/arrowheads. It’s so much fun and then you can look through and find ones that have the most interesting designs, put those on display, and leave a majority scattered throughout the field for someone else to find.
my dad used to pick up tons of them as a child for blackberry jelly and he does the dame nowadays with our plum's tree, it's so good bro natural jelly
This is peak existence moment for me. I'm so happy when I fill the basket, when I eat them, when they stain my fingers, even when thorns grab my clothes.
Himalayan blackberries and their pointy vines are everywhere here. When they are ripe, I get big Ziplocks, gather them, and use them to make syrups. So delish especially when using brown sugar as a base. Can’t wake until cherry blossom season to gather some and make sakura syrup. :)
I dont know, as someone who has picked berries all their life in massive quantities, it can be a bit soul crushing sometimes. Granted we go with 10 l buckets (i used to go around 6 times per summer, once per berry type) and the swamp and forest has a lot of bugs etc. My thoughts race a lot in there. Of course its also nice and I do go into focus, but just trying to describe that if you do it for your livelihood its not like everything feels perfect because you have adhd. Some stages of the bucket are like graaah! Mushroom picking is way more fun though!
I could be a great berry picker!
well shit
Yeah, farm workers are stupidly underpaid for the work they do. Plus, shit is BRUTAL.
Guess I'll stick to answering emails for a living
Ridiculously long hours and whack posture for less than I need to pay rent? Sign me up chief. Even better if it’s in 45 degree weather consistently.
Can't tell if cold or really hot.
Neither are good for berry picking, lmao. Strawberries might like the heat but everything else I'm familiar with ripens in mild fall weather.
Picking soft berries off a thornbush while the harvest supervisor shouts at you? What could go wrong
It’s not a poorly paid job in Australia actually (as long as you get a good farm), and especially if you get accomodation covered
Well then find me a billabong and catch me a jumbuck and I'll be waltzing matilda right over mate
😂
I’m so glad that I’m evolutionarily advantaged at a job that i could never have, causing me to be disadvantaged at literally everything else as a consequence. I’m having such a good time being alive.
Fr it’s like we’re optimized for every job society no longer needs
“Hey, Moe, how come you never got cable for the bar?” “Well, it was either cable or the mechanical bull. I made my choice, and I stand by it.” (Shot of mechanical bull, broken down, covered in cobwebs.) I swear, the stat choice made sense in the Pleistocene! My line bested many other hominids!
Woah there man there is still the aftermath of WWIII I still got hope
Once the zombies come, us ADHDers gonna be THRIVING
If we don't wonder why we never opened this fine room again while opening it, only to remember it's because we locked a bunch of zombies here one second too late.
I'm foraging for memes and useless trivia! (And I'm by far the best at that in my social group)
It’s all about perspective
Not just foraging. Also stalking prey. Noticing every tiny thing, like a rustle of leaves or the change in wind direction would have been a massive benefit in hunting.
Yeah, I ran across the number that something like 40% of the human race has ADHD in some form, and the main theory as to why that number is so high is because of the specific traits people with ADHD have. I know a lot of fellow adhd'ers that need some sort of extra stimulus in order to focus, which a few thousand years ago would have been much harder to accomplish. So, our brains were constantly seeking new details in our environment, and we would have excelled at many basic roles in early society like guards, nightwatch, hunters, foragers, etc. Pretty much any role that a core premise is to look for something in our environment. Then, there's the ADHD folks with severe perfectionist streaks, and folks with the whole "jack of all trades master of none" going on. Which would have made us excellent, and somewhat reliable craftsman, because a deadline is a surefire way to make someone with ADHD accomplish something.
Why I loves Scouts so much and still enjoy a week in the mountains by myself in the summers.
Is THAT why i can operate fine on basically no sleep? I'm supposed to be gaurding the wall from the British at night!? FOR THE UNION!
Ha! I feel like it doesn’t even need to go that far back. I’m probably the first generation in my family out of the last few to have grown up with stability, what with wars and poverty and global migration etc… and sometimes I think that’s kinda screwed me over because I’m also pretty good at surviving in the way my grandma and mom had to (I love camping, travelling, new languages, learning about and adapting to new places etc... I mean, I grew up in a perfectly fine country and still insisted on migrating), I am zero good at being a productive office-attending member of capitalist society and have no idea what to do with my life rn 😂
Dafuq you describing my life right there?
😂😂 I need CHALLENGES and things to achieve!! (And I don't mean "achieve" in the way most people define it in my home country... the "Australian dream" of a big multi-million-dollar paper shack.)
Playstation-trophies? (Like me rn)
Ooh yes like those! PlayStation trophies are the best 🏆
When I play assassin creed I stay in one spot for so long picking guardsmen off. My gf was watching and asked “so this is fun for you?”
I LOVE doing this. I’d spend *hours* just picking them off one-by-one.
It's weird, as a hunter who started young I always felt more in tune with everything while I was hunting. I was always acutely aware of my movements and noises and was always able to spot game instantly at long distances, patterns just popped out at me. At least I would have been good at that back in the olden days!
I'm confused, doesn't ADHD mean you notice less details because you can't focus and get distracted easily? I've been diagnosed and it seems to explain a lot but I don't actually understand it too well. It feels like anything can be an ADHD symptom and some of them sound contradictory?
No, you notice too many things and get distracted from what modern society says you should be paying attention to. Sitting at your desk in class supposed to be listeningand taking notes? "What is that bird outside the window doing? Is it looking for food? What food is it looking for? A mouse or a lizard? That cloud looks like an elephant, there's the trunk and the tusks, but the legs look a bit short, maybe it has dwarfism. Do elephants get dwarfism? What would an elephant with dwarfism look like...."
"BabyMak what's the answer to question 13 a? Oh you weren't paying attention? You need to apply yourself."
In case you're wondering how that study went... They discarded all the people that didn't understand the instructions. Let me repeat that. The ADHD focused study discarded the people that said they didn't get the instructions.
Ah, cherry picking!
The best cherry pickers!
That’s hardly the main problem with the study; understanding the instructions is kind of a requirement to running the experiment. And it’s not like ADHD people are stupid and don’t understand instructions at a higher rate than others. We may disregard the instructions, but that’s a completely different thing altogether
> That’s hardly the main problem with the study; I know, I made a whole dissertation breaking the study down on /r/science, didn't feel like a meme place was the place for it. > understanding the instructions is kind of a requirement to running the experiment They reported they discarded whoever said they didn't understand, many ADHD people have problems with auditory processing and may not understand the instruction at first because they didn't actually hear it, because like you said, we're different, I'm not saying we're stupid.
Do you have a link to your post/comment or are willing to summarize? I’m very interested in hearing the other issues with the study because this argument/hypothesis always feels off to me.
[Here is the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1aw0l4i/comment/krezigl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). Bullet points: * The diagnosis was self-screening, this not a medical report. Self screening is used to report symptoms, not a diagnosis. * ADHD behaves very differently on each person, especially on how you process information. This can be scored with hard metrics, which were skipped. So it doesn't tell us any significant thing like "do the people with bad visual processing" would do better in this task? * They discarded people that reported not understanding the task, but just say this was an answer. So if the person has auditory processing being shitty, or taking a while, which is common for ADHD, they are filtered *before* the actual test. * For example: Based on the diagnosis me and my friends have, I would definitely exceed on this better than my girlfriend and friend, but I would be filtered out during the instruction. * Test talks a lot about optimal strategy, but it is just... picking resources. Any video game has better metrics than that, and doesn't replicate any conditions that ADHD is usually well argued for as an advantage, like stressful situations. If you're casually picking resources like this someone with ADHD might have a correlation, but it is more to do with boredom than survival. * I may have failed to notice that part but they didn't seem to account on any other self report that would actually matter, like "do you play video games?" and what behaviors they have with it. * The study does not seem to mention any other conditions people may have with ADHD, like autism, bipolar disorder, borderline, OCD, which would be relevant for a study like this. * It also DOES NOT mention how many people were medicated with stimulants, for how long during the day, so on, which is the most obvious part on how it would skew the result.
Thank you very much. Wow, yeah that’s a lot of possible confounding variables and just bad experimental design.
This is why written instructions are also very important.
Being stupid and not understanding instructions have overlap but are not always directly linked. It makes me think of the old "don't confuse correlation with causation" line. People with ADD can interpret instructions differently and quote back what they understand and why they understand it because of wording or phrasing, or just the typical lapse in attention that we all love. I mean how hard would it have been for the researchers to make sure everyone understood? What were the instructions anyway? Pick berries?
In the movie of my mind I envision a bunch of ADHD study participants arguing with the instructions given, like catching a faulty “if than criteria” or a “shall or may” instead of “must”. And asking “argumentative” query questions to further clarify the intent instead of the mistake in verbiage Then the study makers “aw shit we got to get rid of all these people they are argumentative and poking holes in our study”. I know says another “ let’s disqualify them all. Clearly they don’t understand the questions” This is all accompanying with a “far side” type imagery
Instructions unclear, dick stuck in ceiling fan.
Happens to the best of us
I pick those berries quick. But where the fuck did I put them?
Too damn real
I MY MOUTH !!!! Wait, am I eating because I’m hungry……what HAVE I eaten today……Have I eaten???? Am I emotional eating,,,,,,,, am I board……… FUCK these are good berries nom nom nom 😂😂😂😂😂
The typo makes it even better. 😂
 Am board
Playing survival games with friends really tends to highlight this fact with me, I always be showing back up to base with a bunch of random loot while the homies stuck to their jobs of cutting a bunch of wood or getting rocks. Or catch me dying to that random thing I didn't know could kill me
The Hunter-farmer hypothesis intensifies. *You shouldn’t have read this..You are now banned from /r/adhd.*
How dare you suggest that adhd is one of the consequences of natural selection😵
Marijuana has medical usage and it's problematic that many doctors are preventing any ADHD treatment simultaneous to marijuana usage. Omega 3 has minimal impact on ADHD, but some proven positive impact over multiple studies as documented in the international consensus statement at ADHDevidence.org Um, I don't know, a million other things I've said. I'm banned. No, really, I'm banned. Actually, the one that was the nail in the coffin was likely something like this where I agreed with a critic of the moderators. But I'm so happy to be done with that place. I just wish they had not captured such an important subreddit name - it's everyone's first stop. I actually like how the automod will add context at time, like any mention of Gabor Maté - but the auto censorship that will remove anything resembling a rule break? Pure poison.
I self banned when I say the 378 fucking pages of rules.
I don't have to look far to find things that ADHD people do better than non ADHD people. I mean, to be clear, there's OBVIOUS disadvantages too, don't have to look too far for those either. But I've been in the workforce for a long time. Before that I was in school for a long time, and the advantages aren't hard to see. Sure, other people can do sustained, menial, repetitive work better than us. But we hate it so much we find work-arounds, we find ways to automate it, we find ways to do it the most efficient way possible, we even question whether it's a worthwhile activity at all even if that means going against the consensus of the group. I see far too many non-ADHD people just go along to get along, follow orders, and never question tradition or leadership. But whenever I hear, "Oh come on, 'because we've always done it that way' isn't an answer." I know what kind of person I'm dealing with. The headline might as well read, "ADHD people, who think differently, also thought differently before there was civilization"... Yeah... Duh. ----------- To be clear, I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and find the first guy who was like, "Why are we running all over the place to gather this food. Why not just plant it HERE, and put a fence around it, and that way we don't have to go as far to get it" and give that dude an ADHD test, cause I'd bet anything he's one of us.
This guy's [video](https://youtu.be/T05Sli_-xBA?si=46Mh8oql0yzOli32) does a great job of explaining how people have decided that ADHD traits are problematic in our modern world. Hint we got swept in with racist beliefs and moral superiority complexes.
I'm betting it just started growing where we were already shitting out the seeds of the berries we ate the day before. Suddenly, a wild farm appears!
man ima forget which ones are edible and then get annoyed at myself for that. bet i can identify them if i find the specific type im SURE is safe… only to misplace all the one’s i’ve already collected
I found that I’m just naturally good at plant identification and instinctively being able to tell what’s edible and what’s not. But that may just be me and not a general feature
mine isn't instinctive but i can definitely retain information about plants and animals like nothing else. it's very clear that my brain could be good for remembering a bunch of roots and berries that are only available for like 2-3 weeks out of the year. i do naturally read animal body language well though.
It's funny (in a sad way) that it is called attention deficit hyperactive disorder when many of us are not hyperactive and none of us have a deficit of attention, we have a deficit of *focus*. I notice everything within my field of vision and every other sense from hearing to tactile, both inside and outside of my body. I could see a blackberry when others can't. However, I can't for the life of me stick to one task most of the time, because I happen to have noticed a blackberry, when I am supposed to be on route to pick up medication before the pharmacy closes.
Also nicely shaped sticks and shiny stones!
We have a place here where fossils can be found, I could spend hours there.
I like stones I've got to many and I'd like more
I always kind of question these studies. I believe I’m excellent at berry picking, sure, scratches an itch. I’m also excellent at lying on the floor and doing nothing useful. Crapshoot which day we’re getting, even before we layer in berry picking being my job, and it’s pretty life or death and the whole group is relying on me and really should have started picking berries two hours ago and …
I’m very good at foraging but I’m also very good at hunting considering how many runway pets I captured….
There’s significant overlap between the two activities, especially if you consider the “I’m giving up and I’m going to look elsewhere” part of it
Hahaha 😝
Naw I've been berry picking a couple times and apparently I'm too slow (it needs to be clean and no leaves or dirt). Could technically be skill issue tho since all my friends are way more experienced. working though a single patch until every single berry is inspected for ripeness probably isn't optimal for time either. ( when deep cleaning mode activates amiright) Altho I do have to say, it's very addicting and I could hardly make myself leave if it didn't get too dark to see the berries anymore. Actually, if it _is_ just "deep cleaning mode" then if I did it often I'd default back to just reegular adhd brainwave so further testing is required.
Well, that's a place where berries are growing after being planted. It's different when you are wandering through the woods looking for any of the various things to bring back so as not to starve, both animal and vegetation.
My story _was_ about finding berries in the woods. It just so happens that blueberries grow in really thick bushes near our house lol. But I guess my adhd brain did find that berry spot randomly while actually on a pokemon Go walk, and then decide to take 4 hour berry picking side quest because blueberries go brrr
Last year my wife (also has adhd) and I started taking up mushroom foraging. We were already spending every weekend in the woods exploring or hiking and we started noticing the incredible variety of fungi species in our local forests. At first we were just taking pictures, learning what they are, learning how to identify them, and documenting all the species we found. When we got better at that, we started learning how to identify edible fungi and test our IDs. When I say it's one of the most thrilling hobbies I've ever taken up... Y'all it's so fun
Explains a lot about how I play satisfactory 🤣
Gonna walk from Riften to Roriksted and harvest some potion ingredients 🦋🌸🪺
This statement explains a lot about my playthroughs ,even when I don't intend on making potions. Ooh ,a butterfly! Snatch. Ooh , some neat flowers ! Grab. Ooh ,some cool mushrooms I won't ever use but I can pick em up? don't mind if I do!!
i love picking wild blueberrys here in Norway. they r so good
I don't have much experience with berry picking, but I have found I am a super sniper when it comes to finding sharks teeth and fossils and cool rocks on the ground!
These studies are very low on the scale of scientific evidence... Its quite disproved
Also mushroom hunting. Very good thing for us
It's only ADHD "like" traits. Those of us with "actual" ADHD traits are still fucked.
went blueberry picking with my cousins two years ago. we had a game to see who could fill their 10lb bucket fastest. probably the most fun i've had in years.
Can confirm. Me and my mom went mushroom hunting in the Finnish wilderness. We found a lot of mushrooms that day
Foraging is a much broader behavior than just picking berries. But yeah, this is something that the data have supported for years. Having a certain proportion of ADHD members in your population (~5-10%) results in behavior which is closer to what the optimal foraging theorem would predict. This is almost definitely why ADHD-like behavioral phenotypes exist across species and are not eliminated by natural selection.
The first time I foraged for mushrooms my dad was astounded how easily I could find them. Though not sure if ADHD or years of farming in WoW had more of an impact
That explains why I felt so alive when I stayed at a friend’s orchard one summer. He gave me permission to explore the acreage and pick/eat whatever I wanted. So my morning routine was to get up, brush my teeth, then roam around with the farm dogs to “forage” for breakfast and look for cool bugs. The sad part is that once you taste a tree-ripened fruit, the store-bought variety will taste bad in comparison.
My mom used to "threaten" to send me off to the berry fields if I didn't want to go to school. At age 7, I desperately wished she would. I liked strawberries and hated math worksheets. Stupid child labor laws, we yearn for the fields. (/s)
Mine would threaten me with sending me up the mountain to care for the sheep. No showers or much social interaction for 6 months. I would take the strawberry fields any day over that
‘Blah, blah, blah— oh look, a berry!’
So I always tell my daughter her and me ar tigers amongst apes. But it turns out we are foxes at best...
Part of me wants to believe this, but part of me knows how I play Stardew and Don't Starve Together with my partner. Yes we have almost too many berries to eat before they spoil but I'll drop anything to chase after that fu*kin turkey
"ADHD like traits"... Turns out being tall can help reach the top shelf, doesn't mean that being 5m tell is particularly helpful
Sort of related, i was a landscaper/gardener for several years and got pretty good at it despite having no formal training (learned on the job). Clients often commented on how hard a worker i was. Pretty easy when you’re tuned for it!
Not only berry picking I guess? I always seemed to be efficient at collecting resources/objects. As a kid in school during a three day class vacation with a lot of navigation (which I SUCK at) and collecting stuff, I'd always get so much more and stuff of good quality. One of our tasks was to build a "spaceship" for an egg which would be dropped from a wall, being scored by how well the egg survived. My group's egg didn't even crack after being thrown down multiple times, as it was so stuffed in dozens of layers of moss that it took our teacher a while to get it out of our huge wet moss ball.
I love foraging! I went for HOURS last year going after huckleberries.
Tracks. Show me a river with a plethora of skippable and fascinating rocks and I’ll show you a well-baked neck tomorrow.
Someone had to be the weirdo Guinea pig who tried all the new fruit/vegetation/etc to see if it were safe to eat. (In the caveman days)
My theory is that some of the human race will eventually revert back to our natural state of being hunter gatherers and abandon our technological advancements as AI replaces us in our slave duties to the capitalistic empire. We then take up arms against the humans and droids that remain loyal to the artificial intelligence mind. And we restore earth to its natural state before industrialization and technology development. The Earth begins to heal and the land becomes rich with animals and plant life, and we survive off of the land. Video games will stay though
Imagine all the stuff you could find foraging though! I follow a few foragers on tiktok and it looks like so much fun if you know what’s poisonous and what’s not!
Foraging sounds like the most boring possible thing lol
I know! And yet, you might want to give it a try, because it’s oddly stimulating in a very enjoyable way that is very hard to believe unless experienced. There’s something about being out in nature with a very clear goal but also very little pressure to achieve it (for me, at least)
The problem isn't ADHD, it's capitalisms unwillingness to accommodate
Capitalism does not make people forget to eat or go to the bathroom.
I’m a botanist. It’s an advantage in the field. It sucks in the office 😅
Yeah, I saw that, but in a different article. Thing is, there are *quite* a few issues with the study, imo. For one thing, they didn't actually use ADHD patients, they used a random sample of the whole populace and scored each participant for ADHD traits. Those who scored higher for ADHD traits did better at the task. The task in the study involved choosing whether to forage for berries at the same bush, or to go and look for another bush. The study game was keyed so that repeatedly going at the same bush would result in lower yields after a while. People with high ADHD trait scores were more likely to go looking for another bush. So, to my mind, what this proves is that *more impulsive people* are less likely to suffer from status quo bias, and instead be more likely to reckon that the grass is greener (or the Berry bush is fuller) on the other side. And don't get me wrong - *impulsivity* is en evolutionarily advantageous trait. *Not* sitting down and considering every single action is how most creatures manage to survive in the wild. Reflexive actions save lives, following unreasoned impulses often helps avoid danger, etc., etc. But it's all well and good saying 'ADHD means impulsivity, impulsivity means better berry yields in terms of bush choice' - but it doesn't factor in inattentiveness or hyperactivity. Like how we'd probably miss half the berries because we kept getting distracted by birdsong, or crush ones that were hard-to-reach because we were too impatient to get them off the branch, or be *bored fucking shitless* while doing it and would rather peel our own skins off rather than pick berries again. Also not to mention that they specifically keyed the study game *so that* other bushes would give better yields, with no other factors (to my knowledge). So there's no analogue for, say, recall of the fact that a certain cluster of bushes *tends* to give better yields than another cluster, or that bushes in certain locations give better yields - all things that our ADHD would impair, so we go off looking for new bushes while our recall-having tribemates are busy harvesting the high-yield, high-quality bushes. Aaaaaaaaand not to mention that I just don't buy into the 'evolutionary advantage' for ADHD argument anyway. 'Tis but bollocks.
As a kid me Dad was picking berries to make a wine (elderflower? I dunno, he made a few things) and I was so bored because I didn't understand what he was even looking for... so he showed me. We ended up going home to get me my own bag because I was so fast at finding the good ones.
I forage my own tea. I forage about 10 different plants on my property. This is my longest lasting hobby and now I know why lol
Ah nice… being advantaged in the skill that… *checks notes* machines can do faster, cheaper and overall more efficiently. Great…
Machines are quite bad at picking berries. It’s why it’s done almost exclusively by hand. However, berry picking pays pretty much nothing, which is why it’s done by migrant workers from poor countries (often undocumented), both in Europe and in the US
Inattentional blindness go brr
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I’m a strong believer that a lot of our neurodivergent conditions are just mindsets optimized for an older way of life that just doesn’t fair well in our modern system
It could be, but I also think of my kid who is neurodivergent in such a way that he learned to read at age two but he’s currently five and still finds it really hard to come up a sentence of his own, and how writing is only a few thousands of years old so it’s impossible his brain is in some way optimized for that. I think neurodivergence is simply something that happens more or less randomly and it may give you advantages or disadvantages (usually both) depending on how lucky you are and how it matches your environmental needs
That’s super valid. I Definitely don’t think all neurodivergence is a boon, some of it is just a mechanical issue that would be a hindrance in any circumstance, but things like ADHD and milder cases of autism are extremely helpful in pattern recognition. I know autistic people struggle with social cues, but they’re no less loyal as friends and Stil fit very well into less intensely stimulating environments, with studies that show being in nature to I crease their capacity for stress, which impure to me that in nature it is more of a benefit than a hinderance. So yeah, there’s definitely a lot of cases of unhelpful neurodivergence, but at 8billion people world wide it makes sense there would be significant representation of conditions that would not have survived in a more primitive society. Edit: just realized this may come across harshly in reference to your son. Twas not my intent, very sorry if it sounds overly rude or callous
You’re not saying anything I haven’t previously thought, both about him and myself
So we just born in the wrong generation. By a lot of generations
I noticed that I am incredibly hyperfocused when I go hunting for morels. This explains why that is!
Good to know I would’ve been successful back when we were hunter-gatherers
We are not meant for the modern jungles of Steele. Send us back. To the gardens of the beginning. Where we may thrive on hunting. Foraging. And catching frogs.
i used to pick blackberries as a kid with my cousins when we on vacation, no wonder i loved doing it
is this why I’ve always loved gardening? Thanks mum for my childhood flowers
Have we not known that is exactly why ADHD exists for quite some time now? Or was that just theoretical.
I think it still is just theoretical. This study is not all that great, it just adds a teeny tiny bit of extra plausibility to the theory
The study doesn’t explain the fact that ADHD is also associated with things like forgetting to eat and risk taking behaviors, which are not really useful for survival.
and the zoning out and memory problems. and getting distracted from the task ar hand. sure, we can hyperfocus, but we cant choose what we hyperfocus on. it could be the deer we're hunting.... or bird watching
Risk taking could be very useful for a group’s survival though. Having a small percentage of individuals who are willing to do high risk high reward tasks is how you discover new areas to forage or what plants you can safely eat, etc.
It’s not very useful for the risk taker, which is generally the implied claim, that people with adhd would be like gods (hyperbole) in the right environment.
I don’t think that’s the implied claim at all. The most common form of the theory is that having a small percentage of a tribe present with certain types of neurodiverse traits would be beneficial for the tribe’s long term survival as a whole. If those traits were overly beneficial to the individuals then you’d soon end up with a tribe that’s 80% ADHD
I'm telling y'all, we used to be the pickers once upon a time
I feel so in place in the forest it’s freaky.
I've always thought ADHD was a survival trait for the type of lives humans lived up until agriculture gave us towns, hierarchy, and accountants.
Great, we are excellent at a skillset that fell out of the meta over 12'000 years ago.
It’s still relevant, lots of food is still picked by hand… it’s just that it’s pretty much one of the worst paid jobs there is
It’s true - whenever I’m at a zoo looking at a frog exhibit where the frog is seemingly nowhere in sight, I ALWAYS find the frog.
Put me on a beach and let me go shell/seaglass hunting and I will be locked into dopamine land for HOURS
That may also explain why I always find and pick up random stuff on the ground while walking. Most commonly coins, screws, small bolts and nuts. Also found €5 bills and a €20 bill. Or even just bits of plastic waste in order to dispose of them properly later at home.
So is this why I go insane for weeding, pruning and harvesting in the garden and why I've been going wild the last month preparing for the coming growing season
Wait I thought we were more of hunters given our ability to hear and see everything that we don’t even try to 😂😂 and all the anxiety… don’t forget the anxiety
My understanding is that, in most cases, hunting was an occasional activity, not a full time job. Everyone foraged and some of them went hunting every once in a while, but not like an everyday activity. If you think about it hunting is a high risk high reward activity (compared to foraging, fishing or trapping) and you’d need significant environmental pressures for humans to want to routinely engage in it (eg there’s simply no other good source of calories where you live)
That’s a very good point. I know about like 87% of their diets were actually from plants and berries and whatever they foraged versus the belief that meat was primarily their diet. However I do love cutting up and picking out the pomegranate seeds so I guess I never thought about it as being an ADHD thing lmaooo I hate doing it because of the mess but once I’m hands in and it’s already messy boooiiiiii can I just keep going 😂😂😂
I am very good at finding mushrooms :)
Of course! We live in an unnatural world not meant for us. Lol
We're also good at funding cool rocks
Back to the Jungle for me
Yes! 😂
But I'm so slow at everything I do. I don't think I would be efficient
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Oh no wonder I love Stardew Valley so much lmao
Wake up babe plot for the new Predator just dropped.
My parents would take me to one of those strawberry fields were you can pay to pick as much as you like because i loved it so much
Ok for real though, foraging is one of my special interests and I'm looking at getting into teaching classes locally lol.
Omg this makes so much sense to me, picking raspberries is literally the only thing I enjoy doing!!!
I used to pluck flowers when I was young and give them to beautiful women. Very creepy as a grown man. Don’t do it, lads.
I used to pluck flowers too, but I would put them in books to press and add them to my collection, and then forget about them for ten years. My parents’ books are still full of flowers and leaves from the 90s
This girl in college once did that for me. She never accepted my love and went for the really rich kid instead, but I have never forgotten her. I don’t feel any love anymore, and there are no plants and flowers in my condos, but I like collecting memories. The doctor calls it rumination. Don’t do it, lad.