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Comment by Quinzel | Hacker News Reader

I find this pretty interesting. I can understand how some of the traits of ADHD might be a competitive advantage in things like hunting, but there are other traits, such as inattentiveness, that I fail to understand how that would be a competitive advantage in hunting. I have ADHD, and I basically swing between intense periods of focus/hyperfocus, and serious inattentiveness. I can see the advantage of hyperfocus… however I’m yet to find an advantage for inattentiveness, and the trouble with ADHD in my opinion is that I don’t seem to have a lot of control over when the hyperfocus kicks in, or when the inattentiveness kicks in.

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I have never met an ADHD person who is inattentive under stress.

An ancient human did not have to be 'productive' for long durations. They had to have intense productivity on short spurts and not be a huge mess the rest of the time.

IMO, my ADHD doesn't manifest nearly as badly if physical activities ate involved. Cooking needs long durations of focus, and I've never become inattentive during it.

Sitting on a table and staring at a screen ? Now that's an adversarial scenario.

> Sitting on a table and staring at a screen ? Now that's an adversarial scenario.

I have found the environments plus multiple screens in Vision, in a quiet room, to be incredibly helpful

Less effort to stay focused on otherwise uninteresting tasks, with no external stimulus but nature (very calming to me) and all the task’s components visible on glorious “screens” so I don’t glitch out under the mental “fatigue” of constant window swapping

The very large stationary screens make it natural to frequently get up and move around, while not losing focus. I walk up to them like large whiteboards which mixes things up and keeps my body’s motion continually involved in my thinking.

Just wish I could select specific objects to pop through full immersion. Like my keyboard and cans of energy drink. For now I use 1/2 or 2/3 immersion.

After a long age, I can again work 10 hours thinking it was just 4 or 5.

Can you bear the Vision for 10 hours?

Yes with the double strap.

It’s not a fashion item, but when it’s tight enough the weight distributes very well.

I have worked all day in it, then felt no hesitancy to watch Bladerunner 2049 in 3D on a “screen” large enough to feel like I was in the movie, and felt fine.

(Tip: Max the angular screen size to most of your field of view. Then adjust the amount of 3D effect to be completely natural by adjusting the screen distance, eliminating the typical 3D uncanny valley. You have it right when your brain suddenly stops paying attention to the 3D aspect because it’s so ordinary. But subconsciously the world is real and you are in it.)

With the fancier strap I felt face & cheek pressure right away, and face fatigue in a couple hours

The change has had other wins. Putting screens anywhere, at true eye level, and only needing a wireless keyboard/trackpad, let’s me sit back in a padded office chair, work on a couch, etc avoiding static position stress and eliminate any tendency to hunch over my laptop

Another interesting oddity is when you lean into a screen, or walk up to it, the resolution effectively keeps up. So inches away from a 100 inch screen, the large letters in front of you still look near perfect, without pixelation (still max out the actual in-headset resolution).

I experience the headset as a big mental & physical ergonomic upgrade for the Mac, with the VR/AR features simply being interesting side benefits

I recommend it highly in those terms

Second this. This has been exactly my experience. I enjoy it, and feel it’s a net win for me despite all the tradeoffs (comfort, text sharpness, battery life). Selective passthrough for objects like a cup and keyboard would be really great.

I think it can be phrased in terms of the famous explore/exploit dichotomy from cybernetics. An agent with ADHD is more likely to exploit/dig deeply once it gets the "scent", but that threshold is higher. A weak signal of ambient reward will lead to impatient exploring. Conversely, a non-ADHD agent will sooner find something good enough to fixate on but will also sooner give up on that region of interest and go on to the next scent. This would explain the paradox of hyper focus of ADHD and the corresponding moderation/saturation in non-ADHD as well.

>but there are other traits, such as inattentiveness, that I fail to understand how that would be a competitive advantage in hunting

Well, inattentiveness refers to modern life, and is manifested more with its overly complex demands, often also based on precise time constraints.

In hunting it might not be that much of an issue. Especially if hunting is your hyper-focus subject.

Exactly.

Time blindness and hyperfocus is a gift from the gods when it comes to productive rabbit hole work. (Subterraneous hunting!)

Or flow as it’s generally called.

But modern life has a complexity level that constantly competes with flow for everyone.

There was a once famous story about Seymour Cray being asked, when they moved to a new building, where he wanted his office phone. He supposedly replied on the tree outside his window.

I've searched the internet and have no luck finding where I read that (many years ago now).

Seems like interruptions have been a nuisance to coherent thought forever.

Edit: found another source citing the phone story, but not the original i had read, i think.

https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html

> There was a once famous story about Seymour Cray being asked, when they moved to a new building, where he wanted his office phone. He supposedly replied on the tree outside his window.

> I've searched the internet and have no luck finding where I read that (many years ago now).

Here you go! [0]

> A Tribute to Seymour Cray, by Charles W. Breckenridge, SRC Computers, Inc.

> Presented during the keynote session at Supercomputing '96, November 19, 1996

> Seymour avoided publicity. He was given many awards and honors, and would have had many more had it not been for his nature to decline them in order to remain totally focused on his work. He led a streamlined life, designed to allow him to achieve his goals, goals that sometimes appeared to others to be utterly unachievable. He avoided distractions. Once when someone ordered a phone for him because they noticed that he did not have one in his office, when asked where he wanted it installed, he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, "on the tree outside my office."

[0] https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html

It could help your hunting group not be ambushed by a surprise attack from a tiger or another hunting group.

While the other group members are looking around the ADHD group member could be more sensitive to noticing random sounds and therefore notice things like that. Therefore hunting groups with at least 1 ADHD dude would be at an advantage.

> It could help your hunting group not be ambushed by a surprise attack from a tiger or another hunting group.

The original multi-tasking.

Definitely the pre-emptive type of multitasking!

True multitasking it is not!

And my brain gets distracted by what it wants to think about, not what it should be doing or paying attention to.

So don’t count on me for sustained wide field threat detection

We will need a Highly Sensitive Person in our party for that. Rolls plus 12 for general context alertness!

The Highly Sensitive Person in my life sometimes gets upset when they realize I am not aware of what is going on around me while working or reading. Their reaction is like I was driving with my eyes closed, it really concerns them.

Inattentiveness kicks in for me at work (software developer) constantly, but physical activity puts me into hyper-focus. Even first-person shooter games kick me into hyper-focus. I think it all comes down to personal stimulation thresholds. I find work boring and uninteresting, but even the most mundane tasks like picking weeds is like heroin for my ADHD because I find it enjoyable and feel I'm making progress.

The genes that support cognition are usually the same genes implicated in autism and adhd. Most variants imparting increased risk for those conditions are extremely common,(typical odds ratio, <<1.1). Some rare variants impart greater risk but those variants are uncommon, in part because of natural selection. If you do not have these rare variants, it typically takes a large number of common mutations before you get the condition. Thus natural selection effects against those rare variants are weak, and this ignores that there might also be beneficial effects of those common variants, either at the group level by increasing diversity of thought, or when appearing without other rare variants.

The take home is that it is much more complicated than single gene disorders where selection effects can have their greatest impact. Common variants impact on fitness are heavily conditioned on the overall genetic mileau.

Being not able to focus will cause you to jump from one thing to the next.

"Oh let me gather wood" 10 minutes later "Oh look! I found flowers" 10 minutes later "Those stones look amazing… what could we possibly do with them?" 10 minutes later "Its getting cold. where is the wood"

Isolated this may seem like a disadvantage. But the negative consequences are reduced when one is acting in a bigger group. And this jumping from topic to topic make the person become a generalist which can be useful.

I read somewhere about a polar bear at a zoo that compulsively paced back and forth. This is not a behavior observed in polar bears in the wild; it was likely was caused by the fact that bears are evolved to walk dozens of miles a day, but this bear lived in a small, enclosed environment.

So maybe ADHD is not adaptive, but is just a pathology caused by the mismatch between our evolved environment and our modern environment?

If the outcome of the focus vs aloof aren't equally weighted, you'd sill come out ahead?

Eg hunting when fixated on hunting, you bring back 5 times the food vs hunting while you're watching a movie in your head gets you 1/2 times the food

Hunting requires focus, fishing doesn't necessarily…

An idea: the advantage of the inattentiveness is better quality of rest time. however, that requires acceptance of these periods.

according to Yuval Noah, the time requirement for hunting would be roughly 2 days a week.

You’re thinking of it way too specifically and narrowly. Those traits might have lots of side effects you aren’t considering. There were all sorts of problems to be solved in hunter-gatherer days. Specifically hunting by stalking large prey is not the only skill that was useful back then.

Maybe inattention can help you spot things when you're super bored and casting about for stimulus. You might see something you wouldn't have otherwise? Very unscientific "Just So" opinion lol

I always imagine that ADHDers would be the gatherers in the hunter-gatherer society. That is where the inattentiveness kicks in. At least for me, when going for a walk,I always notice that I am much more aware of all the plants, flowers, berries and small mammals than my friends. I know that there is a new type of flower I never saw before near that one tree. They actually know where we were on a map.

Tendency to try different things to avoid being bored. Either new ways to do old things, or finding new hobbies.

Both can be big advantages.

I think the diet and lifestyle used to be so drastically different so it's difficult to draw modern parallels.

It doesn’t need to be all or nothing though, humans are social creatures. If rates are similar, having 5-10% of your tribe being more exploratory could be advantageous, even if the rest are picking up slack in other areas.

Unsure if it’s pseudoscience, but similar to the argument around morning vs. evening preference being related to having someone alert for the tribe at the right times.

It's probably the wrong tactic to figure out which task this would help with rather than the benefits that come with shifting attention among tasks.

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