We’ve spent decades framing distractibility as a deficit. A disorder. Something to medicate and manage. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, thinks we have it backwards.
In a compelling new essay for Aeon, Le Cunff makes the case that what we now label ADHD was once an evolutionary advantage. The hypercurious mind, the one that can’t stop scanning the horizon, that gets bored with routine, wasn’t broken. It was built for exploration.
“Human attention did not evolve in an environment saturated with infinite information and algorithmically optimised distraction. For most of our history, novelty was relatively rare and often meaningful; today, exposure to novelty is constant and difficult to escape.”
That framing alone is worth pondering. Consider the sheer volume of what competes for your attention on any given day. Push notifications, autoplaying video, algorithmic feeds tuned to maximise engagement, email marketing calibrated by A/B testing, news alerts engineered for urgency, ad retargeting that follows you across the web. Every one of these is backed by teams of engineers and billions in revenue. The novelty-seeking brain that once helped us find food and avoid predators is now the most valuable target in the attention economy.
The problem isn’t the wiring. It’s the environment we’ve wrapped around it.
Le Cunff’s essay is worth reading in full. She reframes the ADHD conversation away from pathology and toward mismatch. This isn’t “ADHD is a superpower” cheerleading. It’s a serious argument about how a trait that conferred advantage in one environment becomes a liability in another. The environment changed. We didn’t. She draws on evolutionary biology, attention research and her own lived experience without oversimplification or dismissal of the real difficulties people face.
Most pointedly, she makes you reconsider what “normal” attention even means. If our entire information environment is engineered to exploit novelty-seeking, then the line between neurotypical focus and ADHD distractibility gets a lot blurrier than the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders suggests.
Read the full essay at Aeon. The feeds and notifications aren’t going away. But understanding why your brain reaches for them is a decent place to start.
Sources:
- How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive (aeon.co)