What if we’ve been thinking about ADHD the wrong way? Anne-Laure Le Cunff of the ADHD Research Lab at King’s College London suggests a new paradigm in which what society has long considered a disfunction is actually a misalignment between a person and their context:
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. The same mechanisms that once guided potentially rewarding exploration are now mercilessly captured by feeds and notifications. The result is a growing mismatch between a hypercurious attentional style and our modern environment.
More picks about science
The Extraordinary Life And Quiet Death of the World’s Largest Iceberg
“Forty years after breaking away from Antarctica, the frozen colossus known as A23a died as it lived: drifting around the bottom of the globe, fascinating ardent observers, and offering scientists critical new insights about our living ocean.”
Are Memories Transferable — or Edible?
“In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation.”
You Must Remember This
“On the nature of autobiographical memory.”
