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.
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