Posted on 07/04/2024 10:44:14 PM PDT by Jonty30
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently released a study on the potential evolutionary benefits of ADHD. They analyzed data from 457 adults who played an online foraging game, where the objective was to collect as many berries as possible within an eight minute span.
Players could choose to either keep collecting berries from the bushes in their original location, or move to a new patch. (By the way, this sounds an awful lot like a game I used to play on Neopets!) Moving would cost them a brief time out, and there was no guarantee that the patch would have as many berries as their current location, but the number of berries you could get from each bush went down each time you foraged it again.
Along with the game, subjects also took a survey designed to assess whether they had symptoms of ADHD. This didn’t constitute a full or formal diagnosis, but it screened for traits like having difficulty concentrating.
When the researchers compared the survey results with the game play stats, they found that people with ADHD symptoms played differently—and more effectively—than their peers. They were more likely to move on to another bush, and collected an average of 602 berries compared with 521.
I probably don’t need to tell you that this isn’t exactly a perfect model for actual foraging. The researchers do hope to do a similar experiment in the future involving in-person foraging, where they’d use people with formal ADHD diagnoses as their experimental subjects, but that would obviously be a much more complicated experiment to run.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
It’s definitely training. Like learning to study in smaller blocks and do something physical in between. As well as living a disciplined life, such as keeping a bedtime that is reasonable.
Finding out one’s aptitude would definitely help as well, because people with ADHD have a really deep work ethic if they are doing something that interests them. Find the right occupation and you risk him not quitting work because he’s in the middle of something.
I wouldn’t say that. A lot of kids were just lumped into the “troubled” category, which comes with a lot of stigma, leads to drop outs, and then they’re outside society. If you look back at hose days and all those “groups” of people that weren’t really a part of society, hobos, temporary hands, outlaw bikers. There’s a whole lot of people that just fell through the cracks, starting when they were kids.
Well that certainly makes sense that it would help foraging as people started ... oh look a squirrel!!
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