John Medina's Brain Rules

Entry 074: Evolutionary Benefits

Welcome to the last installment of Paying Attention to Attention, the video-mostly portion of the “John Medina’s Brain Rules” substack. This entry addresses the evolutionary history of ADHD and its surprisingly positive impact on our success as a species. As the final video on this subject, this entry also serves as a summary of the entire series.

Note that I will be taking a ‘summer break’ from this substack, with new entries (and new subjects) posting around mid-September. Thanks again for all your insightful comments and positive affirmations in this series. I’ve had a lot of fun putting it together.

See you in six weeks!

As ever, there are both uncaptioned and captioned (cc) versions of this video.

REFERENCES

Moskowitz, C. "ADHD’s Hidden Benefits Can Be ‘Awesome’." Sci Am https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/adhd-can-have-unexpected-benefits/#:~:text=“ADHD%20is%20a%20superpower%2C”,solve%20problems%20and%20be%20creative.(2024).

Barack, D. et al. "Attention Deficits Linked with Proclivity to Explore While Foraging." Proc Royal Soc B 291, no. 2017 (2024): 10.1098/rspb.2022.584.