Why ADHD and ADHD-like Traits Have Been Genetically Preserved

ADHD traits may not have always been viewed negatively. In fact, they were necessary for survival.

By Alya Khoury

Imagine two humans in the wilderness. For them, survival means finding food. 

One human in particular, let’s call him Joe, could never sit still. Joe’s eyes dart from the cluster of berries in his hand to the patch of trees just beyond the hill. The berries are plentiful, easy to reach, and safe, but Joe can’t help but wonder what if there’s something better on the other side.

Another human let’s call him Bob, on the other hand, kneels beside the same bush he’d picked from the day before. He he checks each berry for ripeness, meticulous and methodical, filling his basket with practiced efficiency.

Bob’s focus makes him an expert at returning to reliable sources, ensuring a consistent supply. Joe, however, is different — restless, easily distracted, and constantly chasing novelty. If Bob is the steady provider, Joe is the experimenter, venturing into unknown terrain and occasionally stumbling on a jackpot: a hidden patch of fruit tree or a forgotten water source. 

The dynamic between Joe and Bob reflects a balance critical to early human survival. Humans lived as hunters and gatherers for most of our species’ history, relying on this interplay between exploration and reliability to adapt to unpredictable environments. Food sources were scattered and unreliable, and humans required a balance between consistent gathering and the impulsive drive to explore new opportunities. Traits like curiosity, risk-taking, and hyper-alertness could mean the difference between life and death. 

Today, the traits that Joe embodied above, are often labeled as symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). As human society evolved—shifting from foraging to agriculture to modern industrialization—these same traits began to manifest differently, particularly in structured environments like schools and workplaces. What was once a possible survival advantage is now often seen as a challenge in structured, sedentary societies. Researchers have begun to wonder if the traits associated with ADHD, now seen as impairments, had been crucial advantages for survival.

This question drives an ongoing debate among scientists and mental health experts, of whether traits like impulsivity, hyperactivity, and distractibility are inherently disadvantageous. Anthropologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists each carry their own perspectives on the topic,  yet all agree on the complex interplay between biology, environment, and social expectations.

 “I don’t see that that impulsivity itself is pathological, nor inattention, nor overactivity,” said Dr. Ann Abramowitz, a psychiatrist specializing in ADHD. “But when any of those, or a combination of those, reach a level in a person where they’re impairing that person’s functioning, then we consider a diagnosis of ADHD.”

ADHD is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder that affects approximately 11% of children and 6% of adults worldwide. It is characterized by inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ADHD stunts a person’s ability to focus in classroom settings, at work, in social environments, and more. People may seek help from professionals when the three defining characteristics reach such an extent. There are treatment options such as stimulant medication and cognitive behavioral therapy to help people readjust to a more comfortable routine. 

Researchers like Dr. David Barack have questioned whether these traits might have served an evolutionary purpose, offering benefits that were once crucial for survival, despite often being framed as a challenge in today’s world. Often, the traits we have now exist because they helped our ancestors survive. This passing down of helpful genetic traits is known as natural selection. 

“It doesn’t make sense, from an evolutionary perspective, to be distractible or impulsive if they’re so negative,” said Barack, a neuroscientist and philosopher studying foraging. “There must be something about those kinds of personality traits that is sometimes advantageous, and one context in which they might be advantageous is when we’re trying to find resources in the environment.”

Barack and his team created a digital foraging task to observe how ADHD traits would impact performance in a 2024study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. They recruited participants and split them into two groups: people with ADHD characteristics, and people without. All the participants chose between “patches” of resources, mimicking decisions ancient humans might have faced. 

The people in the study who reported higher levels of distractibility and impulsivity didn’t perform worse. In fact, they performed better. These traits often led to discovering new opportunities. “By making impulsive decisions, by getting distracted by things that might otherwise seem irrelevant, you can uncover new opportunities sooner than your competition,” Barack said. 

These findings seemed to point to one reason why the genetic traits of ADHD may have been passed down from our ancestors to modern humans today. 

Members of the mainstream ADHD community, including Abramowitz, are cautious about labeling these traits as beneficial, despite Barack’s findings. “To say traits of ADHD are advantageous is not fair because none of the traits are ‘helping’ so to say,” Abramowitz said. She emphasized that people who are receiving treatment for their condition are negatively impacted. 

Traits like creativity, and exploration could be more common in people with ADHD, but these aren’t the characteristics that hinder their day-to-day. Abramowitz noted that through her experience with hundreds of patients and families, “ADHD does not confer any measurable advantage when we talk about measuring cognitive functions.”

It is also important to note that Barack’s study did face a few significant limitations. The task was distributed entirely online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This allowed the researchers to reach a wide audience, around 500 participants, but it also meant that most participants weren’t formally diagnosed with ADHD—they self-reported traits like impulsivity or distractibility. 

The study also did not directly examine the participants’ genetics. Given that ADHD is a genetic condition, this would’ve been important information to properly distinguish between people with and without ADHD. The self-reported data, and lack of biological data, meant that the researchers could not confidently say that the more distracted participants did indeed have clinical diagnoses of ADHD. 

Barrack did notice that a small percentage, around 10%, of the participants did report having a clinical diagnosis. An analysis of their data against the rest of the group showed that the ADHD participants truly did perform better.  These limitations tell us that more research is needed to explore the ideas fully, but the implications are interesting. 

Dr. Barack said, “The real takeaway is that distractibility and impulsivity, which is what the scale is really measuring, had this quantitative benefit. Everyone is distracted sometimes; everyone is impulsive sometimes. So, the question is, why do these traits persevere in the human trait repertoire?” 

Barack believes the answer lies in their underlying benefits, particularly their ability to drive creativity, adaptability, and resource discovery.

Traits like impulsivity and distractibility, he suggests, serve a fundamental purpose: the capacity to move on, to explore, to break away from routines. “If being distractible and impulsive were really that bad, you shouldn’t see anyone being distracted or impulsive,” Barack said. “In our popular culture today, they’re treated as universally negative, but they shouldn’t be. These traits clearly serve this ability to find new ground, to change things up.”

Barack’s findings weren’t the first to suggest the evolutionary advantages of ADHD traits. Today, around 300 populations still live as hunters and gatherers, including some members of the Ariaal tribe in Kenya. 

A group of researchers led by Dr. Dan Eisenberg conducted a study in 2008 looking at the genetic mappings of the Ariaal tribe. Some members of the Ariaal tribe practice a nomadic, foraging lifestyle, while others have adopted more sedentary practices. Eisenberg’s study found that most of the children across the Ariaal tribe carried a genetic trait linked to ADHD. 

The children with the trait in the nomadic group excelled in exploratory behaviors and resource discovery– traits that would have been advantageous in a foraging context. The same genetic trait was associated, however, with kids from the sedentary group who had distracted classroom behaviors. 

This study offered two big take aways. First, the predominance of ADHD across the genetics of the population meant there was something that allowed it to persist. The course of natural selection would have been weeded out ADHD if it was truly harmful. Secondly, the environmental context is what dictates if ADHD traits are impairing or helpful. 

Dr. Dietrich Stout, the Chair of the Anthropology department at Emory University, specializes in researching the cognitive challenges of stone toolmaking. “Because we label something as a deficit in our current social and cultural environment doesn’t mean that it is a problem for everyone everywhere at all times”, said Stout, emphasizing that context matters. “Things are problematic for us because of the society that we live in and the expectations that we have. Other things are not problematic here that would be problematic somewhere else.” 

Stout did, however, have some critiques towards the theory that ADHD corresponded to foraging lifestyles. “There’s a very long history of classifying people by their economic system, but that is only one way of looking at variation,” Dr. Stout said. 

He underscores a larger point: human behavior and traits can’t be neatly categorized by survival strategies alone. Foraging may have shaped some evolutionary tendencies, but it’s only part of a more complex puzzle that includes social dynamics, culture, and individual variability. “I do think that a lot of anthropologists and archaeologists would emphasize that there isn’t this one sort of situation in the past, and that the nature of people’s lives is not really dictated by where they get their food,” he added. 

Yet another group of researchers, who asked a different version of the same question: why does the brain get distracted sometimes? Dr. Gary Aston-Jones and Dr. Jonathan Cohen looked at the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system, a specific brain system that plays a role in arousal and behavior control. 

This system has two phases, the tonic phase, which results in distractable behavior, and the phasic phase, which results in being able to focus, also called ‘entering the flow state’. 

They wanted to know if certain phases enhanced exploration versus exploitation.  

The researchers studied the different phases of the LC-NE system in monkeys. They noticed that, in phasic activation, the ability to focus enhanced exploitation tasks. As for the tonic activation, the ability to move from current task to look for another could enhance explorative behavior. 

Take our friends Bob and Joe from earlier. Bob, the meticulous and traditional berry picker may have a stronger ability to remain in the phasic phase. While Joe, the restless and curious explorer may remain more often in the tonic phase, unattached to one task. 

Being able to dynamically move between the two is what has allowed for this trait to exist across many of us at varying levels. We cannot write off the potential advantage that impulsivity and distractibility can offer. 

These perspectives challenge conventional narratives, where lack of focus is often viewed as a weakness or a flaw among all individuals. Impulsivity is synonymous with recklessness and is discouraged. Barack’s findings raise provocative questions of whether traits like distractibility and impulsivity could be reframed as assets. Eisenburg’s findings, invite a real-world perspective on the diversity of humankind, and the importance of context in labeling characteristics as disorders. Aston-Jones and Cohen’s findings show us how the brain dances between impulsivity and focus. 

It is still important to recognize that, while the traits of ADHD may have been once helpful, the challenges faced by individuals with ADHD are significant, often requiring tailored interventions to support daily life. As Abramowitz said, “you want to differentiate true innate hyperactivity and impulsivity from what is maybe at high level until it’s pathological and it results in a diagnosis.”

More research is needed to confidently conclude if ADHD could be advantageous, but these studies, nevertheless, push us to think more expansively. Acknowledging the value of innovation and adaptability allow workplaces and schools to reimagine their structures. we can begin to see impulsivity and distractibility as assets, as opposed to shutting them down as deficits.

The evolutionary narrative invites us to reconsider the diversity of human behavior. Survival once required both explorers and settlers, risk-takers and planners, as with Bob and Joe. Perhaps traits we label as disorders today played a role in our ancestors’ survival, and may even hold untapped potential in our modern world.

“What if we trained ourselves to tune how distracted we were to the environment, instead of trying to eliminate distraction entirely?” Barack suggested. “It turns into a superpower.”