The death of the explorer and the rise of ‘ADHD kids’.
Hyperactivity. Impulsivity. Distractibility. We all know what ADHD looks like. ADHD kids can be chronically restless, have a hard time focusing and completing tasks, might interrupt people at inopportune times, and often show baffling lapses in judgement. ‘ADHD kids’ aren’t just impulsive and hyperactive, though — they often show other symptoms of emotional and behavioral dysregulation that puts them at higher risk for development of other psychiatric disorders. According to a national 2016 parent survey, 6 in 10 children with ADHD had at least one other mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder, with 5 in 10 children also presenting with a behavior or conduct problem (CDC, 2020).
Those who display these hyperactive and impulsive traits are also at a higher risk of developing a substance use disorder (SUD). Those formally diagnosed with ADHD have double the chances of developing a SUD. The risk quadruples when ADHD exists alongside a behavioral conduct disorder. (Wilens et al, 2014). Conduct disorders are disorders of behavior that include aggressiveness, deceitfulness, and a general disregard of other social norms and rules. There is a substantially higher likelihood of all manner of risk-taking behaviors in people that live with ADHD, which also includes a nearly-doubled risk of alcohol abuse and a 2.4x higher likelihood of cigarette smoking (CDC, 2020).
While a parent might lament receiving an ADHD diagnosis for their kid, there seems to be an evolutionary reason that some of us have these hyperactive and impulsive traits. There are different subtypes of ADHD and likely a wide range of genetic and epigenetic determinants for ADHD-related behaviors, but one of the more common subtypes of ADHD is the hyperactive and impulsive subtype, ADHD-HI, which we are discussing here, and not the inattentive type that often occurs with other learning disorders and can dramatically impact functionality. While those with ADHD-HI might display problems with attention and organizing information, those symptoms don’t present as severely as they do in the inattentive type, and many people with ADHD-HI go on to be very high-functioning people once they learn to adapt.
ADHD occurs at a high enough rate to suggest that some of the behavioral symptoms of the disorder may have been positively selected for in evolution, meaning these traits must provide some benefits for our society, or at least provided benefits for societies past. Indeed, there are certain genetic differences, like the seven-repeat allele of DRD4, which is related to dopamine function in the brain, that have been molecularly investigated and have been confirmed to be positively selected for in evolution, which means there exists the possibility that ADHD increases the reproductive fitness and survivability of the individual — or, crucially, for the social group as a whole (Taylor et al, 2006).
To illustrate this idea, let’s imagine a tribe of hunter-gatherer humans on the edge of a forest in a time long past. There are 100 humans in the tribe, but not enough food to feed all 100 humans. Some members of the tribe have to go out and explore the forest in order to forage for food and survive — but that exploration automatically carries immense risk with it.
If all 100 humans in the tribe are genetically wired to be highly judgmental, consistent, and make ‘safe’ decisions, nobody would feel a natural itch to get up and take the risks that are intrinsic in leaving a safe tribe to go explore and forage. Nobody has the exploratory itch, so nobody goes exploring. Food supply dwindles until all 100 humans die of starvation and none of their genetics are passed on.
On the contrary, if all 100 humans are wired for the hyperactivity and impulsivity that engenders a natural drive towards exploratory behavior, all 100 humans feel the itch to go foraging, and perhaps many die due to consuming unsafe berries, being bit by poisonous insects, being mauled by animals — some die, others are lost or injured, their tribe becomes a mess, and all 100 also wind up passing away, which marks the end of their genetic line, too.
ADHD occurs at a rate of 5–15% of the population, and at least one of the likely genetic predispositions for it show molecular evidence of recent positive selection (Taylor et al, 2006) which means that people that show these ADHD/exploratory traits allow for a group survival advantage that is most easily understood in this example: if 5–15 of those 100 members of the tribe have the hyperactive-impulsive exploratory itch, while the other 85–95 feel a drive to remain safe with the tribe, then we have a minority of the population that is wired to be deeply driven to forage despite the risks of exploring the unknown forest and the possible bodily harm that comes with it, while the majority can stay home and engage in other, safer, social group survival-related behaviors. In other words, having a minority — and only a minority — of the group wired to be restless and impulsive increases the survivability of the entire group.
Indeed, ‘ADHD kids’ that might have the aforementioned genetic predisposition (DRD4–7R) show higher tendencies towards novelty seeking, which has been shown to be inversely related to harm avoidance in these instances, meaning traits of high novelty seeking and low harm avoidance often go hand in hand. This makes sense, because DRD4 coding is related to functions like impulse control and attention (Bhatia, 2020).
This constellation of traits — hyperactivity, impulsivity, high novelty seeking, low harm avoidance, ‘jumpy’ attentional traits — makes ‘ADHD kids’ the perfect explorers. However, our society doesn’t have that perspective on these traits; hyperactivity and impulsivity are seen as characteristics of mental disorders that need to be treated, most often with medication. ADHD kids are the explorers in a society that rewards our ability to sit still and control all of our exploratory impulses, while punishing and pathologizing the behaviors that these hyperactive and impulsive traits give rise to.
As previously mentioned, people with these ADHD-like traits are at higher risks of developing all kinds of addictive and other mental-emotional disorders. The correlation between our society’s negative views towards hyperactive and impulsive behaviors and how they relate to the further development of other mental health issues has yet to be determined, but perhaps we can begin a paradigm shift in which we can start to discuss the benefits of having these ‘explorers’ around.
Beyond exploring a potentially dangerous forest and bringing back food for the rest of the tribe, as in the previous example, these people bring value in what is called ‘exploratory knowledge acquisition’. Beyond merely gathering up a few fruits for the tribe on a one-time basis, these exploratory-types were able to bring back priceless knowledge of where these new food sources could be found, enabling the entire group to benefit from the exploration.
Exploratory knowledge acquisition being limited to a minority, once again, bestows a survival advantage upon the rest of the tribe. In order for us to understand this on a practical, modern level, we must consider how all of our children benefit from having a few ADHD kids in the tribes of modern society.
Impulsivity means unpredictability and randomness; and our ADHD kids seem naturally driven to do random things they should not. They are the ones that touch the hot stove first. They eat the random berries and climb dangerously high trees. They do not focus on their classwork, which provides an opportunity for the teacher to show the rest of the kids what happens when children don’t focus on our classwork. ADHD kids see things differently; they break the rules in games, which is another teaching or learning opportunity for all of us and a way for flaws in our various systems to be exposed.
All these impulsive behaviors provide useful lessons for the majority of the kids, while only the minority of the ADHD-type kids put themselves into danger or trouble. Perhaps less often in modern society, but still very valuable, children with these hyperactive and impulsive exploratory traits might discover something advantageous that the more conservative children simply could not.
It’s no secret that our public education system isn’t conducive to the kinds of hyperactive, impulsive behaviors that lead to the exploratory knowledge that our ADHD kids are wired to forage and find. Rather than reframing their restless and impulsive behavior through the lens of understanding that every human has different genetic predispositions that cause them to behave differently, we say that they have an attention disorder. Rather than acknowledging that their innate genetic and emotional makeup drives them towards acts of novelty-seeking and risk-taking for this exploratory knowledge acquisition, we tend to kick them out of the classroom, which only increases their chances of getting into trouble in the real world.
We place a moral veneer over their behavior: little Johnny can’t sit still, and he has impulsive outbursts in class, so he’s misbehaving. God forbid he go from being labeled an ‘ADHD kid’ to being labeled a ‘bad kid’, which is the path towards suspension and expulsion from public school, which is often the beginning of further emotional and behavioral dysregulation and therefore a descent into even worse mental, emotional, and behavioral health. In order to turn ADHD kids into ‘good kids’ that can sit still for hours at a time without a single hyperactive knee-bounce or impulsive peep, we prescribe them drugs, most often stimulant drugs like Adderall.
Jaak Panksepp, who did exhaustive work into mammalian behavior, mammalian emotions, and the emotional circuits in mammalian brains that underly emotion and behavior, characterized the massive and highly influential dopamine-driven system in the brain as the SEEKING system. Most of us know the dopamine system as the ‘reward system’ and much of what we talk about when we talk about dopamine or the ‘reward system’ is in the context of addiction.
However, to call the dopamine system the ‘reward system’ is to grossly oversimplify it; dopamine has little to do with our experience of pleasure on the level of reward attainment. Dopamine doesn’t have as much to do with our brains saying ‘I like this’ as we previously thought; and dopamine is linked to much, much more than just ‘pleasure’ and ‘reward’.
Dopamine has 5 different receptor types. These dopamine receptors are linked to everything from generating the excited, euphoric emotional states that come from exploring and reward anticipation to higher-level cognition to impulse control to movement to learning and memory.
Dopamine signaling in the brain generates excitement at the prospect of a reward in the environment, it drives us to approach the possible reward, yet, crucially, it also inhibits the impulses that drive the consummation of the reward-related behavior — if and when all dopamine signaling is happening in a way that allows for impulse control, which might not be the case in our explorers.
Dopamine is also responsible for the adaptive learning that comes from attempted reward consummation, and even innervates the parts of the brain responsible for neurogenesis, a crucial process in allowing us to learn from our mistakes (Oertal et al, 2016). Clearly, natural differences in how we produce and process dopamine — like we see in the genetics of our ADHD kids — are major factors in whether we learn from our ‘mistakes’ or continue to make the same ‘reward prediction errors’ in the future.
This explains why ADHD kids can be so frustrating sometimes: why don’t they just learn from their mistakes like the rest of us? Maybe they don’t because humans would be extinct without them. Some of us have to make some mistakes and then continue to make similar mistakes after that; if all of us learned perfectly from every small painful mistake that we make, then none of us would ever take any risks.
Risk-taking would be snuffed from our genome, and all of us would sit in our chairs quietly for 10 hours a day and listen to our parents and our bosses and stay away from anything that could ever hurt us. We would never try to become Olympians or Hollywood stars or business magnates, because it would just be too risky. Then, hyperactivity and impulsivity would be bred out of our genome, and we would live in a world without Michael Phelps, Adam Levine, Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Simone Biles, Jim Carrey, Richard Branson — the list goes on and on.
Hyperactivity and impulsivity should be viewed as the inherently neutral traits that they are. Michael Phelps, had he not had the opportunity to become a swimmer, might’ve found a more negative, maladaptive channel for his hyperactivity and impulsivity. Again, we must think of the clear link between ADHD, dopamine processing, and addictive disorders.
Again, dopamine-driven SEEKING is an emotional state of euphoric anticipatory excitement; it is pleasurable in a sense but not comparable to the pleasure of consummating a reward — for example, the pleasure and satisfaction we feel when we are eating a chocolate cake.
A great way to understand the difference between the enjoyment we feel when we are in a SEEKING emotional state and a more traditionally rewarding ‘pleasure’ like eating a chocolate cake is to classify these feelings differently: those who are deeply tuned into an emotional SEEKING state are enjoying the hunt for the sake of the hunt. Pleasure, as it relates to the enjoyment of ‘rewards’ like eating a chocolate cake, can be thought of as pleasures related to feasting. Hunting and feasting are two very different experiences of pleasure, and explorers are wired to hunt for the sake of the hunt and actually might not very much enjoy feasting at all. If Richard Branson was wired to feast, he would’ve stopped hunting after his first million dollars. Michael Phelps is naturally driven to SEEK and hunt, or else one gold medal would’ve been enough. For hunters, hunting in and of itself is enjoyable, regardless of any feast that they might partake in afterwards.
Michael Phelps and other ADHD kids/explorers are driven to greatness by their constant desire to hunt, which is a positive trait when their emotional SEEKING urges are appropriately channeled. However, had Phelps been denied a swimming pool and came across some oxycontin instead, perhaps his SEEKING urges would’ve turned him into a statistic.
I believe that our school system, and perhaps our entire culture in general, needs more time and space for allowing curiosity, exploration, and learning-related freedom and agency in our lives. We should recognize the natural SEEKING-related urge to explore that most kids have, accept that some kids will have more hyperactive and impulsive exploratory urges than others, and have programs in place for ADHD kids that just aren’t the best genetic fit for rote, dictated, classroom learning.
Perhaps we can begin to think of this subtype of ADHD as the explorer subtype, both to lessen stigma and provide these kids with another, more positive identity beyond that of an ‘ADHD kid’. We also need to emphasize the need for alternative educational programs for these children. This will also prevent the ADHD kids, who will likely struggle with behavioral and emotional dysregulation at some point in their lives, from becoming labeled ‘bad kids’ early on, which can lead to school suspensions and other punishments, which are the beginnings of societal expulsion and can be a death sentence in America.
The genetic differences that underlie ADHD will manifest behaviorally: ADHD kids are wired to pay more attention to novel and attention-grabbing stimuli, which might mean that they pay attention to everything except the book on their desk and the tone of the teacher, which the ADHD student might perceive as monotonous even if other students might not.
A natural overstimulation of this dopaminergic SEEKING system fills the bodies of our explorers with a restlessness that they just can’t quite put their finger on and certainly can’t control. It isn’t that they have difficulty understanding the content being presented in the classroom — on the contrary, many ADHD-HI kids are quite intelligent — they just might have difficulty truly and deeply comprehending why they have to sit there for 8 hours a day learning grammar and rote mathematics, no matter how often our teachers and parents explain to them that this is simply a necessary prerequisite to becoming members of high society.
Our explorers aren’t wired to sit there for 8 hours, and perhaps they even have a genetic makeup that makes them less likely to listen to their elders; they are wired to get up and SEEK novel information and exploratory rewards even if their parents tell them not to. Again, there’s a group survival advantage here; elders have brains that are more well connected. Our elders have fully-developed brains that often possess great judgement — but somebody still has to take the risk of disobeying them and taking on the potential harms that come with behaviors related to exploratory knowledge acquisition, or else we eventually stagnate and die.
We need our ADHD kids, and we need them to know they are more than just ADHD kids. I believe we need to start calling them explorers, playing to their strengths, finding a place for their behavioral and emotional dispositions, and trying to find a way to help them to thrive. There have been some compelling studies done on the link between ADHD and the self-employment associated with entrepreneurism, which makes sense given the constellation of aforementioned traits (Block et al, 2016). With this in mind, I am willing to bet there are more than a few explorers who would be more than happy to take on a fast-track to entrepreneurship if it were offered as a specialization at age 15. We must keep in mind that the differences in genetics and brain function that manifest as ‘ADHD’ and similar behaviors are here for a reason.
Thank you for reading thus far. For my next post, I will discuss the darker sides of ADHD, and go into more detail about how ‘ADHD kids’ become ‘bad kids’ that become ‘criminals’ and ‘addicts’, while also explaining how an overactive, under-inhibited SEEKING system can give rise to the mental and emotional disorders that we often see in our explorers, which can include narcissism, mania, bipolar disorder, and others.
Please check out my other articles about addictive disorders, follow along if you’re interested, and feel free to reach out.
