Many workplaces select for a narrow cognitive profile: sustained sedentary focus on abstract tasks. Human populations have historically evolved with broader specialisation.

Ancestrally, competence was publicly legible. There was strong coupling between environmental proficiency and social reputation - people needed competent hunters to survive! Today, it is often the case that forms of competence are opaque, delayed, or politically mediated.

For most of human history, effort → visible result → calibration. Now effort → abstraction → delayed, ambiguous feedback. Many “motivation problems” are likely actually calibration problems within modern environments .

Reframing ADHD. Economists have a concept known as 'Time Preference' - in short, that people prefer immediate rewards to anticipated future rewards. But to some degree all humans have a preference for 'now' over some distant future. Could ADHD be seen as an far range example of a normal human trait?

Preferences are individual - and should be celebrated as such - but not arbitrary. They track cues that historically predicted fertility, investment, protection, and social leverage.

Important: evolutionary mismatch is not a vague just-so story. It generates testable predictions about when traits should become impairing: rapid environmental change, decoupling of cues from outcomes, and loss of developmental calibration.

In hunter-gatherer groups, social interaction and feedback is continuous. Modern settings compress it into high-pressure intervals. The shift changes the dynamics. And allows baseless rumination when back alone!

Long 'to-do' lists could not exist in ancestral environments. The ability for foresight and planning was limited to the possible and fairly immediate.

A growing number of large-scale datasets now track how light, sleep timing and social rhythm influence mood. The strongest effects appear when multiple cues drift at once, supporting ecological rather than single-factor explanations.

Hunter–gatherer learning models suggest that people learn fastest when observing others in real contexts, not in abstract instruction. The apprenticeship model is more natural than rote learning!

A useful lens: anxiety often increases when feedback becomes opaque. Historically, social cues were immediate—facial expression, tone, presence. Today, performance signals are delayed, digital or ambiguous. Uncertainty itself drives stress.

"Humans are not well adapted to live in modern cities—and this may be having a big impact on our health and wellbeing. This is the claim of evolutionary scientists...who say “rapid industrialization” has reshaped human habits so dramatically that our biology may no longer be able to keep up."

"Neurodiversity becomes not just a moral imperative but a competitive advantage. For too long we have approached workplace inclusion as something we should do because it’s right. But, what our research reveals is that building truly inclusive, human-centred workplaces... it’s about good business."

Our minds evolved in small‑group, high‑mobility, high‑feedback societies. When modern life or work imposes long stretches of isolation or asynchronous tasks, this mismatch in environments is, all else being equal, likely to result in unnecessary suffering.

New empirical work (Nov 11 2025) shows mixed attitudes among autistic, ADHD and dyslexic learners toward the term “neurodiversity." Link:

"Although aspects of computer-meditated-communication may indeed represent such evolutionary mismatches...there is also..a failure to contextualize the negative mental health effects of CMC against broader societal factors which are plausible preexisting evolutionary mismatches themselves..."

Depression may have evolved as the mind’s energy-saving mode—pause the pursuit, reassess the plan, survive the winter. Modern life has removed the off-season, so shutdown becomes chronic. The mechanism still works; the context no longer does.

Neurodiversity policy works best when viewed as ecological design, not accommodation. Instead of “fixing” individuals, adjust the niche—work rhythms, light, noise, coordination style—to match evolved variance in attention and arousal patterns.

Across anxiety, ADHD and depression, an evolutionary psychiatry lens asks why vulnerabilities persist. Mismatch, trade-offs and adaptive calibration provide unifying explanations that neurobiology alone can’t. buff.ly/ipZ34vS

Anxiety is a prediction engine built for forests, not inboxes. It evolved to model risk, not to live inside permanent uncertainty. When everything is possible but nothing is visible, the alarm doesn’t know when to turn off.

Low mood may function as a mechanism of disengagement — reducing motivation to pursue unproductive goals and reallocating cognitive resources. Consider whether we might view depression as adaptive in origin, though due to 'mismatch' between modern and ancestral environments, pathological today.

ADHD as an oversensitivity to stimuli: we call them “attention disorders,” but perhaps we just built an environment where attention itself is under attack. A brain that can’t filter noise looks ill only when the world won’t stop shouting.

When the eyes stop finding depth and variation, thought flattens too. Sensory ecology predicts it: monotony is not calm, it’s starvation of information.

We evolved to expect feedback from faces, not screens. The nervous system still measures safety by eye contact, tone, and shared rhythm. A thousand “likes” can’t replace a single nod across a table. At least, not until we are all safely encultured in the coming AI-linked bodysuits :)

Anxiety isn’t always over-reaction. Sometimes it’s under-stimulation: the body looking for cues it no longer finds. Subtle sensory change—light, sound, air—can quiet the search. Not in the more extreme cases, of course, but a lit incense stick and an open window does wonders for me, personally.

We often chase efficiency by standardising roles. Yet human systems, like natural ones, depend on redundancy — overlapping skills, divergent styles. Resilience; adaptation to changing environments [and the environment is always changing] often hides in the inefficiencies we prune away.

A brain evolved to track rustling leaves still tries to track rustling tabs. It’s doing its best. But the design brief was different.

My first paper, out in PsychReview!! Along with @orbenamy.bsky.social, Nik & @jaeggiadrian.bsky.social, @realadamhunt.bsky.social & I revisit an old theoretical question using concepts from evo psychiatry and anthro: Why do mixed associations exist b/w social media & mental health? A 🧵

Every organisation is an ecosystem of specialisations. This isn't just theoretical - it's a reality inherent to all complex systems. Perhaps, then, the question isn’t necessarily “who fits our culture?” but “what niche are we failing to create?”

"Neurodivergent individuals represent an estimated 15-20% of the global population, yet they continue to face significant barriers to workplace inclusion....reduces reliance on disclosure by implementing universal support, while also fostering a culture that makes voluntary disclosure safe."

A new systematic review (April 2025) of neurodiversity in computing education highlights that many interventions lack empirical support... "Most papers provided curricular recommendations that lacked empirical evidence to support those recommendations."

A recent review (19 Aug 2025) suggests 'grouping anxiety disorders into broader categories – namely, fear-dominant, mixed, and anxiety-dominant'. Plausible that evolutionary analysis of those distinct categories would be useful.

A new scoping review finds that trust, social identification, communication, incentives and norms are key levers in group cooperation across commons and organisations. Interesting stuff - link in thread.

"The ‘I’ in Egalitarianism: Hadza Hunter-Gatherers Averse to Inequality Primarily when Personally Unfavourable" finds interesting patterns about inequality aversion in small-scale societies - basically, they're selfish too! Norms are needed to keep selfishness in check...

Coalition instincts are double-edged: they bind teams but can create silos. The solution isn’t to eliminate group identity - rather, it’s to build nested loyalties: project, team, organisation. Hierarchies of belonging mirror the social scaffolds humans evolved with - family, extended family, tribe.

Teaching and learning from others is the critical human skill. We are motivated through the impressions we leave on others in our peer group. Education that reintroduces imitation and small-group practice reconnects students with evolved incentives.

Smartphones are critical to modern working life, we can hardly do without them - nor should we. But our attention systems evolved to be too sensitive to microscopic interruptions.

"...Late chronotypes had a 7 % lower depression risk per extra hour of daylight exposure..." A longitudinal study shows that daylight exposure is linked to lower depression scores - independent of exercise and social contact, at least in "night owls" (late chronotypes.)

A recent mapping review recommends that managing neurodiversity in work settings should emphasise systemic structure, not only individual accommodations. In mismatch terms, the structure should adapt to varied cognitive niches, not expect uniform minds.

A large new survey finds misconceptions of ADHD and autism among corporate employees, even when awareness is high. Interesting to wonder how much hinges on simplistic 'broken brain' explanatory models

Why is everyone so 'Anxious?' One potential answer, hugely overlooked, is simply that our brains evolved to be hypersensitive to tiny social threats—slight status shifts, non-verbal signals. In today’s large but flattened hierarchies, many social feedback loops feel ambiguous!

A call came out for a “biology‑informed” framework for mental disorders that weaves in genetics, behaviour, and systems. Biology has informed psychiatry for decades! Whats missing is reference to the evolutionary theory that helps us understand biology!!

A recent Frontiers In Psychology article introduces what they term "Neurocognitive Mismatch Theory," suggesting that environments low in movement, sensory variety, or natural stimuli amplify functional impairment in ADHD and autism. The findings point toward designing settings that diminish mismatch

Interesting new article in Frontiers - exploring affective versus predatory violence in terms of evolutionary adaptation (24 Sep 2025). They claim that this distinction matters not only in forensic settings but in organisational threat assessment and structured conflict resolution.

Recent arXiv study: “Portable Silent Room” prototypes for neurodivergent women and non‑binary people show that VR environments tailored to sensory regulation can reduce anxiety and emotional dysregulation. Designing for intersectional needs matters more than many suspect! arxiv.org/abs/2508.18591

EY’s Global Neuroinclusion at Work Study 2025 reveals only ~25% of neurodivergent professionals feel “truly included” in their workplace, even as many report proficiency in high-growth skills when inclusion is present. Suggests inclusion is a strong performance lever. www.ey.com/content/dam/...

Children with ADHD differ not just in how often they check the time but how strategically they monitor time in everyday‑tasks (aged 9‑13) when using a naturalistic VR task. Possible that training strategic monitoring will improve school performance. Link: buff.ly/KsoBoF1

A new preprint finds that “body doubling” (human or AI) in virtual reality helps adults with ADHD finish construction tasks faster and maintain attention (15 Sep 2025). Suggests social scaffolding could reduce mismatch in high‑demand jobs. Intriguing Stuff. Link: buff.ly/i3j4rRc

A study published this month surveys autistic doctors internationally: language preferences (‘identity‑first’ vs ‘person‑first’) correlate with views of autism as disorder vs difference, which in turn correlate with experience of distress. Link: buff.ly/zSPnDsK

Research finds that many young children suspected of autism are later diagnosed with ADHD as they grow older; ADHD traits may have been present but under‑detected early. This suggests early screening with flexible observation, and avoiding fixed labelling too early. Link: buff.ly/CvXM5rg