Modern life values sitting in school or an office, focusing on one thing at a time—an attentional stance that may not always have paid off in early human history. Survival in the wild, some neuroscientists argue, may have depended at crucial moments on a rapidly shifting attention and swift action, without hesitating to think what to do. What we now diagnose as an attentional deficit may reflect a natural variation in focusing styles that had advantages in evolution—and so continues to be dispersed in our gene pool.
