Adam Hunt

🚨Just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry!🚨 Evolutionary explanations of anxiety rated as 5x more useful for patients and 3x more useful for clinicians than genetic explanations of anxiety! Our paper is the largest RCT of evolutionary explanations to date!

"Cliff-edged fitness functions increase the risk of maladaptive outcomes. In this example, directional selection for higher values of the trait tends to shift the trait distribution toward the fitness optimum. As a result, some individuals may overshoot the optimal trait value and experience a substantial fitness loss." Evolutionary Psychopathology, A Unified Approach. Dr. Macro Del Giudice

Proximate vs Ultimate causes: Proximate causes explain how a trait operates in the present moment. The local trigger for a behaviour; the short-term feedback loops. See's threat, become fearful. Ultimate causes explain "the story" of "why" a trait exists. Evolutionary history and adaptive function used to estimate the long-term selective pressures that shaped the system is the way it is right now. Explaining "Why" we came to fear in the first place.

'Mismatch theory' suggests our brains evolved for a vastly different environment than the one we live in today - pathology, pain etc, is the result this lack of ideal fit with our surroundings. Our surroundings are often developing "faster" than our underlying "human code" can change.

Unironically, I think healthy workspaces should have highly appreciated food/drink providers. They bring everyone together! And ideally a choir master/band....

Sense-making is often half-of-recovery. Given the relative ineffectiveness of psychiatric treatment, the most healing reframe a patient can hear often isn't "you're broken but we can try to fix you." It's "what you're feeling makes complete sense given what this system was built to do."

One of the most interesting paradoxes of mental health! Unlike almost any other common disease, they are often early onset, usually before having kids - why did the human species evolve these vulnerabilities?

Standardized metrics must almost tautologically punish high variance. But evolution rarely optimizes just for the average; it preserves divergent cognitive strategies because specialisation is often efficient, and because extremes survive different tail-risk events.

Interesting survey results!

We are going to look back at this era of psychiatric science in sheer incredulity. How this was a Nature paper in the first place baffles me - but also, the data was manipulated!?

It's plausible that the "curative effect" of psychological therapy is the result of granting the patients a consistent story, and therefore a way to understand/manage/process their life-dilemmas. Evolution is in this sense the Ur-Story - and it also happens also to be true!

A story of a 'specialised mind' from a YouTube comment: Many autistic specialisations have been replaced with systems that allow more typical people to do the same job. Just consider writing as a substitute for memory tasks incomprehensible to most people. The strange thing is that autistic people sometimes can't comprehend the ordinary, either! My grandfather was never diagnosed, but he must have been autistic. He was the postmaster of the town next to the one I grew up in, and knew the entire population of two towns, and how people were related to each other, some 25,000 people altogether. He could do that with ease. What he could NOT do was to learn that most people are NOT like that. Around my 8th birthday he found out that I did not know all 33,000 people of my home town. To him, that was an earth-shattering discovery. It just could not be! I am reasonably certain that among all the people he knew there was not even one person who also knew all the others. But grandpa simply took it for granted that everybody knew everybody else. Still, as little as 3 generations ago he was certainly regarded as useful, as an asset. There was probably nothing about the Post Office he didn't know. Mail was transported by train, so he had learned the layout of the entire national rail network by heart, every branch line, every stop, even if the line was NOT used for mail at the time. One day it might be! Who would deny that it is good to have a postmaster like that? There was a man at the time, less suited to common employment, who was highly valued by large employers in my town, including steelworks with close to 9,000 employees. He had memorised all their names and tax codes and pay to date since the beginning of the fiscal year. He knew all the deductions they had had and their hourly rates: day-shift, night-shift, overtime, weekend rates, holiday rates. He was brought in regularly and told every man's working hours for the week, upon which he provided data about their net pay, deductions and gross pay, flawlessly calculated. By now, the abilities of people like that have been automated, too. The structure of human capital changes. It is very unlikely that prehistoric tribes valued EVERY autistic member or even allowed the majority of its autistic members to live. It would be interesting to learn whether autism is just as common in Japan as it is elsewhere. I would not be surprised if it were significantly rarer, because of the country's particularly long and intense tradition of conformism. But at least it is (for the most part) a survivable form of conformism, which is most emphatically not the case with the increasing uniformity of the former West.

Physical medicine, naturally, recognizes a fever as an evolved defense against infection, not just a symptom to be suppressed - why not the same paradigm for the mind? One's "mental life" is part of a canny, evolved feedback loop, the same as with the physical.