🎉New pre-print!🎉 “Our findings represent the most robust evidence to date that evolutionary psychiatry offers normalising causal stories with various positive effects, in this case by casting anxiety as a calibrated defence system that can overshoot in contemporary contexts."

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.

I'd literally bet thousands of dollars that none of those supposed associations is robust

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.

This did seem a priori obvious to me but good that someone has written it up (most microbiome psychiatry stuff is untrustworthy for similar reasons)

One of the funniest videos I've seen in a long while

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

Fascinating insight into a world-defining technology

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

Anxiety isn’t always over-reaction. Sometimes it’s under-stimulation: the body looking for cues it no longer finds. Consider reintroducing subtle sensory change—light, sound, air—can quiet the search. The cure may be as small as a window that opens. Not in the more extreme cases,

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

My first paper, out in PsychReview!! Along with Amy, Nik and Adrian, @RealAdamHunt & I revisit an old theoretical question using concepts from evo psychiatry and anthro: Why is evidence linking social media to mental health so mixed? A 🧵

The Land Trap is now OUT in the US! Just two days to wait until the UK release. Pre-orders should be landing imminently.

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

https://t.co/bwODIetN3h

"Neurodivergent individuals represent an estimated 15-20% of the global population (Doyle, 2020), yet they continue to face significant barriers to workplace inclusion....we advocate a balanced approach—one that reduces reliance on disclosure by implementing universal support,

https://t.co/nMTbprGLd6

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.

Honestly, this is atrocious behavior by Tfl. These guys cleaned some tubes to show how easy it is to make a difference to our local communities, and were accused of writing the graffiti themselves!! Absolutely outrageous, an apology is necessary, if not sufficient!!

Link:

A new systematic review (April 2025) of neurodiversity in computing education highlights that many interventions lack empirical support and urges greater co‑design with neurodivergent learners. "Our work shows that research on neurodivergence in computing education is still very