Adam Hunt
@RealAdamHunt
Researcher @Cambridge_Uni. PhD in evolutionary psychiatry. Explaining neurodiversity, improving methods & stigma. 'Evolving Psychiatry' podcast host.
New paper🎉 just published🎉 in Biological Reviews 🎉 We propose a new gold standard to avoid “just-so” storytelling in evolutionary inference & apply it to autism. It’s been 9 years (!!) in the making.
Meagre financial handouts for neurodivergent individuals probably aren't the best option for support and maximising their long term potential. A better (cough evolution cough) informed system could do a more nuanced job at helping people integrate into classrooms and workplaces!
Still a week left to sign up for the evolutionary psychiatry debate day in Cambridge - the best opportunity of this year to meet up with others interested in the field! Discussing key topics of depression and the future of the field buff.ly/daHzwQK
Every parent (especially of twins) and teacher can comfortably attest: personality does just differ wildly, often with no discernible environmental effect, even at such an intimate level of observation! Explaining why evolution allowed this was one of the major aims of my PhD
Nothing like having fraternal twins to realize how big individual differences are. All baby advice seems to assume babies are interchangeable but lemme tell you: we treat them exactly the same & it’s clear that they are two _very_ different people with very different preferences.
Big problem! "People just take a random GWAS of a protein, a GWAS of a disease or trait B, run a little test,retroactively cobble together an introduction,write a paper, and submit. Add in the bias towards publishing significant findings and you get a very potent noise machine."
Psychiatric Genetics Beyond Heritability: Q&A with Michel Nivard “We look for genes as a means to an end—biology, epidemiology, and etiology of complex human outcomes.” psychiatrymargins.com/p/psychiatric-…
The Coldplay fiasco is a nice example of huge backfiring of natural reactions due to weird modern environments!
Shame is designed to minimize the leakage of reputation-damaging information pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
before you have a baby, you think "babies are cute" but then after you have a baby, it finally sets in: that sentiment is exactly backwards. cute is baby. babies are the ultimate referent for cuteness, the ur-cute against which all other cuteness is a crude facsimile.
my pets annoy me so much post-kid. that's now my dominant experience with them, feeling irritated by their bids for attention :(
ADHD is in the media a lot recently. Complaints about excessive support, too easy diagnosis. Ignoring the fraudsters, a lot of people do struggle with modernity (understandably, we weren't built for this!) and supporting our individual differences to maximise our potential does…
👇 the records of humans living in pre-industrialised life are some of the most precious information we have (and can still gather, just about!). For however many centuries or millennia humanity survives, we'll be relying on those records for insights into our nature
Good theory is important in the social sciences but while theories are, by necessity, continuously being refined and often superseded, the observations in the ethnohistorical record are timeless and will always be valuable. They remain criminally under-appreciated.
This summer, August 31st, we are hosting an evolutionary psychiatry debate in Cambridge. Experts discussing whether depression is functional and whether evolutionary perspectives are more important in research or the clinic. Audience participation possible. Join us!…
Introducing Grok 4, the world's most powerful AI model. Watch the livestream now: x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
Excellent blogpost by @JessicaRumbelow who leads Leap Lab, on the possibilities (and limitations) of AI for improving science. Major problems: garbage in, garbage out; and hallucinations But big data, careful bespoke models and interpretability offer exciting avenues...…
The line between 'disorder' & 'normality' does not exist - but we pretend it does....
From enhanced risk-taking in ADHD to the social deception strategies of psychopathy, each row in the table shows a proposed “trade-off.” While these traits can lead to impairment, they may also reflect specialized abilities that, under certain ecological or social conditions,…
Panic isn't purely dysfunctional—it evolved as a life-saving alarm. Agoraphobia might reflect a sensitive (but sometimes overly cautious) ancient survival mechanism.
Every day I receive an email from 'The Transmitter', sponsored by 'Spectrum' and funded by the Simons Foundation - originally tasked with better understanding autism... I get that it's cool science but.... this research has never really helped anyone right?
Homo Sapiens have a very rare ability to obtain calories from decaying fruit. Our appreciation for alcohol being a happy-side effect of this trait, then co-opted for socialising
