Human Evolution & Notifications
I was talking to a friend the other day and said “I’ve long held the belief that the increasing anxiety/stress/ADD is a result of human evolution/timeline”.
Let’s for a second think of an alert or notification as “something that needs our attention”. In the early days those things were lions roaring, lighting, etc. In modern times that’s email “bings” and car horns.
According to this Stack Exchange Discussion and Wikipedia it takes 50-100,000 years for a predominant trait to evolve in/out of a species.
I’ve drawn up an anecdotal, totally-not-science-based chart of how many “notifications” a human likely heard. In this chart it is average notifications over a 10 day period (.1 means 1 notification every 10 days, 1 means 1 notification per day for 10 days):
Putting that in context and combining our understanding of evolution with the approximate notifications we receive; we are evolved to hear approximately 1 notification per day but I estimate we hear 50.
If we assume the human body/mind is evolved to treat notifications and sudden noises as danger/threat/action-required, we are stimulated 50x per day while we are expecting 1x per day.
I believe our brains are simply not accustomed to that constant state of alert/stress.
Sources Used:
