The Specialised Mind will be Adam's first book. It will be published by Bluebird at Pan Macmillan in the UK and globally, and by BenBella Books in the US. Toby Mundy is serving as Adam's literary agent. An academic paper on the subject can be found here.
For half a century, mainstream mental health science has searched for the broken circuits, faulty chemistry and disease-like causes that were supposed to lie behind common mental disorders. Despite billions of dollars and decades of work, those breakages have not been found. The Specialised Mind argues that this failure is not a temporary setback but a sign that the entire framework is wrong.
The book's central insight is to apply evolutionary theory to reexamine neurodiversity. Traits such as autism, schizophrenia, ADHD, dyslexia, neuroticism, anorexia and psychopathy are common, often appear early in life, run in families, and persist in every population on Earth. If they were simply diseases, natural selection should have weeded them out long ago. Instead, the patterns point to something quite different: these conditions are not simple breakages but are fundamentally related to functional, evolved systems.
Some of the traits we label as disorders are themselves adaptations — cognitive strategies that served our ancestors and only look like dysfunction when measured against the expectations of modern life. Others are the unavoidable trade-offs of those adaptations — "what we had to pay to be able to succeed" — falling more heavily on some individuals than others, much as sickle cell disease falls on the unlucky inheritors of a gene that protects whole populations from malaria. And many of the cases that reach clinics today are what happens when an ancient apparatus of feelings and abilities, built for one world, finds itself in another and begins going haywire — manifesting in extreme or harmful forms it was never designed for. In every case, the diagnostic labels we use are referencing the predictable outcomes of evolved systems, not simple breakages.
Human beings did not evolve as interchangeable units. We evolved in small, cooperative, interdependent groups, where life was often less about survival of the fittest and more about survival of the fit-ins — and fitting in often meant being different in the right way. The hyper-attentive cataloguer of plants and animals, the visionary who heard the voices of spirits, the restless scanner alert to threat, the perfectionist hard worker, the fearless rule-breaker: each represents a recognisable cognitive specialisation, with characteristic strengths and characteristic costs. What clinics today label as disorder is, in many cases, those ancient specialisations colliding with classrooms, offices, screens, supermarkets and social media, or manifesting in extreme ways at the end of a spectrum which is otherwise lending useful skills.
Across its chapters, The Specialised Mind takes the reader from a Siberian reindeer herder who can recite the parentage of 2,600 animals, to South African ukuthwasa healers battling invisible spirits as a rite of passage, to the rise of anorexia as perfectionist personalities attach to modern attractiveness ideals, to the chilling psychopathy of Yanomami chief Moawa. Each condition is examined through the same lens: not asking what is broken, but what was built, why, and at what cost — and at what point an otherwise adaptive tendency, exaggerated or misdirected, can tip into serious disability. A final chapter on personality shows that the same logic explains the variation we call "healthy" — introversion and extraversion, conscientiousness and ease, agreeableness and confrontation — and that the line between disorder and personality is one of social necessity rather than biological reality.
The book does not romanticise suffering. Autistic and ADHD people die younger; schizophrenia remains one of the most disabling conditions on Earth; the struggles are real and often severe. But understanding their evolutionary origins changes what we do with them. It reframes stigma, reshapes self-image, and points toward more humane approaches to education, work, treatment and prevention. If these conditions are not simple malfunctions but ancient cognitive systems struggling to fit a world they were never built for, the question is not how to cure them, but how to fit old minds into a new world.