How digital
environments are
eroding the myth
of “neurotypical”
cognition while
producing
population-scale
ADHD

A new systematic review documents the neural signature of ADHD across non-diagnosed adults

A systematic review by Alsuwaylim and colleagues, published in Research Journal in Advanced Humanities in April 2026, synthesises 28 empirical studies published between 2016 and 2025 on the cognitive effects of digital multitasking on working memory. The review follows PRISMA 2020 methodology, draws from PubMed, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC, and integrates behavioural, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological evidence. Its findings across cognitive, academic, and neural domains are unambiguous and methodologically robust.

The cognitive evidence converges on substantial working memory degradation. Heavy media multitaskers demonstrate reduced recall accuracy, slower response latencies, elevated error rates, and increased switch costs across response time and accuracy measures. Attentional lapses become more frequent, and metacognitive monitoring — the capacity to assess one’s own performance and self-correct — deteriorates. The often-cited “brain drain” finding from Ward and colleagues appears here too: the mere physical presence of a smartphone, even powered off and face-down, measurably reduces available working memory capacity in adult participants. The cognitive cost is not confined to active device use. It extends to the environmental salience of digital devices themselves.

At the neural level the evidence is more pointed still. Chronic digital multitasking is associated with reduced functional efficiency within the fronto-parietal control network — encompassing the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex — which constitutes the principal neural substrate for executive control, working memory maintenance, and attentional regulation. If you are to any extent familiar with my writings then you will know where I am going with this…

Heavy media multitaskers show altered neural recruitment patterns during focused-attention tasks, diminished prefrontal inhibitory control, and heightened sensitivity to environmental distractors. Hippocampal encoding activity is reduced during periods of attentional lapse, producing weaker and less durable memory traces. Alpha and theta oscillatory dynamics in prefrontal and posterior parietal regions — the rhythmic activity that supports working memory representation — become fractionated under divided-attention conditions. Default Mode Network activity, which should attenuate during goal-directed processing, instead becomes elevated during multitasking-related attentional lapses.

Taken together this is the empirical and neurobiological signature that, when it appears in someone who has carried it from early childhood, gets diagnosed as ADHD. Fronto-parietal inefficiency. Working memory deficit. Sustained attention failure. Disrupted hippocampal encoding. Elevated DMN activity during goal-directed tasks. Switch costs. Impaired metacognitive monitoring. The review documents this signature appearing reliably, across 28 studies and a decade of empirical work, in the general adult population. The diagnostic implication is one the authors do not draw.

The exclusion criterion that makes the review’s findings far more revealing than the authors intended

The review’s methodology section, listing exclusion criteria, includes this clause: studies were excluded if they “reported on populations with clinically diagnosed neurological or psychiatric disorders as the primary focus, given the distinct cognitive profiles of such populations and the potential for confounding.” This is a standard exclusion in systematic review methodology and the authors had good reason to apply it — distinct clinical profiles do introduce confounding variables when synthesising effects across general populations. The methodological choice was not wrong. What it accidentally produced, however, is something the review’s framing cannot quite see.

By explicitly excluding diagnosed neurodivergent populations from the synthesis, the review documents the emergence of the full ADHD neural signature in a non-diagnosed sample. The fronto-parietal inefficiency, hippocampal encoding disruption, elevated DMN activity, switch costs, working memory degradation, and metacognitive failure are not appearing in people whose architecture inherently produces them. They are appearing in people whose architecture has been shaped into producing them by sustained exposure to digital multitasking environments. The same neurobiological pattern, arrived at through a different developmental pathway, with the same functional consequences.

The boundary between “the cognitive cost of digital multitasking” and “ADHD” is, at the neural-substrate level, becoming difficult to draw. What separates the two is not the neural pattern itself but the developmental history that produced it and — crucially — whether the person carrying it has obtained a diagnosis. The diagnosis is not arbitrary; it tracks something real about the lifelong, architectural quality of the experience. But what the diagnosis tracks is increasingly being produced, in non-diagnosed populations, by environmental exposure rather than by inherited cognitive architecture. This is now fact. And this is one of the many reasons why we are already in muddy waters that need wading through with some serious critical thinking and holding of all the nuance.

As the implications cascade quickly. A research literature that treats ADHD as a discrete clinical condition affecting roughly 5-8% of adults, while simultaneously documenting that 60-70% of adults now exhibit the same neural signature under sustained digital exposure, is operating with a diagnostic boundary that no longer corresponds to where the cognitive reality actually divides. The review has not noticed because the exclusion criterion that produced its sample also produced its blind spot. To synthesise effects in non-diagnosed populations cleanly is to render invisible the convergence between those populations and the diagnosed ones.

The Directory’s work on waning human attention made the broader argument that human attention is being reshaped by cybernetic environments at population scale. The virtual autism and screen exposure pieces extended this to developmental neural architecture during formation. The technostress piece addressed the same dynamic operating across adult working life. The Alsuwaylim review provides — without intending to — the empirical synthesis that anchors all of those arguments at the neural-substrate level. It documents what the cybernetic-attention cluster has been arguing: environmental design is now producing, at population scale, the cognitive impairments previously confined to diagnosed neurodivergent populations.

The neurotypical cognitive profile was already an industrial artefact — now it is being eroded too

Our recent article on neurodiversity in the workplace argued that the modern workplace was designed around a cognitive profile — punctuality, sustained linear attention, predictable productivity rhythms, hierarchical role compliance, etc — that itself emerged from industrial-era selection pressure rather than representing a genuine, stable, human baseline. Neurotypicality, in that frame, is what survived industrial workplace selection. It is not what was originally there. It is the cognitive shape that proved compatible with factory time, clock discipline, and routinised attention demands across roughly 150 years.

“In this matter there is little choice today: anything out of the ordinary can only be pathological, for that abstraction, ‘statistical average’, counts as the ultimate truth, and not reality. All feeling for value is repressed in the interests of a narrow intellect and biased reason.” — C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Volume 10: Civilization in Transition, p.642

The Alsuwaylim review documents what happens when that industrial-era cognitive profile encounters the post-industrial digital environment. The capacities the industrial workplace selected for — sustained attention, working memory under linear task demands, executive regulation — are precisely the capacities that contemporary digital environments now systematically erode. The neurotypical profile that was shaped by one regime of environmental selection is being unshaped by the next. This is not a return to some prior cognitive state. It is a transition into something new. The general population is not becoming less industrially-adapted in some neutral direction. It is becoming adapted to a different environment with different demands and different costs — one that fragments attention by design, structures cognition around notification-driven interrupt cycles, and rewards rapid task-switching while taxing the underlying neural substrate that makes task-switching possible. The cognitive profile produced by sustained exposure to this environment is one that shows the neural and behavioural signature documented in the review: working memory degradation, fronto-parietal inefficiency, hippocampal encoding disruption, elevated DMN activity. The same signature that, when present from childhood, has historically been called ADHD.

The diagnostic vocabulary has not caught up with the environmental shift. The clinical frame still treats ADHD as architecture-and-genetics, occurring in a minority population, against a stable neurotypical baseline. But the baseline is moving. The workplace, the platform, the always-on communication norm, the notification architecture — all are reshaping the cognitive substrate they were originally designed around. The same digital environments that my workplace writings identified as failing to accommodate neurodivergent employees are now failing the neurotypical employees too. The accommodation question, framed as an issue for the diagnosed minority, has been overtaken by an environmental-design question that affects everyone.

What this means for my body of psychological and philosophical articulations is that the boundary I’ve been working to soften — between the constructs of “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent,” between the architecturally distinct minority and the environmentally compromised majority — is being softened in parallel by the environments themselves. The argument no longer rests solely on the moral case that neurodivergent presentation should be respected rather than pathologised. It rests, increasingly, on the empirical case that environmental design is producing the same neurodivergent signature across populations that were previously considered separate.

What it means when the boundary between “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” stops holding

The clinical and educational systems that currently sort people into “ADHD” and “neurotypical” are operating with a categorical distinction that, at the neural-substrate level, no longer cleanly tracks. Some people carry the architecture from birth. Others are acquiring the functional equivalent through sustained environmental exposure. Both populations show the same neural pattern, both experience the same cognitive costs, and both are increasingly unable to function in environments that demand the cognitive profile their substrate cannot easily produce.

This has several immediate consequences worth naming. Clinical ADHD diagnosis rates will continue rising — not because diagnostic standards have loosened, but because the underlying cognitive presentation is genuinely becoming more common across the population as digital environments do their work. Workplace adjustment frameworks designed around the assumption that neurodivergent employees are a minority will become unworkable as the proportion of employees presenting with these cognitive patterns continues to climb. Educational approaches premised on a baseline of sustained attention and intact working memory in the “typical” student will produce diminishing learning outcomes as that baseline erodes. Public health framings that locate the problem in individual screen-use habits will continue to miss the structural design that makes those habits the path of least resistance for everyone.

The Directory’s editorial position across this cluster has been that environmental design is the variable, not individual cognitive variation. The Alsuwaylim review provides the empirical scaffolding for taking that position more strongly than before. The digital environment is not merely failing to accommodate neurodivergent workers, learners, and citizens. It is actively producing, at population scale, the neural and cognitive signature that the diagnostic system labels neurodivergent when it appears in individuals from birth. The system is generating, through environmental design, the very population it then pathologises and proposes to remediate through adjustments. This is the structural pattern I’ve been working to render visible across my neurodiversity platforms, and what the review documents is its most empirically grounded form to date.

The methodological care of the review is real. The exclusion criterion was reasonable. The blind spot the exclusion produces is not the authors’ failure. It is the field’s. The clinical and cognitive-science literatures on digital multitasking, attention, and ADHD have spent two decades developing in parallel without sufficient cross-citation to notice that they are increasingly describing the same neural pattern in different populations. The convergence is now too clear to keep missing. What follows from naming it is a different research programme — and a different politics of attention aka Attensity! — than the ones currently in play.

Citations

Alsuwaylim, A. M., Alshehri, O. A., Alzahrani, S. Y., Alsubaie, F. B. S. M., Ali, M. O., & Yacoub, S. A. (2026) — The effects of digital multi-tasking and task switching on working memory: A systematic review