I’ve started to notice for a while now that cats fit a lot of the neurodivergents traits like ASD and ADHD:
- Neophobe (they love routine and hate changes)
- Easily overstimulated
- Hate being told what to do
- Eat the same food everyday and be happy with it
- Can be lovely with close ones but very shy/anxious with strangers
- Very involved in stuff they like (playing), very lazy for stuff that doesn’t interest them
- Easily distracted
- Sleep a lot
- Can have shutdowns or meltdowns in stressful situations
Seeing all those patterns, I’m starting to think that maybe neurodivergent people’s brains have some structure which is closer to a feline brain, and that could explain some of these similar behaviors.
It’s really just some random thoughts, but it seems to match a lot and cats and humans are not that far away in the tree of evolution 🤔
Haha good point (maybe I’m a plant tho…)
I’m always trying to explain human, and living beings behaviors based on evolution, and what environmental or social pressure made a species evolve the way it did.
That’s why I’m “guessing” that that group of behaviors is probably older than when humans and cats branched out, and that maybe the human branch evolved with a different brain structure, but we still have some remnants of that.
I mean we do have the dive reflex which probably comes from when we were still ocean creatures.
That’s fair, and same when it comes to trying to explain behaviors evolutionarily (though some are definitely just random, too, since if a characteristic doesn’t actually directly cause an early death/fewer reproductive years, evolution will never affect it). Such guesses just get further from reality as they get more specific. So it would make sense and likely be accurate to say there is an evolutionary explanation for the behaviors that we demonstrate to divergent levels, but it becomes a bit more strained to say that that evolutionary explanation has to do with neurodivergent people being more closely connected to cats than neurotypical people.