The hypercurious mind

ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff + BIO

Photo by Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

is a neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, UK. She is the founder of the online learning community Ness Labs and the author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (2025).

Edited byNigel Warburton

It’s Monday morning at the lab and I have a team presentation due in two hours. I open my laptop intending to tweak a figure, then notice a paper I’d bookmarked. That paper cites another, which leads me to one of the authors’ new preprints. Soon I find myself with 27 tabs open, three half-formed ideas scribbled in my notebook, and a new app downloaded to prototype something that has nothing to do with my presentation.

I know I should stop and I can feel the time pressure building, but the pull to wander is too strong – almost physical. Just five more minutes, I promise to myself, and I’ll return my attention to the ‘real’ work. Only when my anxiety becomes impossible to ignore do I force myself to come back to the slides.

This little dance isn’t unusual for me and the millions of other people who can spend hours in deep, almost joyful focus when a question grabs our attention, but who can also derail ourselves completely when we hear about a shiny new idea. For a long time, I thought this was a personal failure of discipline, a quirk I needed to manage better. It’s only when I started working at the ADHD Research Lab at King’s College London that I came to believe it might be something else entirely.

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist using behavioural experiments, eye-tracking and EEG to examine how attention is drawn toward some signals and away from others. In retrospect, the irony isn’t lost on me that I spent years studying attention without applying the same analytic lens to myself. To understand why I’d dismissed my own experience for so long, it helps to look at how ADHD is officially defined. ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is characterised in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) as ‘a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development.’ The emphasis is on impairment: something is not working as it should.

Yet the day-to-day reality of people with ADHD is more complex than the clinical definition suggests. It’s a highly heterogeneous condition, expressed along multiple dimensions of severity and sensitivity. Most who meet the criteria aren’t impaired all the time, or in all settings, but tend to find certain environments particularly demanding, such as those that allow limited autonomy or require sustained attention to predetermined tasks while punishing nonlinear exploration. Place the same person in a context with novelty, urgency, real stakes or exciting uncertainty, and the very same tendencies – normally labelled as ‘inattention’ or ‘impulsivity’ – can support intense focus, fast pattern-recognition, high energy and creative problem-solving.

For instance, I struggle to sustain attention on work that offers little room for discovery, such as sitting through long planning meetings or working my way through necessary but repetitive tasks. In contrast, when I’m designing a new experiment – thinking through how to test a hypothesis, anticipating what participants might do, and adjusting the task to capture those decisions – my attention can lock in for hours, sometimes to the point where I forget to eat.

The diagnosis may capture predispositions, but whether those predispositions become impairing or empowering seems to depend heavily on context. This tension between diagnostic criteria and lived experience raises a question that is central to my research: how can the same attentional patterns be associated with both functional impairment and high performance depending on the environment?

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One reason this question has been so hard to answer is that researchers in neuroscience and psychology haven’t converged on a single explanatory ‘core’ of ADHD – most likely because ADHD traits aren’t reducible to any single underlying mechanism. Over the past decades, different candidates have taken turns as the leading account. Some theories emphasise delay aversion: the idea that people with ADHD are especially motivated to avoid waiting, making delayed rewards unusually costly. Others focus on executive dysfunction, framing ADHD as a failure of top-down control, inhibition or working memory. Still others point to reward-processing differences, particularly altered dopamine signalling, which may make routine tasks less motivating while increasing the appeal of immediate or uncertain rewards.

Each of these accounts captures something real, but none fully explains the striking context-sensitivity of ADHD – how the same person can appear distractible in one situation and exceptionally focused in another, or how I myself kept burning out in a structured corporate setting but now thrive in a flexible research one. Importantly, many of these theories centre on the factors that constrain attentional control rather than on the forces that actively shape where attention goes – on the symptoms, not the source. They leave largely unaddressed the deeper questions of why attention might be biased toward novelty and uncertainty in some individuals in the first place, and why such tendencies have persisted across human history.

Studies suggest that people with ADHD differ in how their brains respond to novelty and feedback during learning

What if we’ve been looking at this backwards? What if the question isn’t what constrains attention, but what captures it? In many people with ADHD, signals linked to curiosity – such as novelty, uncertainty, prediction error, informational reward – carry higher motivational weight. In plain terms, some cues feel disproportionately worth following. From this perspective, what looks like distractibility can be understood as rapid, stimulus-driven reallocation of attention toward whatever promises the greatest payoff. The delay aversion, the executive struggles, the altered reward-processing – they can all be seen as downstream expressions of a brain that has fundamentally different priorities about what deserves attention, priorities that may have served early human societies in certain environments long before modern medicine defined them as a disorder.

Multiple lines of evidence are consistent with the hypothesis that informational reward has an outsized pull on attention in many people with ADHD. Neuroimaging studies suggest that people with ADHD differ in how their brains respond to novelty and to feedback during learning. In tasks that contrast novel with familiar stimuli, individuals with ADHD show altered activation and reduced habituation in attention- and reward-related circuits, suggesting heightened sensitivity to new information. Separately, studies of probabilistic reward-learning find atypical neural responses to feedback in striatal and medial frontal regions, consistent with differences in how outcomes are learned from over time.

The same heightened sensitivity to informational value appears behaviourally in paradigms designed to measure exploration. In multi-armed bandit tasks, in which participants must choose between several options carrying uncertain rewards, adults with ADHD make more exploratory choices than controls. And in virtual foraging tasks, individuals high in ADHD-associated traits tend to leave depleting patches sooner and sample alternatives more readily – behaviour that can look like premature switching in tightly controlled environments, but can be advantageous when environments are variable. What this suggests is that, for some people, information itself carries the urgent pull of a reward. The question ‘What might I discover next?’ isn’t just interesting – it’s compelling in the way that food is to someone hungry.

This attentional profile is what I call ‘hypercuriosity’, an impulsive motivational drive toward novel, uncertain or unresolved information that may be especially prominent in certain individuals with ADHD – though it likely exists as a broader dimension across the population – and that can override other priorities, even when doing so conflicts with longer-term goals or external demands.

Hypercuriosity offers a useful lens for understanding many puzzling aspects of ADHD. It explains why attention shifts so readily in low-stakes, repetitive contexts, yet locks in place when a problem is urgent or rich with unknowns. It also helps many familiar features of ADHD fall into place. Rapid changes of focus reflect sensitivity to what feels promising in the moment. Distractibility reflects the presence of several competing leads, where attention is consistently drawn toward the most motivationally salient stimuli – whatever offers the greatest expected informational reward, whether that’s a new idea, an intriguing problem or an exciting possibility. And it might help explain more than is obvious at first glance. People often lose track of time when their attention locks on to something that feels immediately rewarding or mentally stimulating. The difficulty with boring conversations isn’t just about attention but about the painful absence of anything new to learn. Even racing thoughts at bedtime can reflect a mind that keeps generating new possibilities to explore, unable to stop asking ‘What if?’ or ‘What about?’ Taken together, these experiences point to hypercuriosity as a potential key driver of where attention goes and how long it stays there.

Many of these experiences have already been documented, but treated as separate traits rather than parts of a single attentional profile. Researchers have long studied novelty-seeking, sensation-seeking and exploration bias as individual traits in ADHD. For example, people with ADHD tend to score higher on measures of novelty-seeking, show greater exploratory choice in sequential decision-making tasks, and persist longer in sampling unfamiliar options even when those options carry lower expected reward. Hypercuriosity draws on all of these, but it’s more than just another label for the same phenomena. Where novelty-seeking focuses on preference for new experiences and sensation-seeking emphasises intense stimulation, hypercuriosity specifically highlights the informational dimension: the drive to acquire knowledge. It connects exploratory decision-making (the tendency to sample new options) with intrinsic motivation (the pull of learning for its own sake) and explains why both might show up together in the same individuals. It explains not just what people seek, but how their attention gets captured and why it’s so hard to disengage.

For instance, someone high in novelty-seeking might choose to try a new restaurant, but a hypercurious person might find themselves unable to stop researching the chef’s background, the history of the cuisine, and all the cooking techniques they’d never heard of, then forgetting to actually book the restaurant. The key distinction is intensity and compulsiveness: hypercuriosity involves an irresistible pull toward new information that can override plans, priorities and other practical considerations.

In certain environments, a curiosity-driven mode of engagement with the world may have been favoured rather than selected against

Hypercuriosity helps explain why the same person who seeks out interesting problems to explore can also feel trapped by their own curiosity, following threads that pull them away from what they intended to do. However, in settings rich in novelty, uncertainty or immediate feedback, the tendency to shift focus can become an asset. Moving quickly between cues allows hypercurious people to spot patterns, follow hunches, and adjust their thinking as new information emerges. So the issue is not a general deficit in attention, but a mismatch between how attention is regulated and what different environments ask of it. What reads as distraction in one context can support flexible, nonlinear thinking in another, making it easier to notice weak signals, emerging patterns or alternative lines of enquiry.

That a small subset of the population would be hypercurious makes sense when considered against the environments in which human attention evolved. For most of our history, resources were patchy, risks were unpredictable, and information was both scarce and consequential. In such settings, sensitivity to novelty and uncertainty would not have been a liability, but a survival advantage. Groups likely benefited from a diversity of attentional strategies: stewards focused on exploiting known resources efficiently, while scouts were more inclined to explore, notice anomalies, and take risks. What we diagnose today as distractibility or impulsivity may once have reflected the role of the scouts: monitoring the edges of the known world for new opportunities or emerging threats.

Genetic evidence points in the same direction. Some variants linked to dopamine receptors have been tentatively associated with novelty-seeking and ADHD-related traits and appear more frequently in historically nomadic populations than in sedentary ones. This doesn’t indicate a specific gene for ADHD, nor does it imply genetic determinism, but it does hint that, in certain environments, a restless, curiosity-driven mode of engagement with the world may have been favoured rather than selected against. High scanning behaviour may have supported threat detection; novelty-seeking may have facilitated the discovery of new resources or territories; and a willingness to abandon a depleting resource patch early, which might look impulsive in the laboratory, may have proven adaptive in the wild. If so, hypercuriosity could be pictured as a kind of distributed ‘research and development’ function: potentially costly and inefficient, sometimes extremely valuable.

At the neural level, part of the explanation for this attentional style may lie in the fact that curiosity, impulsivity and attention are not separate systems in the brain. They draw on overlapping reward and motivation circuits, particularly those involving dopamine. When something promises new information, these circuits signal value and pull attention toward exploration. Hypercuriosity, in this sense, might reflect a stronger weighting of these informational rewards – an increased tendency to pursue what might be learned next, even when doing so can conflict with other goals.

None of this makes hypercuriosity a ‘superpower’, a framing I find misleading and unhelpful. The same traits that can support creativity, insight and rapid learning also carry real costs. Curiosity can slide into distraction. A drive to explore can become counterproductive when what’s required is repetition, or just rest. Novelty-seeking can increase vulnerability to risk-taking and difficulty disengaging from immediately rewarding activities. Sensitivity to change can make it difficult to tune out noise, interruptions and competing demands. And the same drive that can fuel discovery can also fuel impulsive decisions, patterns of starting projects without finishing them, and financial instability. All of these challenges can impact daily functioning, wellbeing and mental health. Without appropriate outlets or support, hypercuriosity can become a source of ongoing struggle.

However, the difficulty mostly lies in the environments in which hypercurious people have to operate. Human attention did not evolve in an environment saturated with infinite information and algorithmically optimised distraction. For most of our history, novelty was relatively rare and often meaningful; today, exposure to novelty is constant and difficult to escape. The same mechanisms that once guided potentially rewarding exploration are now mercilessly captured by feeds and notifications. The result is a growing mismatch between a hypercurious attentional style and our modern environment.

Schools and workplaces often amplify this mismatch. Many educational systems reward adhering to linear instructions. Many work environments value predictable output over exploratory thinking, except in narrowly defined ‘creative’ roles. This can be mentally taxing for people whose minds work by roaming, connecting, and revisiting ideas from unexpected angles. Burnout, anxiety and various forms of self-medication are not uncommon attempts to dampen an overactive attentional system that has few appropriate outlets.

Rather than focusing on how to regulate hypercuriosity, we might ask how to design environments that work with it

The developmental trajectory of hypercuriosity helps explain why those institutional settings can be so problematic. In early childhood, exploration-heavy behaviour often looks normal – toddlers are supposed to touch everything, ask endless questions, and flit between activities. The mismatch becomes apparent when formal schooling begins and children are expected to sit still and keep pace with a predetermined curriculum. Some kids adapt, some struggle visibly and get referred for evaluation and medication, and others learn to mask their restless need for discovery while internally feeling increasingly misaligned. By adulthood, those who thrive have often found ways to construct niches that work with their attention rather than against it – careers in research, creative fields, entrepreneurship or other domains that reward curiosity, adaptation and nonlinear thinking. This creates survivorship bias, where the people whose stories get told – including my own – are those who eventually found environments that matched their attentional style. For every adult who became a successful researcher or artist, there are others whose hypercuriosity never found productive channels.

For a long time, I didn’t recognise how much my environment shaped my own experience. When I began working at the ADHD Research Lab, I had no reason to suspect I might meet diagnostic criteria myself. When a colleague casually asked: ‘Have you been diagnosed?’, the question caught me off guard. I knew the definitions, and I didn’t think they applied to me. I had degrees and a good career. By conventional measures, I was functioning. But the diagnosis helped me put language to experiences I had previously treated as unrelated. Patterns I had framed as personal shortcomings – cycles of burnout followed by new commitments, difficulty switching off at night, periods of deep immersion punctuated by disorganisation, persistent struggles with routine tasks, and attempts to manage a racing mind with alcohol and nicotine – began to make more sense when viewed as context-dependent traits rather than failures of discipline or willpower. Again, in many ways, I have been fortunate. Without fully realising it, I had built a life that worked with my hypercuriosity.

This reframing from global deficit to environmental mismatch suggests broader implications. Rather than focusing solely on how to regulate hypercuriosity, we might also ask how to design environments that work with it. What if schools created space for students to freely follow their curiosity, even when it leads away from the prescribed curriculum? What if career guidance helped people find roles that match their attentional style rather than forcing them into conventional paths? What if workplaces designed positions where hypercurious employees could excel at spotting emerging patterns, connecting disparate ideas, or navigating complex, ambiguous problems? What if technology could channel curiosity toward meaningful exploration instead of exploiting it for engagement?

Of course, hypercuriosity doesn’t explain everything about ADHD. Some people experience persistent struggles that remain even in contexts rich with novelty, or working memory difficulties that interfere even with deeply engaging tasks. This isn’t surprising given how often neurodivergent conditions and mental disorders cluster together. Many people with ADHD also meet criteria for autism, anxiety or depression, each bringing their own patterns of strengths and challenges that can interact with their attentional style in complex ways. While hypercuriosity may be a central axis, it very likely operates alongside other differences in brain function that can amplify or override its effects.

What the hypercuriosity theory of ADHD offers is a way of organising a wide range of existing findings within a single framework. Rather than treating differences in attention, impulsivity, exploration and task engagement as separate features that merely co-occur, it views them as interwoven consequences of a shared bias toward immediate informational reward. From this perspective, attention isn’t just a limited resource but a system that might be disproportionately drawn toward signals that promise learning, resolution or discovery. Whether that bias proves impairing or advantageous depends less on the individual alone than on how well their environment aligns with this specific attentional style.

The same tendencies that fragment my attention also generate unexpected connections

Lastly, none of this dismisses the reality of impairment. ADHD can be deeply disabling, and many people struggle with emotional dysregulation, addiction and chronic stress. But ‘disorder’ implies a dysfunction that persists across contexts. If symptoms substantially diminish when conditions change, or emerge primarily under specific environmental pressures, it’s worth asking where the pathology really lies. By understanding what is currently labelled as ADHD as a mismatch between attentional style and environment rather than simply as dysfunction, we open up new possibilities for how we structure educational and work environments, and for how we build assessments that distinguish inability to sustain attention from a strong bias toward novelty and exploration.

Curiosity has always shaped how humans learn, adapt and grow. The impulse to seek, which once led explorers across uncharted territories and now leads to 27 browser tabs, might, in the right environment, fuel scientific discovery or technological breakthrough. As I close my laptop after finally finishing those slides – two hours late but with insights I couldn’t have discovered without the unplanned detour – I’m reminded that the same tendencies that fragment my attention also generate unexpected connections, and that much of the difference between distraction and productive exploration depends on context.

This isn’t about rebranding ADHD as a gift or denying its real costs. Rather, the question is whether we’re ready to find out what hypercurious minds can achieve when they’re not spending all their energy trying to sit still and think straight. What would happen if we stopped trying to fix them and started building environments that actually supported them?

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