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........

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