Anne-Laure Le Cunff was one thing of a wild youngster. As a youngster, she repeatedly disabled the college fireplace alarm to sneak smoke breaks and helped launch {a magazine} crammed together with her academics’ fictional love lives. Later, as a younger grownup learning neuroscience, Le Cunff would spend hours researching advanced matters however struggled to finish easy administrative duties. And he or she usually obsessed over random tasks earlier than abruptly abandoning them.
Then, three years in the past, a colleague requested Le Cunff if she might need attention-deficit/hyperactivity dysfunction, or ADHD, a situation marked by distractibility, hyperactivity and impulsivity. Medical doctors confirmed her colleague’s suspicions. However fearing skilled stigma, Le Cunff — by then by then a postdoctoral fellow within the ADHD Lab at King’s School London — stored her analysis secret till this yr.
Le Cunff knew all too nicely in regards to the deficits related to ADHD. However her analysis — and private expertise — hinted at an underappreciated upside. “I began seeing … breadcrumbs pointing at a possible affiliation between curiosity and ADHD,” she says.
Individuals inside the ADHD neighborhood have lengthy acknowledged that the situation might be each dangerous and useful. Researchers, although, have largely centered on the harms. And people learning remedies are likely to outline success as a discount in ADHD signs, with little regard to attainable advantages.
That’s beginning to change. As an illustration, Norwegian researchers requested 50 people with ADHD to explain their optimistic experiences with the dysfunction as a part of an effort to develop extra holistic remedies. Individuals cited their creativity, power, adaptability, resilience and curiosity, researchers reported in BMJ Open in October 2023.
“What actually struck us was … individuals speaking about how navigating the challenges of ADHD had truly made them extra empathetic, extra accepting of others [and] higher at dealing with adversity,” says Astri Lundervold, a medical neuropsychologist on the College of Bergen in Norway.
As Le Cunff dug deeper, she started to suspect that the professionals and cons of ADHD may share a neurological hyperlink. She was notably drawn to a 2020 paper in Present Opinion in Behavioral Sciences suggesting that impulsivity and curiosity gentle up related reward pathways within the mind. Possibly for some individuals, Columbia College cognitive neuroscientist Caroline Marvin and her crew theorized, curiosity is an pressing have to glean data instantly. Le Cunff started to surprise if that curiosity-impulsivity hyperlink — what she coined “hypercuriosity” — could be dialed up in individuals with ADHD.
If appropriate, the hypercuriosity speculation of ADHD may have implications for the estimated 130 million youngsters and 220 million adults worldwide who’ve been recognized with the situation, particularly by way of training, researchers say. Take into account the kid who’s all the time getting out of their seat in school or speaking by classes. Dampening such impulsive habits in order that the kid can focus and succeed makes intuitive sense. However what if dampening the kid’s impulsivity additionally dampens curiosity?
An evolutionary mismatch
A hyperlink between impulsivity and curiosity makes intuitive sense to Le Cunff. Like some others within the area, she suspects traits related to ADHD might need been advantageous in ancestral, sometimes nomadic, environments. People developed in a world marked by useful resource shortage and unpredictability. Having individuals impulsive — and curious — sufficient to discover unknown or harmful conditions would have helped their group’s survival, Le Cunff instructed in August 2024 in Evolutionary Psychological Science.
“You don’t need all people to be roaming all over the place on a regular basis as a result of individuals would die. However you do want some individuals to take extra dangers,” Le Cunff says.
And appreciable analysis means that the nomadic life-style benefited these with ADHD. In an internet foraging recreation, as an illustration, scientists first screened contributors for ADHD after which tasked them with gathering as many berries as attainable throughout a number of patches. Individuals may keep at a single patch for so long as they needed. However they needed to determine — keep at a patch as berries decreased and tempo of gathering slowed or surrender time choosing berries whereas touring to a brand new, extra plentiful patch.
Individuals who screened optimistic for ADHD — virtually half the pattern — have been sometimes faster to depart patches, whilst journey instances to the following patch elevated, the crew reported in February 2024 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That dangerous technique paid off as these people collected extra berries on common than those that screened unfavourable for ADHD.
Fashionable environments, although, are wealthy in assets and knowledge and sometimes sedentary. So an individual susceptible to leaping headfirst into the unknown right this moment might seem impulsive and even reckless, quite than curious.
Consider it this manner, says cognitive scientist Francesco Poli of the College of Cambridge. “We didn’t evolve in an atmosphere with a lot sugar, and now it’s so simply out there. We simply eat it on a regular basis,” he says. Equally, “we didn’t evolve in an atmosphere with a lot data, and now there’s a lot out there. We simply eat data on a regular basis.”
Satiating curiosity as ‘busybodies’ and ‘hunters’
How individuals stability curiosity with data overload has thus emerged as a quickly rising space of inquiry within the social sciences. And hints are rising to assist Le Cunff’s proposal that discovering this elusive stability in up to date instances could be notably difficult for these with ADHD.
In a single foundational research, researchers requested 149 contributors to discover Wikipedia entries for quarter-hour a day for 21 days. Individuals may begin with any subject and observe their search wherever. The researchers then appeared by contributors searching histories and quantified the similarity between search phrases on a scale from 0 for essentially the most dissimilar to 1 for essentially the most related. As an illustration, “Marie Curie” and “Pierre Curie” had a similarity worth of 0.8 whereas “knowledge tooth” and “human vestigiality” had a price of simply 0.2.
Data seekers generally known as “hunters” have been like hounds, pursuing matters as deep down the foxhole as wanted, the crew reported in March 2021 in Nature Human Behaviour. Their search scores stayed nearer to 1, they usually usually returned to the preliminary inquiry web page to remain on observe. Busybodies, in contrast, flitted from subject to subject, by no means dwelling too lengthy in anyone place.
When in search of data, individuals with ADHD sometimes resemble busybodies, epistemologist Asbjørn Steglich-Peterson and thinker of science Somogy Varga theorized this yr in Philosophical Psychology. However that singular label is too simplistic, says the duo from the College of Aarhus in Denmark. Many individuals with ADHD are additionally susceptible to hyperfocusing. What may seem as random flitting about is, as a substitute, a quest for a subject of curiosity. As soon as they determine a subject, such people develop into extra like hunters.
Typically falling down the rabbit gap can yield nothing however misplaced hours; different instances, individuals can arrive someplace wholly sudden. Le Cunff says her personal educational journey has adhered to this sample. “I used to be following breadcrumbs throughout completely different fields till I discovered this intersection that I couldn’t cease desirous about.”
How does curiosity work within the mind?
Why Le Cunff’s mind needed to bounce round till it hit on the concept of hypercuriosity is unclear, partly as a result of scientists aren’t precisely positive how curiosity operates within the mind, whether or not neurotypical or neurodiverse. Proof suggests, although, that satiating curiosity prompts the mind’s reward circuits in a lot the identical approach as satiating starvation.
In a single current research, hungry lab contributors scrolled by photos of meals, comparable to fruits, sausage rolls and chocolate. Researchers additionally piqued contributors’ curiosity, as an illustration by exhibiting them movies of magic methods. Individuals then acquired their odds of “profitable” a depicted meals or magic trick answer or dropping and receiving an electrical shock. Based mostly on these odds, the contributors selected whether or not or to not take the gamble.
Individuals’ need to fulfill their starvation or curiosity waned as their odds of receiving an electrical shock elevated — to a degree. That’s, they accepted some threat of a shock for data or meals. Equally, fMRI mind scans confirmed individuals’s ventral and dorsal striatums lit up whereas mulling the gamble, the researchers reported in Could 2020 in Nature Human Behaviour. These mind areas are concerned in processing reward cues.
“Our brains do appear to reply in related methods after we’re anticipating receiving data that we actually need or after we are anticipating receiving chocolate,” says Caroline Marvin, who was not concerned in that analysis.
Hypercuriosity within the classroom
If individuals with ADHD anticipate that scrumptious data greater than others, that would assist clarify their difficulties in fashionable faculties and workplaces, say Le Cunff and others. In these sedentary, usually quiet areas, hypercurious college students may disrupt the classroom, and hypercurious employees may produce lower than their colleagues. Significantly within the Western world, the tendency has been to rein in such people, whether or not by behavioral modification or treatment, researchers say.
However dampening impulsivity dangers dampening curiosity and all its related advantages, together with improved studying, data retention and well-being, Marvin says. And that would have ramifications past the person.
The hypercurious worker, for instance, perhaps “gained’t get nice scorecards,” Steglich-Peterson says. However that individual’s tendency to tie collectively wacky, disparate concepts might nicely develop their crew’s universe of concepts.
For Le Cunff, it was the offhand references to curiosity within the ADHD literature that acquired her to her bigger idea of hypercuriosity as a possible hallmark of the situation. Now, with a $220,000 grant from UK Analysis and Innovation, she’s placing that concept to the take a look at.
By way of interviews, eye-tracking and measuring electrical exercise within the mind, she hopes to problem the deficits-based narrative round ADHD by exploring how curiosity operates in college college students with the situation. Finally, she desires to create sensible methods for the way educators can information college students with ADHD.
“If you have a look at the best way individuals with ADHD be taught, and particularly if they’re hypercurious, they begin studying one thing they usually’re like, ‘Ooh what’s that? I need to find out about this. What’s that? Does it hook up with that?’ It seems much more like a messy thoughts map quite than a straight [line],” Le Cunff says. “The issue is when there’s no area for exploration.”
In transferring away from a primarily deficits-based understanding of ADHD, although, clinicians and sufferers have to keep away from swinging to too far within the different route, Steglich-Peterson cautions. “There’s a sure tendency to explain ADHD as [a] superpower … It’s not a superpower,” he says.
Lundervold concurs. “We’re speaking a couple of situation with excessive charges of accidents, substance abuse, relationship difficulties and even mortality. We will’t simply positive-[think] our well past these realities,” she says. “The aim isn’t to romanticize ADHD. It’s to make sure that after we’re supporting individuals with this situation, we’re seeing the entire individual, not simply the issues.”
