People with ADHD may have an underappreciated advantage: Hypercuriosity

Anne-Laure Le Cunff was something of a wild child. As a teenager, she repeatedly disabled the school fire alarm to sneak smoke breaks and helped launch a magazine filled with her teachers’ fictional love lives. Later, as a young adult studying neuroscience, Le Cunff would spend hours researching complex topics but struggled to complete simple administrative tasks. And she often obsessed over random projects before abruptly abandoning them.    

Then, three years ago, a colleague asked Le Cunff if she might have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a condition marked by distractibility, hyperactivity and impulsivity. Doctors confirmed her colleague’s suspicions. But fearing professional stigma, Le Cunff — by then by then a postdoctoral fellow in the ADHD Lab at King’s College London — kept her diagnosis secret until this year.

Le Cunff knew all too well about the deficits associated with ADHD. But her research — and personal experience — hinted at an underappreciated upside. “I started seeing … breadcrumbs pointing at a potential association between curiosity and ADHD,” she says.

People within the ADHD community have long recognized that the condition can be both harmful and helpful. Researchers, though, have largely focused on the harms. And those studying treatments tend to define success as a reduction in ADHD symptoms, with little regard to possible benefits.

That’s starting to change. For instance, Norwegian researchers asked 50 individuals with ADHD to describe their positive experiences with the disorder as part of an effort to develop more holistic treatments. People cited their creativity, energy, adaptability, resilience and curiosity, researchers reported in BMJ Open in October 2023.

“What really struck us was … people talking about how navigating the challenges of ADHD had actually made them more empathetic, more accepting of others [and] better at handling adversity,” says Astri Lundervold, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway.

As Le Cunff dug deeper, she began to suspect that the pros and cons of ADHD might share a neurological link. She was particularly drawn to a 2020 paper in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences suggesting that impulsivity and curiosity light up similar reward pathways in the brain. Maybe for some people, Columbia University cognitive neuroscientist Caroline Marvin and her team theorized, curiosity is an urgent need to glean information right away. Le Cunff began to wonder if that curiosity-impulsivity link — what she coined “hypercuriosity” — might be dialed up in people with ADHD.

If correct, the hypercuriosity hypothesis of ADHD could have implications for the estimated 130 million children and 220 million adults worldwide who have been diagnosed with the condition, especially in terms of education, researchers say. Consider the child who is always getting out of their seat in class or talking through lessons. Dampening such impulsive behavior so that the child can focus and succeed makes intuitive sense. But what if dampening the child’s impulsivity also dampens curiosity?

An evolutionary mismatch

A link between impulsivity and curiosity makes intuitive sense to Le Cunff. Like some others in the field, she suspects traits associated with ADHD might have been advantageous in ancestral, typically nomadic, environments. Humans evolved in a world marked by resource scarcity and unpredictability. Having people impulsive — and curious — enough to explore unknown or dangerous situations  would have helped their group’s survival, Le Cunff suggested in August 2024 in Evolutionary Psychological Science.

“You don’t want everybody to be roaming everywhere all the time because people would die. But you do need some people to take more risks,” Le Cunff says.

And considerable research suggests that the nomadic lifestyle benefited those with ADHD. In an online foraging game, for instance, scientists first screened participants for ADHD and then tasked them with gathering as many berries as possible across several patches. Participants could stay at a single patch for as long as they wanted. But they had to decide — stay at a patch as berries decreased and pace of gathering slowed or give up time picking berries while traveling to a new, more plentiful patch.

Participants who screened positive for ADHD — almost half the sample — were typically quicker to leave patches, even as travel times to the next patch increased, the team reported in February 2024 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That risky strategy paid off as those individuals collected more berries on average than those who screened negative for ADHD.

Modern environments, though, are rich in resources and information and often sedentary. So a person prone to jumping headfirst into the unknown today may appear impulsive or even reckless, rather than curious.

Think of it this way, says cognitive scientist Francesco Poli of the University of Cambridge. “We didn’t evolve in an environment with so much sugar, and now it’s so easily available. We just eat it all the time,” he says. Similarly, “we didn’t evolve in an environment with so much information, and now there is so much available. We just consume information all the time.”

Satiating curiosity as ‘busybodies’ and ‘hunters’

How people balance curiosity with information overload has thus emerged as a rapidly growing area of inquiry in the social sciences. And hints are emerging to support Le Cunff’s proposal that finding this elusive balance in contemporary times might be particularly challenging for those with ADHD.

In one foundational study, researchers asked 149 participants to explore Wikipedia entries for 15 minutes a day for 21 days. People could start with any topic and follow their search anywhere. The researchers then looked through participants browsing histories and quantified the similarity between search terms on a scale from 0 for the most dissimilar to 1 for the most similar. For instance, “Marie Curie” and “Pierre Curie” had a similarity value of 0.8 while “wisdom tooth” and “human vestigiality” had a value of just 0.2.

Information seekers known as “hunters” were like hounds, pursuing topics as deep down the foxhole as needed, the team reported in March 2021 in Nature Human Behaviour. Their search scores stayed closer to 1, and they often returned to the initial inquiry page to stay on track. Busybodies, by contrast, flitted from topic to topic, never dwelling too long in any one place.

When seeking information, people with ADHD typically resemble busybodies, epistemologist Asbjørn Steglich-Peterson and philosopher of science Somogy Varga theorized this year in Philosophical Psychology. But that singular label is too simplistic, says the duo from the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Many people with ADHD are also prone to hyperfocusing. What might appear as random flitting about is, instead, a quest for a topic of interest. Once they identify a topic, such individuals become more like hunters.

Sometimes falling down the rabbit hole can yield nothing but lost hours; other times, people can arrive somewhere wholly unexpected. Le Cunff says her own academic journey has adhered to this pattern. “I was following breadcrumbs across different fields until I found this intersection that I couldn’t stop thinking about.”

How does curiosity work in the brain?

Why Le Cunff’s brain wanted to bounce around until it hit on the idea of hypercuriosity is unclear, partly because scientists aren’t exactly sure how curiosity operates in the brain, whether neurotypical or neurodiverse. Evidence suggests, though, that satiating curiosity activates the brain’s reward circuits in much the same way as satiating hunger.

In one recent study, hungry lab participants scrolled through pictures of foods, such as fruits, sausage rolls and chocolate. Researchers also piqued participants’ curiosity, for instance by showing them videos of magic tricks. Participants then received their odds of “winning” a depicted food or magic trick solution or losing and receiving an electric shock. Based on those odds, the participants chose whether or not to take the gamble.

Participants’ desire to satisfy their hunger or curiosity waned as their odds of receiving an electric shock increased — to a point. That is, they accepted some risk of a shock for knowledge or food. Similarly, fMRI brain scans showed people’s ventral and dorsal striatums lit up while mulling the gamble, the researchers reported in May 2020 in Nature Human Behaviour. Those brain areas are involved in processing reward cues.

“Our brains do seem to respond in similar ways when we’re anticipating receiving information that we really want or when we are anticipating receiving chocolate,” says Caroline Marvin, who was not involved in that research.

Hypercuriosity in the classroom

If people with ADHD anticipate that delicious information more than others, that could help explain their difficulties in modern schools and workplaces, say Le Cunff and others. In those sedentary, often quiet spaces, hypercurious students might disrupt the classroom, and hypercurious workers might produce less than their colleagues. Particularly in the Western world, the tendency has been to rein in such individuals, whether through behavioral modification or medication, researchers say. 

But dampening impulsivity risks dampening curiosity and all its associated benefits, including improved learning, information retention and well-being, Marvin says. And that could have ramifications beyond the individual.

The hypercurious employee, for example, maybe “won’t get great scorecards,” Steglich-Peterson says. But that person’s tendency to tie together wacky, disparate ideas may well expand their team’s universe of ideas.

For Le Cunff, it was the offhand references to curiosity in the ADHD literature that got her to her larger theory of hypercuriosity as a potential hallmark of the condition. Now, with a $220,000 grant from UK Research and Innovation, she’s putting that idea to the test.

Through interviews, eye-tracking and measuring electrical activity in the brain, she hopes to challenge the deficits-based narrative around ADHD by exploring how curiosity operates in university students with the condition. Eventually, she wants to create practical strategies for how educators can guide students with ADHD.

“When you look at the way people with ADHD learn, and especially if they are hypercurious, they start reading something and they’re like, ‘Ooh what is that? I want to learn about this. What is that? Does it connect to that?’ It looks a lot more like a messy mind map rather than a straight [line],” Le Cunff says. “The problem is when there’s no space for exploration.”

In moving away from a primarily deficits-based understanding of ADHD, though, clinicians and patients need to avoid swinging to too far in the other direction, Steglich-Peterson cautions.  “There’s a certain tendency to describe ADHD as [a] superpower … It’s not a superpower,” he says.

Lundervold concurs. “We are talking about a condition with high rates of accidents, substance abuse, relationship difficulties and even mortality. We can’t just positive-[think] our way past those realities,” she says. “The goal isn’t to romanticize ADHD. It’s to ensure that when we’re supporting people with this condition, we’re seeing the whole person, not just the problems.”