ADHD

I feel, for me at least, it's more than just curiosity. Bottom up thinking makes you obsessively want to learn the deeper truth so you can build more generalized knowledge. For example, a neurotical student learning the Pythagorean theorem would simply memorize the formula which is easy and straightforward. Maybe if they're curious enough they'd try to understand why it works. But for a bottom up thinker, memorizing the formula as a floating piece of knowledge is difficult. So they need to have a deeper understanding of the underlying principles in order to "ground" that knowledge.

My pet theory is that people with ADHD have to rely more on bottom up thinking to compensate for their weaker working memory. Having a deeper understanding of a subject makes things easier to remember and reason about. Kind of like how it's easier to remember a phone number if you look for patterns within it. This "hypercuriosity" is an advantage in the same sense as wheelchair users have the advantage of having stronger arms.

My curiosity absolutely does not disappear when I'm medicated! I'd rather say that it gets refined and sharpened such that I can better filter out noisey ideas that irrelevant and focus on my curiosity and creativity such that I can actually execute on the ideas I have.

Alas, I have the 'nothing at all gives me dopamine' ADHD. I thought it was just depression for years, but turns out it was ADHD. I struggle to see any benefits that come from my condition.

“And she often obsessed over random projects before abruptly abandoning them.”

Preach.

I mean it's a "water is wet" kind of "discovery" for anyone who has or understands ADHD, but it's nice to see it spelled out in an accessible way for laymen. Many types of neurodivergence have advantages, it's just that those advantages are not as impactful as the disadvantages because they the disadvantages break societal norms. Just like a person in a wheelchair breaks the societal norm of stairs. Unless accommodations are made, they disabled person is unable to participate in society and thus they are unable to use or sometimes even show their advantages.

You know the saying: Hypercuriosity hyperkilled the hypercat.

I think most people who have it figure this out pretty quickly. NT normies feel like they accept the world completely at face value by comparison and it can cause a lot of friction

Duh.
You think a behavior that was handled in humanity for thousands of years would be fully disadvantageous or perhaps just we are letting our world be dominated by what a few think it should look like?
It may not fit into the current world but that is more a statement on it than us.

I'm offended by the attention deficit and the disorder part. I don't have a deficit, I have an abundance of attention, it's just not linear. I have parallel attention, not serial. In my close circle I'm the guy people often go for answers, because I often have them, albeit often somewhat superficial, because it's near impossible to go deep in any subject, unless hyperfocus kicks in.

PFFT advantage of asking too many questions and pissing off all the normals? Yup, got it.

“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.”

I cannot express to you how much this captures my experience reading. It can sometimes take days for me to get past a page when I'm constantly stopping to look up other things a passage made me think of or write down ideas and questions.

I feel this too when I play video games. I like to open every box, go through every door, listen to all the recordings etc. When I play coop with my husband it drives him a bit nuts when he wants to focus on a specific quest and I'm exploring.

“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?”

Perfectly explains my struggle with learning physics in school and it quickly becoming a hobby of mine when i stopped being medicated when i no longer went to school.

Yeah I have it, it's let me learn a lot of new things but it falters when I really want to explore those things or God forbid, get better at them

I read the article, but I don't understand how hypercuriosity is a benefit. It's more annoying than anything, because I can't do anything practical with it.

So if you ever wonder who it was that figured out you can eat something weird way back in history, sounds like it was probably someone with ADHD lol

You mean like my 256,475 hobbies?

These two share curiosity in common.