Writing Slowly

One reason I make notes and write is that I’m curious about everything.

I’ve written previously about how to be interested in everything. And I’ve also written about busybodies, hunters and dancers - three different styles of curiosity.

It was the ‘dancer’ style of curiosity that resonated most with me:

“This type of curiosity is described as a dance in which disparate concepts, typically conceived of as unrelated, are briefly linked in unique ways as the curious individual leaps and bounds across traditionally siloed areas of knowledge. Such brief linking fosters the generation or creation of new experiences, ideas, and thoughts.”

So I was interested to see that Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments and founder of Ness Labs, Has been exploring what she calls ‘hypercuriosity’, which may be associated with ADHD.

Well, I guess I’m the living proof. I set out this evening to write about my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning for Artists and Fighters but I ended up writing about something completely different instead: hypercuriosity.

Come to think of it, that’s how the book got written in the first place, by pursuing my curiosity. And come to think of it, that’s how I do practically everything.

In writing the book I was particularly attracted by the value placed on the Japanese concept of shoshin (初心), ‘beginner’s mind’ - a quality often downplayed in Western contexts, where experts are supposed to already know everything.

I’m more interested in not knowing - and then going to great lengths to find out.

Links:

Brar, G. (2024, November 14). The hypercuriosity theory of ADHD: An interview with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Evolution and Psychiatry (Substack).

Gupta, S. (2025, September 16). People with ADHD may have an underappreciated advantage: Hypercuriosity. Science News.

Le Cunff, A. (2024). Distractability and impulsivity in ADHD as an evolutionary mismatch of high trait curiosity. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 10, 282.

Le Cunff, A. (2025, July 15). When curiosity doesn’t fit the world we’ve built: How do we design a world that supports hypercurious minds? Ness Labs.

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