“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.
Oh yes and on games I often pause them to look up some random question like which skill is the best to inherit or something. I do soo much research on games I play despite my best intentions to just be in the moment.
I think this is why certain games very much overwhelm and overstimulate me. Luckily it’s a time sink that I don’t really need to have in my life anyways, beyond random occasions when I find something that pulls me in.
I am right there with you in games. I’ve been playing Enshrouded with my partner and some friends recently, and we’ve gotten into arguments on continuing the quest, versus exploring, versus building lol
It’s very interesting to me to see how other people can just walk past something without looking into it, or, even more foreign to me, remember it, and come back later. I, personally, have to completely explore an area outright the first time, because I know I will not be interested in going back through it in the future
Love this! I can start a Wikipedia page on something to do with particle physics, and 300 pages of related topics later, I can finally recurse to the original page and… ah, got it! Cool!
“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.
Oh yes and on games I often pause them to look up some random question like which skill is the best to inherit or something. I do soo much research on games I play despite my best intentions to just be in the moment.
IME, the “story” is what happens between my deep-dives from the railing of the baked-in plot-ship. 🤣
I think this is why certain games very much overwhelm and overstimulate me. Luckily it’s a time sink that I don’t really need to have in my life anyways, beyond random occasions when I find something that pulls me in.
I am right there with you in games. I’ve been playing Enshrouded with my partner and some friends recently, and we’ve gotten into arguments on continuing the quest, versus exploring, versus building lol
It’s very interesting to me to see how other people can just walk past something without looking into it, or, even more foreign to me, remember it, and come back later. I, personally, have to completely explore an area outright the first time, because I know I will not be interested in going back through it in the future
Love this! I can start a Wikipedia page on something to do with particle physics, and 300 pages of related topics later, I can finally recurse to the original page and… ah, got it! Cool!