Last time I wrote about curiosity, I argued that sometimes it can be less than productive, except when it comes to people. With people, complexity rules, and should always be permitted to run wild!
If you’ll excuse the indulgence, the closing words went:
“When it comes to human relationships, it pays to sustain our curiosity and suspend our judgement. It’s a valuable time to remind ourselves of just how little we know, especially when it comes to each other. We may think we understand one another, but if we can just separate our curiosity from the idea of ever actually knowing, and instead connect it with the excitement inherent in the creation of new ideas and endless possibilities, perhaps we’ll find ourselves judging less and caring more.”
That’s a nice place to continue from, since it is precisely our curiosity about others which Neuro Curiosity seeks to extend, yet instead of that new depth slowing us down, it can allow for even more powerful conversations. That’s the brief journey I want to take you on; to start by acknowledging that curiosity might seem, on the face of it, to slow things down, (and neuro curiosity all the more so) yet in slowing things down, it leads to richer and more impactful conversations for all concerned.
Though it’s not an established term, Neuro Curiosity is exactly as it states - curiosity about how we think differently. It’s the act of remaining open to the myriad ways we all think. Not our differing values, belief systems and opinions, but literally, the different ways in which we go about forming and entertaining those opinions in the first place. In essence, and for want of a better metaphor, it’s about the differences in our core operating systems. Systems we’ve both inherited biologically, and shaped through our life experiences.
Since it’s human nature to simplify, filtering out complexity so we can make sense of the world, we can’t help but go about our lives mostly believing that other people think, at a fundamental level, just like us. We look around and we typically see people with two eyes, two ears, a mouth, a body and other such physical likenesses. This, combined with our common language to define our thinking and the unconscious adoption of those words and definitions socially by osmosis, all lead us to assume that our experiences of the world are more alike than they truly are.
Things like time, colour, sound, the beating of our heart and the fundamental social norms around how we interact, are all things we believe we understand and experience similarly, enough at least that we take them for granted, filtering them out of our conscious thinking. Yet it simply isn’t so. In fact, neuroscience continues to show just how differently people’s brains respond to the same stimuli, indicative, we think, of people experiencing the world differently.
To drill home just how fundamentally different peoples’ experiences are, and to highlight some very real challenges for the neurodiverse, let’s take a look at just one of those fundamental perspective variances; time.
It can be frustrating when someone turns up late to a meeting, and without a decent excuse. It must mean they aren’t taking the purpose of that meeting seriously, right? Well, not necessarily. As human beings, how we experience and talk about time shapes us and time perception can vary hugely between individuals due to factors such as age, cognitive processes, and personal experiences. Some people may consistently perceive time as moving faster or slower than others, and that experience differs from person to person, as well as being situationally variable (that is, different depending on the situation.)
For ADHDers especially, though also widely throughout the neurodivergent population, time insensitivity represents a serious challenge and a huge variance in how we experience the world. Whilst we all have a tendency to discount rewards more heavily the longer the reward is delayed (known as ‘temporal discounting’ or ‘delay discounting’), for ADHDers this experience is amplified in the extreme. For many, it becomes a case of either ‘now’ or ‘not now’, with no ability to conceive a specific amount of time in the future or the past. Indeed, fundamentally, ADHD can be seen as ‘a disorientation in time’. ADHDers do not feel time passing in the same way. The reality that things ‘take time’ can be literally invisible to them.
Practically, this means that they will often not be able to offer quick, accurate estimates of how long something will take. It’s not that they won’t offer these estimates. It’s that they can’t! They don’t have the executive functions to enable that. Strategies to manage time insensitivity challenges can be taught and employed to some effect, but the fundamental difference in perception remains. Interestingly, that same challenge lends itself beautifully as a strength in a host of real-world situations, where ADHDers benefit from being more present, empathic and creative in the moment. Just as every strength overplayed can become a weakness or challenge, every challenge, given the right environment, can become a strength.
Being neuro curious here means noticing our own assumptions around time and softening them as much as we’re able.
When we open ourselves to the idea that time is being experienced differently, we avoid judging and consequently, shaming and shutting down someone who actually had the best of intentions, and in the right environment of non-jugement and curiosity, could have proven immensely powerful and productive in driving change.
In coaching, we’re practically drilled on the concept of remaining curious. It’s a central pillar to good coaching. Everything is data, and our minds offer a host of assumptions. Our job is to recognise them as such, always returning to a position of curiosity and noticing in the service of our client. It sounds lovely, but stated in this way, it can also obscure a tension. I’ve argued before that a life without curiosity would in essence be akin to death. Equally though, a life without assumptions would be crippling, at least in the moment. In a world where we want to be both considerate yet decisive, there’s a tension there about how much curiosity we can extend, and how much would get in the way of us making a decision and moving forward. However, and rather ironically, if we view this tension through a more lateral lens, it dissipates.
Writing articles like this, inside my ‘writing cave’, I tend toward a perspective of isolation that lends itself to worrying about how neuro curiosity might lead us to assume nothing, and thus leave us frozen. To consider that people could be perceiving time, pain and all sorts of other things differently, can leave us feeling unable to move. But I fear that’s toxic productivity speaking, itself culminating from the social norms I, and most of us have absorbed unconsciously from living in the modern world. Everything changes when we shift that curiosity from a linear model - having questions and needing answers and momentum - to something more lateral; the value of curiosity we gain relationally from interacting with others in the here and now.
When we remember that curiosity, even neuro curiosity, is mostly played out in the world interacting with other people, we’re reminded just how dynamic it is.
Curiosity is always responding to the world and the people in it. It’s not about an answer to a question, but about the impact of the exchanges that come about from the position of curiosity itself. In short, it’s how that position of curiosity makes us feel and how those feelings shift in us. There may well be a question that needs answering, but ironically, it’s by NOT desperately trying to answer it that it ends up getting answered!If there is a goal in taking a neuro curious stance, it’s one of practising neuro curiosity to create a feeling of safety in the moment, knowing that you’ll never be able to be infinitely curious about how others think - we’re simply not wired that way, and we can’t be. Rather, it’s the endeavour in the moment to create a space for people to think at their best. Where their thinking takes them, given as few assumptions as possible about how people should think, knows no bounds!
I’ve found myself in training sessions, fighting the corner for curiosity out of an almost apologetic position;
“Yes, I know it takes time to entertain these different perspectives, but trust me, it’ll be worth it in the long run.”
I still very much hold that position, but I wonder why I’ve become so apologetic? I fear I’ve spent too much time thinking on my own, rather than playing around with these ideas with others and putting that curiosity into practice! Too much time wondering what the outcome of neuro curiosity might be, rather than realising that the value occurs in the moment as we extend this kind of curiosity. We can’t dictate or predict what that value is. More pints and talks down the pub, I say! We all need to get out there and practise neuro curiosity, minus the toxic drive to conclude and get answers. And that’s the point. It’s a human practice, not a linear goal.
Remaining curious and acknowledging that the person in front of you is almost certainly experiencing the world differently from you, whilst letting go of any judgement or assumptions about how they should think or should be, leads to both them and you feeling psychologically safe in the moment. And that’s where great conversations happen and where the best kind of thinking - different thinking - flourishes. Oh, and I didn't mention all the research that correlates such curiosity with longevity of life, wisdom and happiness. If you value any or all of those (yes, that’s almost certainly rhetorical), then it’s time you got even more curious, and neuro curiosity is a powerful step in that direction.
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