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I don’t think it explains much in a scientific sense, but with the theme of passion and obsession, I really enjoyed The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean: https://en

I don’t think it explains much in a scientific sense, but with the theme of passion and obsession, I really enjoyed The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchid_Thief https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchid_Thief And this famous quote from that book: > “The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility." Edit: before the book was the New Yorker article, if you want to “try before you buy” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/orchid-fever https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/orchid-fever

siavosh 6y ago
Thanks for the interesting reference. The drive to reduce uncertainty could certainly be a hypothesis in explaining animal curiosity and its persistence through natural selection for a population. I guess I'm more intrigued by the individual phenomena of obsession. The psychological aspects of my occasional obsessions are so vivid to me still. Years back when I got into woodworking, for example, I remember just visualizing as I fell asleep the use of hand planes and the pursuit of getting thinner and thinner shavings. Then I got into bread baking and I pursued everything I could for the ultimate oven spring, I would then start visualizing the reveal of the bread out of the oven. Then I got into mechanical watches (thankfully briefly) and couldn't stop reading about them, and relevant imagery kept popping into my head, etc etc etc. My world, priorities, value systems all just made sense in those periods which spanned months to years. Then inevitably when I moved on, I would look back and I couldn't relate or understand the obsession anymore. I'd transition from an insider to an outsider looking at it. It always surprises me how that transition, into and out of, an obsession alienates you from yourself.
- z2210558 6y ago
  This is beautiful.

siavosh 6y ago

Thanks for the interesting reference. The drive to reduce uncertainty could certainly be a hypothesis in explaining animal curiosity and its persistence through natural selection for a population. I guess I'm more intrigued by the individual phenomena of obsession. The psychological aspects of my occasional obsessions are so vivid to me still. Years back when I got into woodworking, for example, I remember just visualizing as I fell asleep the use of hand planes and the pursuit of getting thinner and thinner shavings. Then I got into bread baking and I pursued everything I could for the ultimate oven spring, I would then start visualizing the reveal of the bread out of the oven. Then I got into mechanical watches (thankfully briefly) and couldn't stop reading about them, and relevant imagery kept popping into my head, etc etc etc. My world, priorities, value systems all just made sense in those periods which spanned months to years. Then inevitably when I moved on, I would look back and I couldn't relate or understand the obsession anymore. I'd transition from an insider to an outsider looking at it. It always surprises me how that transition, into and out of, an obsession alienates you from yourself.

z2210558 6y ago
This is beautiful.