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.