A Portrait of the Artist with ADD

JOURNEY #25: TO THE WANDERING MIND

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."

— James Joyce's Ulysses

Paying my respects at James Joyce's grave in Zurich

In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom spends a single day — June 16, 1904 — wandering through Dublin. His mind spends that day wandering everywhere.

Which raises the question: Did Leopold Bloom have ADD?

The term ADD wasn’t coined until 1980. Before that, people like Bloom might simply have been called distracted. Dreamers. Their minds would lock onto something interesting and follow it anywhere — to places nobody expected, least of all themselves. People with ADD lose things. They tend to drive people around them crazy. But they also notice things that few others notice.

Consider Hades, the funeral episode, where Bloom accompanies the body of his friend Paddy Dignam to Glasnevin Cemetery.

Of course, attending a funeral demands stillness. Gravity. Respect for the dead. But Bloom's mind has other ideas.

Bloom spots a rat moving among the graves and that’s all it takes. The priest is still speaking. Everyone is sombre. Yet this is what happens next inside Bloom’s head:

“An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes…One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it.”

His mind ricochets from rat to bones to meat to cheese to Chinese travellers to white men to cremation to priests. Eight moves. Five sentences. Each one abandoning the last. And his mind keeps on spinning. For pages and pages. What you've just read is a fraction of where Bloom’s mind goes before the funeral ends. 

And this is just one episode. Bloom keeps it up throughout the entire novel. Every chapter he's in. Every hour of the day. 

But Bloom isn’t everyman. He’s a very specific kind of man: a man with ADD.

Which raises the question: How did Joyce get it so right?

Italo Svevo

Joyce’s closest friend in Trieste was Italo Svevo — born Ettore Schmitz, a novelist and industrialist twenty years Joyce’s senior. Joyce taught him English at the Berlitz School. Svevo taught Joyce something more valuable: what it felt like to be a Jewish outsider in a city that tolerated you without quite accepting you. Stanislaus Joyce later recorded that Svevo once complained: “Tell me some secrets about Irishmen. Your brother has been asking so many questions about Jews that I want to get my own back.” 

When Joyce finally left Trieste to finish Ulysses in Zurich, he kept a photograph of Svevo on his desk. Nobody knows exactly why. But Svevo was the man who had shown him what it felt like to be a Jewish outsider — curious, gentle, perpetually distracted. Perhaps he needed that close.

Svevo’s own novel, Zeno’s Conscience, published the year after Ulysses, shows you exactly what Joyce was absorbing. Zeno is the narrator, a prosperous businessman from Trieste who can’t stop explaining himself, can’t stay in the present, and can’t finish a thought without starting three others. His mind moves the way Bloom’s mind moves: by association, by digression, by accident. When you read it, you understand where Bloom came from.

If you know someone with ADD and want to understand what goes on inside their head, read Ulysses and Zeno’s Conscience. They are the most accurate portraits of the ADD mind ever put on a page.  

James Joyce, AI and Behavioural Economics

JOURNEY #24: TO THE FIRST CHATBOT AND THE FIRST NUDGE

"Who ever anywhere will read these written words?"

― James Joyce's Ulysses

I came back to Ulysses recently, reading it as a behavioural scientist, and was struck by how much James Joyce got right about the world that would follow.

One chapter in particular kept pulling me back.

For a long time, the Ithaca chapter stood out as one of the strangest episodes in Ulysses, written as a catechism — composed entirely of questions and answers.

Joyce once called it the "ugly duckling" of Ulysses --unloved by many readers, yet his favourite episode. While many found the chapter dry or inhuman, Joyce found precise and mechanical. 

Today, the Ithaca chapter feels eerily familiar. Seen through a modern lens, it resembles a prolonged interaction with ChatGPT.

To see how this works, consider the opening passage of this chapter:

"What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?" 

"Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertance as far as the farther corner of Temple street..."  

The exchange continues: prompt, reply, prompt, reply, and on and on. The responses are exact, dull and free of emotion, and could easily have been generated by AI. 

Read today, Joyce nailed how we talk to machines a century later.

Joyce develops the first nudge 

In Ithaca, Joyce does more than experiment with form. He articulates a principle that behavioural economics would formalize a hundred years later: the nudge. 

It centres on the way Bloom convinces his wife, Molly, to carry an umbrella, even though she dislikes them.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte (1884)

Bloom wants her to carry one not because it’s practical, but simply because he likes the image of a woman carrying an umbrella. Molly actively resists the idea. She dislikes carrying one and has no reason to change her mind. Rather than argue with her, Bloom sets things up so that carrying the umbrella makes sense to her. By buying her a new hat on a rainy day, he gives her a reason to carry the umbrella: she doesn’t want the new hat to get wet. What looks like her decision is, in fact, the result of a carefully arranged intervention that makes the desired behaviour feel natural.

Joyce names the mechanism himself: “indirect suggestion implicating self-interest.” It's hard to imagine a cleaner early description of what behavioural economists would later call a nudge. The insight is precise and modern. Behaviour changes more easily when context is reshaped than when people are reasoned with. 

Long before behavioural economics had a language for it, Joyce had already seen it—and written it into an ordinary domestic moment.

Why People Interested in Behavioural Economics should read James Joyce

I often suggest that people interested in behavioural science read James Joyce. Not only because Ulysses is extraordinary literature, but because it shows how people actually think, choose, and act. Long before behavioural economics or nudge theory Joyce was already mapping attention, desire, habit, and influence in everyday life. For anyone working in behavioural science, Ulysses isn’t an escape from the discipline — it’s a reminder of where its deepest insights began.

Joyce's character Stephen once asked: "Who ever anywhere will read these written words"? A century later the answer includes behavioural economists studying influence, those building conversational AI, and anyone trying to understand how people actually think and choose. 

Obviously, Joyce didn’t borrow from AI or behavioural economics. Both caught up to him.