What adjective could be used to describe someone whose interests meander from one area to another?

Circuitous? Tangential?

The noun to describe that person is dilettante.

The adjectives might be “flighty”, “distracted”, “scatterbrained”, “unfocused”, “fickle” and “any of these various synonyms for the first.

My word is disquisitive. How’s that for giving a veneer of sophistication to your lack of focus?
:)
You’re not alone

Capricious.

Most of the words (as you see) for this are negative (dilettante and dabbler are the most fitting, to me). Positive ones that I can think of don’t quite match your description: an eclectic, or perhaps a multifaceted person.

Then of course, there’s the old Xena standby: “I have many skills.” But you have to say it in a low growl. It might not be appropriate for every occasion.

@glacial Disquisitive sounds like it’s negative but it’s not

I like disquisitive, though the “dis” in the front does seem to give it a negative sense.

Jack of all trades.

Renaissance Man.

Polymath.

(Nouns, I know. But so many adjectives have already been given).

Off I fly, careering far
In chase of Pollys, prettier far
Than any of their namesakes are
—The Polymaths and Polyhistors,
Polyglots and all their sisters.

Thomas Moore

“Polymathic” and “polyhistoric” are the adjectival forms

Personally, I think ‘dabbler’ has more focus than one would ascribe to ‘meandering’.
My sense of being a dabbler means putting attention into a subject enough to get something accomplished, learning or creating, then possibly moving to another subject.
That’s my approach, anyway, just sayin’.
But it does look like the dictionaries disagree with me, ascribing superficiality to the pursuits of the dabbler. Oh well…

Polywore for a noun or polyvoracious for an adjective is good too.

It’s good to be interested in a lot of things but unfortunately there’s never enough time to go into things in depth but for a few subjects you can specialize in. I also like to think it makes you more of a holistic thinker to be that way. Eventually you need to focus though and synthesize information that you’ve gathered. That’s when the rewards of skimming things become apparent. You can always dig for more information once your intuition has a lead on something and you want to know more to support it. That’s how I work.

Jack of all trades and master of none?

Dilettantish

I have always thought of it as divergent (me) vs. convergent thinking. One source; a bit wordy

@Earthgirl That’s quite the vocabulary you have there. Wow.

I personally just use the phrase “being a bit of a Denver”

Blondesjonian

Sometimes young or immature will do fine. This is something people typically outgrow. Unless they suffer from some clinical problem, such people eventually become more focused. Exploration is healthy and normal unless this become a prolonged or extreme pattern.

@Dr_Lawrence , I definitely can’t use youthful exploration as an excuse.

I am currently reading The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is a pretty good book for intellectual happy wanderers. The title is somewhat misleading. The book is divided into five parts, which talk about different areas of mathematics developed in the last century. The book touches on such areas as information theory, fractals, chaos theory, game theory,complexity theory and computer simulation. It is the author’s contention that these different areas feed off one another and collectively give us a fresh perspective on the natural world. I like what is being attempted, but I think the project is a bit overly ambitious. It does provide motivation for revisiting the various topics and studying them further

Discursive?

I like to use quirky and eccentric. I’m a person who used both of these words to describe myself. I used to use dilettante but someone told me that that word meant that I really didn’t know much about any of the things that I am interested in.