Being Curious - Quareness Series 135th "Lecture".
It's remarkable how we repeatedly reference
What has been done rather than
What remains to be done,
A state of affairs better imbued
With a subtle sense of anticipation
Focussing on what we don't yet know.
Perhaps thoroughly conscious ignorance
Really is a prelude to any true advance
With its ever expanding circumference,
As every answer begets more questions.
And knowing a little about a lot can enable us
In framing interesting and thoughtful questions,
Making more space for a better quality of ignorance
When education is more about setting fires.
But as many a wise one has observed when
Lighting the spark of curiosity to feed our learning
In overcoming the tyranny of common sense
And challenging what we think is obvious,
It's hard knowing what we take for granted
Precisely because we take it for granted.
A typical definition of curiosity is simply a desire to seek out new knowledge or experiences. However, it can also involve a willingness to engage with complex, unfamiliar and challenging concepts or endeavors...so says Todd Kashdan, a professor of psychology at George Mason University, Virginia, USA and author of "Curious" who has helped to develop two widely used scientific models for measuring curiosity. The models describe a number of different dimensions involved from "joyous exploration" to having to do with one's level of focus and commitment when confronted with the uncertainties that newness breeds..."when you explore new terrain, you'll probably be exposed to feelings of stress and anxiety"...but curious folk are not easily deterred and display resilience when exploring new concepts or scenarios. Other dimensions involve a willingness to take risks in pursuit of new experiences and "social curiosity" which he describes as taking an interest in other people's views and opinions.
There's some research evidence that when people experience positive emotions like happiness, they also tend to be more curious than when they aren't happy. Indeed researchers have hypothesized that positive emotions may exist in part to help encourage curiosity and the fruitful exploration it encourages. Another academic researcher - David Lydon-Staley at the department of bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania - says "there's the 'broaden and build' theory that says positive emotions have a lot of function, and one of them is to get us to engage in things we wouldn't normally do". In this way curiosity can lead to new relationships, new skills or new areas of knowledge that enrich a person's life on many levels.
Todd Kashdan again..."having secure attachments is like having a home base in a game of tag in that they allow people the freedom to be less inhibited and to explore"...but the likely best way to feed curiosity is to engage with new people, new places and new points of view. As he points out, an aversion to the unfamiliar (what he calls "premature closure") stifles curiosity, but novelty (even if uncomfortable at first) acts like a fertilizer..."the more you interact with new experiences or information, the more you realize you don't know, which makes further exploration more attractive". At the same time, engaging with something new tends to drain it of its power to cause anxiety...“the highest level of anxiety you feel is always during the anticipation of something new, stick it out and you see that the anxiety is manageable and can even be enjoyable”. Although there may be safety and security in the familiar, it seems that curiosity and the novel experiences that nourish it may pave the way toward more meaningful and fulfilling living.
"Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science"...so said the great 19th century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. This suggests that knowing a lot of stuff is really about helping us to get to more ignorance. If we can imagine knowledge as an ever-expanding ripple on a pond, our ignorance (forming the circumference of this knowledge) has to grow alongside i.e. the knowledge generates ignorance. We can use any collection of facts to generate higher-quality ignorance...it's what we don't know that makes better questions. The real beneficial purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is to be able to frame lots of interesting and thoughtful questions thereby acquiring a taste for what's outside the circumference (beyond the facts).
It's somewhat of a truism that if there's no learning going on, there's no real education going on either. However, if we light the spark of curiosity, people will naturally learn and we can offset a deadening culture of compliance. Furthermore we can say that creativity (= process of having original ideas of value) more often than not comes about through the interaction of different ways of seeing things...a state of mind fostered by being curious. It's also the case that we're unlikely to ever come up with anything original if we're not prepared to be wrong. Again how we get to learn best (if at all) is most likely through actively engaging with our individual creativity and curiosity.
Spending time with young children really brings home how much their young minds are powered by curiosity and "taking a chance". Indeed kids have even been described as curious personified. But as we age our reservoirs of curiosity have a tendency to dry up with a person's openness to new experiences and new sensations declining steadily over time. At the same time apathy tends to increase along with more rigid adherence to time-worn routines and opinions. Researchers have also noticed that being highly curious tends to correlate with many different measures of both mental and physical health and vigour. Curiosity appears to activate those parts of the brain involved in high-level cognitive processes and over time such activation may help to explain some of its benefits. And in both young and old it has been found that high and consistent levels of curiosity correlate with mental well-being and life satisfaction, as well as providing some protection from depression. As Professor Kashdan says "if you take the fundamental things that people tend to want out of life - strong social relationships and happiness and accomplishing things - all of these are highly linked to curiosity". It seems that the more experts examine curiosity, the more evidence they are finding to suggest it's the key to a happy, fulfilling life.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
February, 2021.