Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

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For a trait with so much potential power, curiosity itself seems uncomplicated. Psychologists define curiosity as “wanting to know.” That’s it. And that definition squares with our own commonsense feeling. “Wanting to know,” of course, means seeking out the information. Curiosity starts out as an impulse, an urge, but it pops out into the world as something more active, more searching: a question. However, I have to confess that I have plunged into a kind of reverse Eve-guilt many, many times, being too tired and distracted to engage in the curious questions I have been asked. When I had two toddlers and a baby at home, I used to read a lot to the 2 and 4-year-olds just to have an hour of sitting down instead of running. At one point I decided to introduce them to the mythical origins of our culture and read the children's bible. An avalanche of questions was the result: I found _Curious_ to be interesting, but disappointing. I was disappointed because a majority of the book was dedicated to unrelated diversions. If you're an avid reader like me of non-fiction self-help, psychology, business, and biography literature you will be familiar with a majority of the anecdotal tangents contained herein. The entrepreneurial fairy tales of Steve Jobs and Walt Disney; the inquisitiveness and creativity of Ben Franklin; the success predicting ability of "grit" and the marshmallow test (boy do I get tired of reading about this test -- I probably would failed it as a child, yet I'm a successful adult); and so forth. I was hoping for a more detailed discussion of curiosity, particularly how to _cultivate_ curiosity, but it wasn't there. But the curiosity conversations are different from the workouts in this way: I hate exercising, I just like the results. I love the curiosity conversations, while they are happening. The results—a month or a decade later—are something I count on, but they are a bonus. Curiosity is a book that is both entertaining and informative. Written with a passion and pace that will keep the reader both entertained and engaged throughout. If you ever wondered why you know longer wonder, if you think you have it all figured out but can’t shake that sneaky feeling that perhaps you don’t or if you are just fed up with being told that it is not your job to ask questions this book is worthy of a gander.

I never made a movie about F. Lee Bailey, of course, although his life is certainly rich enough for one. I didn’t even make a movie about lawyers until twenty years later, when I did Liar Liar, with Jim Carrey, about what happens to a lawyer who is forced to tell nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours straight. New York Times bestselling author and Oscar–winning producer Brian Grazer has written a brilliantly entertaining and eye-opening exploration of curiosity and the life-changing effects it can have on every person’s life. Sitting there in his office, I could clearly understand that the movie business was built on ideas—a steady stream of captivating ideas, new ideas every day. And it was suddenly clear to me that curiosity was the way to uncover ideas, it was the way to spark them.I met with Jonas Salk, the scientist and physician who cured polio, a man who was a childhood hero of mine. It took me more than a year to get an audience with him. I wasn’t interested in the scientific method Salk used to figure out how to develop the polio vaccine. I wanted to know what it was like to help millions of people avoid a crippling disease that shadowed the childhoods of everyone when I was growing up. And he worked in a different era. He was renowned, admired, successful—but he received no financial windfall. He cured what was then the worst disease afflicting the world, and he never made a dime from that. Can you imagine that happening today? I wanted to understand the mind-set that turns a cure like that loose in the world.

I would hand over the documents with graciousness and deference, and since it was the seventies, they’d always say, “Come in! Have a drink! Have a cup of coffee!” Calley would say, “Grazer, come sit in my office.” He’d put me on the couch, and I’d watch him work.And watching Calley work, I realized something: creative thoughts didn’t have to follow a straight narrative line. You could pursue your interests, your passions, you could chase any quirky idea that came from some odd corner of your experience or your brain. Here was a world where good ideas had real value—and no one cared whether the idea was connected to yesterday’s idea or whether it was related to the previous ten minutes of conversation. If it was an interesting idea, no one cared where it came from at all.

There are two types of curiosity: diversive and epistemic. There are actually three types of curiosity with the third being empathetic, but the author barely gives empathetic curiosity airtime. Adam is told explicitly by God: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” 8 My office was in a corner on the third floor, with views of the walkways crisscrossing the lot. I would open the window (yes, in the 1970s and 1980s, office windows still opened) and I’d watch the powerful, famous, and glamorous walking by. Digital technologies are severing the link between effort and mental exploration. The web erodes our penchant for epistemic curiosity focused on understanding. “Google can answer anything you want, but it can’t tell you what you ought to be asking."

BOOKS ABOUT CURIOSITY

I was intrigued by the concept of an evolutionary origin driving human curiosity. Compared to other animals, it appears that humans possess a unique biological urge to be curious, to venture into the unknown. Some might say then that curiosity is a key trait of humanity: to be curious is to be human. In grad school, I studied what developmental psychologists refer to as “socioemotional skills”. What are often thought of as “soft skills” such as behavioral skills, social skills, self-expression, and introspection are traits people can learn and improve on. I wrote my thesis on how educators can encourage children’s curiosity. I knew logically traits like creativity can be nourished and improved like any other skill. But I still worried about somehow ‘using up’ my creativity if I wrote too much. Calley, on the other hand, was one of the hippest guys in the world. He knew movie stars, he socialized with movie stars. He was highly literate—he read all the time. He sat on his couch, with ideas and decisions winging through his office all day long without rules or rigidity. The quality of many ordinary experiences often pivots on curiosity. If you’re shopping for a new TV, the kind you ultimately take home and how well you like it is very much dependent on a salesperson who is curious: curious enough about the TVs to know them well; curious enough about your own needs and watching habits to figure out which TV you need.

No one today ever says anything bad about curiosity, directly. But if you pay attention, curiosity isn’t really celebrated and cultivated, it isn’t protected and encouraged. It’s not just that curiosity is inconvenient. Curiosity can be dangerous. Curiosity isn’t just impertinent, it’s insurgent. It’s revolutionary. I WAS A PUDGY boy, and I didn’t grow out of it as a teenager. When I graduated from college, I had love handles. I got teased at the beach. I looked soft, with my shirt on or off. It’s certainly very much talked about. We increasingly talk about curiosity-driven science, which generally means science that doesn’t have to justify itself with an economic bottom line. It’s science that simply looks at a question because it wants to know the answer to it. I suggest in my book that when we look at the history of curiosity, it’s more complex than that. In particular, curiosity has always had an agenda to it. For Francis Bacon, it was an agenda of furthering state power by creating a useful technology. For scientists like Robert Boyle, it was a religious duty of trying to find out as much about what God had created as we could. Illustration: Erika Meza There’s also something about children’s books that makes them such a safe space. Ron was kind of shy, and he seemed surprised by my phone call. I don’t think he really wanted to meet me. I said, “It’ll be fun, it’ll be relaxed, let’s just do it.”To get started, Stoufer recommends the I Survived and Ranger in Time series, which will help your child connect to historical events through relatable characters and spark even more curiosity for what happened in the past. Curious is a book that defines the place of curiosity in our lives today. Where it comes from, why we have it, what we do with it, while making the case for why we need to resurrect it. Browsing the shelves in a bookstore, it caught my eye and I spontaneously bought it, probably as a subconscious reaction to the fact that I have heard that I tend to be too curious about everything ever since I was very little. It is a topic that has followed me from early childhood over my academic studies and into motherhood and teaching. When I started writing again, I worried I would “run out” of ideas. At first, the ideas came fast — writing after a long break unleashed a torrent of pent-up ideas. I had accumulated years of lived experience to write about. But as I continued, I started worrying my creativity would dry up at some point. The second I finished a piece I was proud of I would think, what if I can’t do that again?