an essay about curiosity

Essays About Curiosity: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Are you writing essays about curiosity? Then, read our guide of helpful essay examples and writing prompts.

Curiosity refers to the strong desire and active interest to learn something. It could start with a burning question that leads to more questions. This series of questioning can evolve into a pursuit that paves the way for discoveries. Curiosity can change how we perceive life and our world. While everyone is inherently curious, how we use our curiosity, for good or bad, shows who we are as people.

Check out our essay examples and topic prompts for your curiosity essay , and stay curious till the end. And when your essay is complete, check out our best essay checkers and take the slog out of proofreading.

1. Curiosity: Why It Matters, Why We Lose It, And How To Get It Back by Christy Geiger

2. did curiosity really kill the cat by mario livio, 3.  why curiosity, diversity, and inclusion are the secrets to successful business transformation by beatriz sanz saiz, 4. the five dimensions of curiosity by todd b. kashdan et. al, 5. curiosity: we’re studying the brain to help you harness it by ashvanti valji and matthias gruber, 1. how has curiosity helped you in life, 2. the benefits of curiosity, 3. how does curiosity lead to scientific discoveries, 4. encouraging curiosity in the classroom, 5. diverse vs. specific curiosity, 6. can curiosity be practiced, 7. curiosity in early civilization, 8. curious animals: what are they thinking, 9. the curiosity rover, 10. negative effects of curiosity.

“…[A]s an adult, we can reach a learning plateau. We feel good to get to a point of understanding and knowledge, but begin to lose our curiosity. We find it easier to live as the expert who knows than the student who grows.”

Adulthood can have a negative impact on our levels of wonder and curiosity. Geiger believes it’s time to regain our childlike curiosity as we move to a tech-driven industrial world where constant innovation and adoption of technologies are required. You might also be interested in these essays about critical thinking.

“Curiosity is the best remedy for fear. What I mean by that is that often we are afraid of the unknown, of those things we know very little about. Becoming curious about them, and making an effort to learn more, usually acts to relieve that fear.”

Who would’ve thought an essay could be weaved out from a common expression of curiosity? This curiosity essay finds that the saying “curiosity killed the cat” started quite differently than we know it today. Its meaning now evolves to echo parts of history when conventional and extremist ideologies would silence inquisitive minds to avoid being challenged and overturned.

“To be a leader in a context of superfluid markets, where everything is connected, an organization needs to constantly explore which are the new “needs,“ which technologies exist, how they can be maximized and where they can be used to innovate boldly to create new experiences, goods and services.”

Curiosity will drive businesses to survive and thrive in this digital age. But, they also need to seek assistance from diversity and an inclusive organization. With these two, businesses can stimulate new thinking and perspectives that can feed into the curiosity of the organization on the ways it can reach its goals and be the market’s next disruption.

“Rather than regard curiosity as a single trait, we can now break it down into five distinct dimensions. Instead of asking, ‘How curious are you?’ we can ask, ‘How are you curious?’”

Kashdan builds on existing curiosity research to identify five dimensions of curiosity : joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, social curiosity, and thrill-seeking. Once you’ve assessed the right curiosity type for you, it might do wonders in catalyzing your curiosity into progress and development outcomes for your goals and well-being.

“It might seem obvious that if you are curious about something, you pay more attention to it, making it easier to remember later – but the effects of curiosity on memory are more complex than this.”

The essay presents new research on how a type of curiosity aiming to bridge information gaps connects with brain functions associated with enhanced learning. As far as education is concerned, the discovery strongly supports the need to create an environment to encourage students to ask questions rather than just give children a set learning program to consume.

10 Writing Prompts For Essays About Curiosity

Narrate an instance in your life when curious questions led to positive findings and experiences that helped you in life. Whether it was acing an exam, learning a new language, or other aspects of everyday life. Elaborate on how this encouraged you to be more interested and passionate about learning. See here our storytelling guide to help you better narrate your story. 

Research shows that curiosity can stimulate positive emotions. Many research studies outline the other benefits of curiosity to our health, relationships, happiness, and cognitive abilities. Gather more studies and data to elaborate on these advantages. To create an engaging piece of writing, share your experience on how curiosity has influenced your outlook on life. 

Albert Einstein is renowned worldwide as a famous theoretical physicist. Throughout his research, he used curious thinking and openmindedness to write his theoretical papers, changing the world as we know it. Curiosity is an essential attribute of scientists, as they can look for solutions to problems from a whole new angle. For this essay, look a the role of curiosity in the scientific process. How does a curious mindset benefit scientific discoveries? Conduct thorough research and use real-life examples to show your findings and answer this question.

School classrooms can be the playground of a student’s imagination and curiosity. In your essay, write about how your school and teachers encourage students to ask questions. Next, elaborate on how the learning prompts promote curiosity. For example, some teachers tell students that it is okay to fail sometimes. This assurance helps students think with new perspectives and solutions without the fear of failure.

When researching the different kinds of curiosity, you will find two categories- diverse and specific curiosity. Look into the different attributes of these curiosity types, and identify which one, in your opinion, is the better type of curiosity to foster. For an interesting argumentative essay, you can research which kind of curiosity you have and discuss whether you have a better or worse approach to curious thinking. Pull facts from online research to support your argument and include personal anecdotes to engage your readers.

Curiosity is an inherent human trait. We are all curious. But like any trait, we can practice being curious to improve our thinking. In this writing prompt, provide your readers with strategies that enhance curiosity. For example, meditation can help stimulate more curious thoughts. 

In early civilization, people answered many of life’s questions with religion. How did humanity shift from heavily relying on gods to believing in science? What part does curiosity play in this shift? Try piquing your curious mind and answer these questions in your essay for an exciting piece of writing. 

If animals solely relied on their basic instincts and functions, there is a high chance they would not survive in our world. According to Primatologist Richard Bryne in his paper Animal Curiosity , some animals can demonstrate curious behaviors that lead to new learning and survival skills. For this writing prompt, peer into curiosity in the animal kingdom and cite animals known to have high intelligence. Is curiosity at the foundation of their high IQs? Discuss this question in your essay.

This essay prompt is about the car-sized Curiosity Rover of NASA. The rover was designed to navigate the Gale crater on Mars and collect rock and soil samples for analysis. In your essay, research and write about why it was named “Curiosity” and its significant contributions to the Mars exploration mission.

Curiosity can have negative undertones from the expression “curiosity killed the cat.” Get to the heart of the matter and look through existing literature on the adverse outcomes of curiosity. One example to cite could be this study which concluded that one kind of curiosity is associated with errors, confusion, lack of humility, and vulnerability to fake news and so-called pseudo-profound bullshits. 

Curious to learn more about effective writing? Check out our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .  If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, read our guide on how to write a five-paragraph essay .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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Ideas and insights from Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning

The Importance Of Being Curious

“Why do I feel cold and shiver when I have a fever?”

I knew the day would come when my little girl would learn to talk and inevitably start asking those much-anticipated questions. The questions themselves weren’t worrying me.  I was actually looking forward to seeing where her curiosity would lie.

What was bothering me was whether or not I would know the answers.

In the age of the smartphone, this may seem like a silly worry.  Surely, the answers to almost everything would be just one Google away.

Still, I struggled with how I was going to prepare to become an all-knowing mother. Then one day it struck me: I didn’t need to have all the answers. What a great example I could set if I let my daughter know that I, too, am still learning. And I realized how much more I could learn if I took another look at things I thought I already knew the answer to with the curiosity of a child. My little girl’s mind is a beginner’s mind – curious, open to new ideas, eager to learn, and not based on preconceived notions or prior knowledge. I decided that I would approach her questions with a beginner’s mind, too.

Once I decided to become more curious, I started noticing that curiosity was becoming more prominent in the workplace, too. Leaders, it seems, don’t need to have all the answers, either. But they do need to be curious.

Curious about curiosity, I searched for answers, and found frequent references to Albert Einstein’s famous words, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” We might well quibble with the notion that Einstein had no “special talent,” but he wouldn’t have solved the riddles of the universe if not for his passionate curiosity. Then I came across another Einstein quote: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.”

Curiosity’s reason for existence in the workplace

Decades ago, management thinker Peter Drucker placed knowing the right questions to ask at the core of his philosophy on strategic thinking. Many of today’s leaders have adopted Drucker’s “be (intelligently) curious” philosophy, an approach that is becoming more salient as the world increases in complexity.

Warren Berger, in “ Why Curious People Are Destined for the C-Suite, ” cited Dell CEO Michael Dell’s response to a PwC survey that asked leaders to name a trait that would most help CEOs succeed. Dell’s answer? “I would place my bet on curiosity.” Dell was not alone. Alan D. Wilson, then CEO of McCormick & Company, responded that those who “are always expanding their perspective and what they know – and have that natural curiosity – are the people that are going to be successful.”

Leaders don’t need to know everything. In fact, it’s an impossibility. Things change too rapidly for that. What worked yesterday can’t be guaranteed to work tomorrow. Disrupters are just around the corner. If you’re not one of them, you may well end up a disruptee. Today’s leaders need to be curious, and know how to ask the questions that lead them to consider new ideas.

How we can all develop curiosity

Becoming a mum has taught me how to handle my little girl’s curiosity. It strikes me that leaders in new roles also have to learn what to do and how to act in ways that are new and different. What I find works best is approaching your new role with a curiosity mindset, completely open to new ideas and suggestions. Here are some ways to develop your curiosity:

• Apply a beginner’s mind:  Be open to and look for new and novel ways of doing things.
• Ask questions, listen and observe:  Seek first to understand, not to explain.
• Try something new:  Take a different route to work, read a book in a genre you usually avoid, go to an art gallery you wouldn’t normally go to. Each of these activities opens your mind to new points of view.
• Be inquisitive:  Ask others their opinions, perspectives, and their approaches to certain things. Everyone does things a bit differently, and there are potential new answers and solutions to problems hidden in other people’s thinking.

These are a few of my ideas. I’d be interested in hearing yours. How do you stay curious?

Dalia Molokhia is a senior learning solutions manager at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. Email her at  [email protected] .

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Definition of Curiosity, Its Causes and Importance Essay

Introduction.

One might ask, “What is curiosity?” Curiosity is an observable feeling, usually portrayed by people and some specific animals and appears like a force that drives them into knowing, meeting, or seeing new things. It arouses their emotional behaviour. Though claims are that it killed the cat, it has been proved that, it is the force behind all scientific inventions. It has brought about the most expensive and interesting discoveries by both scientists and artists.

It is a natural trait whose signs become evident right from birth when a baby shows the desire to explore not only its mother, but also anything within its proximity. Any trait is categorised based on its impact to the individual and the entire society. Though it cannot be wholly supported by all, majority will go for it owing to its position in the global technology. Based on these expositions, I believe curiosity, is a character that needs to be grown and developed in the minds of all people who believe that they can be great.

The desire for knowledge serves as the root cause of curiosity. Straight from childhood to old age, there is always a visible yearning depicted by all people and some categories of animals. A child will crawl or cry as an expression of its want for something while old people will always be questioning themselves about nature, demanding to know why it has to deprive them of the energy to carry out various jobs. This is none but curiosity.

Another cause of curiosity is the urge to satisfy ones senses. The need to see, hear, touch, among others, has been proved to arouse ones desire, forcing him/her to satisfy them. Practically, when people get rumours about something, be it a funny place, an interesting story, or a weird animal, they desire to actualise the rumours.

If it calls for them to see, in order to be satisfied, they must see failure to which an unmet requirement is registered in the person’s mind. He/she will be experiencing some sort of a force or an inner voice telling him/her to rise up for that need. This has to do with nothing else, but curiosity.

Importance of curiosity

One of the major areas curiosity serves a vital role is education. Its contribution towards the performance of students is quite significant. It has become so crucial that some colleges have opted to introduce it as subject compulsory to every student. Through it, learners have made long steps as far as inventions are concerned.

Moreover, it serves as a motivational tool by learners. For instance, if ones teacher is a professor, he/she feels motivated and wants to experience the feeling of professors. He/she opts to know the steps the fellow followed into achieving such a high level of education. In their minds, learners create imaginary figures that act as role models whom they desire to take after, given the time and opportunity. By so doing, they end up boosting education status through their curiosity.

In addition, curiosity plays a major role in nurturing patience. As the claim goes, where there is patience, there is payment. This stands out in people who desire to be, or to own something that takes time before it happens. For instance, a young boy hoping to become a pilot has to develop patience within him because, he has to wait until he gets what it takes, for one to be a pilot and this calls for a serious view of education as the only way through. Hence, curiosity is a trait, crucial in education and cannot be avoided.

Another crucial importance of curiosity is that, it engages ones mind, making him/her active rather than passive. It has been proved that where there is activity of the mind, there is God’s dwelling place. It also makes ones mind alert of new ideas and methods of doing things. This is so because whoever is curious, he/she is ever learning day by day. It opens up the mind of people making them believe in the possibility of everything they do.

It also plays a key role in boosting ones enjoyment. Those who are curious are ever enjoying the interests of what they encounter everyday. The human mind is always welcoming when it comes to new ideas or things. Therefore, the fact that curiosity makes one learn new things on a daily basis, it is clear that he/she is always joyful.

In conclusion, Curiosity can overturn the world in terms of inventions and developments. Owing to what it has done for the few who developed it before, it stands out as a character that needs to be acquired by all, who believe in living up to the top of their dreams.

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IvyPanda. (2018, July 16). Definition of Curiosity, Its Causes and Importance. https://ivypanda.com/essays/curiosity/

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The Five Dimensions of Curiosity

• Todd B. Kashdan,
• David J. Disabato,
• Fallon R. Goodman,
• Carl Naughton

How are you curious?

P sychologists have compiled a large body of research on the many benefits of curiosity. It enhances intelligence: In one study, highly curious children aged three to 11 improved their intelligence test scores by 12 points more than their least-curious counterparts did. It increases perseverance, or grit: Merely describing a day when you felt curious has been shown to boost mental and physical energy by 20% more than recounting a time of profound happiness. And curiosity propels us toward deeper engagement, superior performance, and more-meaningful goals: Psychology students who felt more curious than others during their first class enjoyed lectures more, got higher final grades, and subsequently enrolled in more courses in the discipline.

New research shows that curiosity is vital to an organization’s performance—as are the particular ways in which people are curious and the experiences they are exposed to. This package examines how leaders can nurture curiosity throughout their organizations and ensure that it translates to success.

• Todd B. Kashdan , Ph.D. is professor of psychology at George Mason University who studies well-being, psychological flexibility, curiosity, courage, and resilience and the author of Curious?,   The Upside of Your Dark Side , and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery, 2022). Take this quiz to match yourself with a principled rebel archetype.
• DD David J. Disabato is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at George Mason University and a consultant with Time Inc. and Merck KGaA.
• FG Fallon R. Goodman is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at George Mason University and a consultant with Time Inc. and Merck KGaA.
• CN Carl Naughton is a linguist and an educational scientist who consults with Merck KGaA.

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Why Curiosity Is Necessary for Creativity

Be more curious, and your creative spirit will prosper..

Posted February 11, 2022 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Curiosity is a clear foundation fror a more creative life.
• Curiosity is propelled by the desire and freedom to ask questions.
• Creativity is enhanced when we seek answers to divergent and self-initiated questions.

Curiosity is ingrained in our DNA . We are fascinated by the future; we are transfixed with the unknowns that surround us; we are amazed at all that we have to explore. The mysteries of the world have always been an impetus for us to peek and poke and prod for answers—learning something about our surroundings as well as about ourselves. Nowhere is this truer than when we watch the youngest among us—our children.

Children are known for sticking their fingers in places where young fingers should never be. They are famous for putting all manner of objects and substances in their mouths… everything from plastic blocks and the pet dog’s ears to any object in the room not nailed down or sufficiently weighted.

In adults, curiosity guides us toward a lifetime occupation, it drives us to search out potential mates, it stimulates us to travel to new destinations, and it holds our hand as we move into old age and the unknowns of the future. By and large, we are relentless question-askers. We want to know more than we know; we want to expand our horizons, try out the new and undiscovered, and pursue experiences that deepen our comprehension (and appreciation) of the world we live in.

But curiosity is much more than a simple search for answers. It is also the generation of possibilities. When we look at the world from multiple perspectives, we give ourselves permission to examine a wider range of resolutions and remedies. We open up our minds to explore the unexamined and unknown. Curiosity becomes a propellant for new opportunities and new options. Ian Leslie explains it this way: “…curiosity is essential to an exploring mind; it opens our eyes to the new and undiscovered, encouraging us to seek out new experiences and meet new people.”

It was Albert Einstein who famously said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” He also went on to say, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” For Einstein, curiosity was the engine that drove his creativity .

Curiosity is the catalyst for questioning, and questioning is what propels us to seek out the unfamiliar and the unknown. Curiosity is the fuel necessary for creativity to prosper and succeed. For, without questions, knowledge becomes stagnant and immovable. It does not move forward, nor does it have sufficient power to poke and peek and prod what may lie just below the surface or just slightly out of reach.

Strategies to enhance curiosity

Try these suggestions to promote creativity.

1. What if...?

For much of our lives, we are predisposed to look for a single solution to a single problem. We have been “brainwashed” to think that for every problem, there is one, and only one, way to solve that problem. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. When we consider that there might be a multitude of potential responses to any problem, we allow ourselves to break out of the “one-problem, one-answer” syndrome and begin to look for a host of potential solutions (and a host of potential ideas).

The strategy known as “What if...?” is a most powerful idea generator. Simply place the two words “What if” in front of questions you might normally pose when confronting a problem or challenge. “What-iffing” stimulates the brain to think in very divergent ways. It also moves you away from a tendency to look for single right answers.

Try some of the following “What if” questions. How many possible responses can you come up with for each one? Don’t think about the quality of your responses (that will severely limit your creativity); just think about the quantity of responses you could generate for each selected query:

• What if cats would come when you called them?
• What if you were required to choose your life expectancy when you reached age 21?
• What if a small red circle appeared in the middle of everyone’s forehead whenever they told a lie?
• What if every college student could be guaranteed a job immediately upon graduation?
• What if a car could be invented that would be immune to any type of accident?
• What if you had a watch that could predict what you would do over the next 24 hours?
• What if you could wash your clothes while still wearing them?

Asking “What if” questions propels us in new directions (cognitively speaking). From a mental standpoint, they help us move “outside the box” into dimensions typically not within our normal field of vision.

2. No wrong questions.

In a Zoom meeting, conference call, monthly department meeting, or any other kind of group discussion, try to avoid asking the following questions: “What is the answer?” or “What is the solution?” By asking those questions, you are severely limiting a multiplicity of responses simply because the group is now focused on finding the answer or the solution… rather than generating a vast array of potential answers or solutions. More appropriate questions might include: “What are some possibilities here?”; “How many different ways can we look at this?”; and “What are some of the impediments we have to overcome?”

In short, ask questions for which there may be a wide variety of responses, rather than questions which limit the number or type of responses. Anecdotal evidence demonstrates that we tend to think based on the types of questions we are asked. If we are only asked questions for which there is the expectation of a single answer, that’s all we’ll get. On the other hand, if we pose questions that might generate a multiplicity of responses, then the collective creativity of the group is enhanced considerably.

Leslie, Ian. Curious: The desire to know and why your future depends on it. (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

Fredericks, Anthony D. From Fizzle to Sizzle: The hidden forces crushing your creativity and how you can overcome them. (Indianapolis, IN: Blue River Press, 2022).

Anthony D. Fredericks, Ed.D. , is Professor Emeritus of Education at York College of Pennsylvania. His latest book is In Search of the Old Ones: An Odyssey Among Ancient Trees (Smithsonian Books, 2023).

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Schools Are Missing What Matters About Learning

Curiosity is underemphasized in the classroom, but research shows that it is one of the strongest markers of academic success.

When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded , “to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

The power of curiosity to contribute not only to high achievement, but also to a fulfilling existence, cannot be emphasized enough. Curiosity can be defined as “ the recognition, pursuit, and intense desire to explore, novel, challenging, and uncertain events .” In recent years, curiosity has been linked to happiness, creativity, satisfying intimate relationships, increased personal growth after traumatic experiences, and increased meaning in life. In the school context, conceptualized as a “ character strength ,” curiosity has also received heightened research attention. Having a “ hungry mind ” has been shown to be a core determinant of academic achievement, rivaling the prediction power of IQ.

Yet in actual schools, curiosity is drastically underappreciated. As Susan Engel has documented in her book, The Hungry Mind , amidst the country’s standardized testing mania, schools are missing what really matters about learning: The desire to learn in the first place. As she notes, teachers rarely encourage curiosity in the classroom—even though we are all born with an abundance of curiosity, and this innate drive for exploration could be built upon in all students.

Curiously (pun intended), curiosity is also virtually absent from the field of gifted-and-talented education. A recent survey of required identification methods across all states found that only three considered motivation a part of giftedness. IQ, on the other hand, is required by 45 states, while 39 require standardized tests of achievement.

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A recent feature story in Scientific American further punctuates this point. Misleadingly titled “ How to Raise a Genius ,” the article summarized the results of a 45-year study of children who at age 12 scored in the top 1 percent on the SATs and were subsequently tracked and then supported. At least 95 percent of the participants experienced some type of educational acceleration as a result of their identification, and most participated in enrichment programs such as Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth (CTY). The CTY program—which counts Mark Zuckerberg and Lady Gaga as alumni—was initiated to “find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we now call STEM,” and to figure out how to support them to increase the chances of them reaching this expected potential.

Much to the researchers’ delight, the results confirmed their expectations. Their “profoundly gifted children” indeed grew up to be an impressive group . The majority completed doctoral degrees from some of the best universities in the world (which require high test scores as a gating mechanism), and many boasted impressive literary and scientific-technical achievements, including patents and published books.

These findings suggest that early advanced test scores are an indication of one’s readiness for more enhanced resources, and this should certainly be supported. But what other conclusions can be drawn from these findings? That if you’re a parent and you want to “raise a genius” but your child isn’t precocious on academic tests at an early age, you’re out of luck? Or worse, that these are the kids, and only these kids, who the country should bank on? One of the lead authors of the study, David Lubinsky, was quoted as saying: “When you look at the issues facing society now—whether it’s health care, climate change, terrorism, energy—these are the kids who have the most potential to solve these problems. These are the kids we'd do well to bet on.”

But is this really true? The researchers selected students based on a single criterion—advanced test scores—and supported these precocious youth throughout their schooling, failing to select for some other variable and thus disregarding all the other children.

The Fullerton Longitudinal Study (FLS) , a 30-plus year study of the development of giftedness across various points in time conducted by Adele and Allen Gottfried of California State University, takes a different approach. Instead of relying on teacher nominations— recent research suggests that nominations miss at least 60 percent of gifted students—the researchers started by assessing a group of 1-year-olds, long before any of them had a chance to be officially labeled as gifted. The only criteria for inclusion in the study were that the infants had to be full term, of normal weight, and free of visual and neurological abnormalities.

They initiated their study in 1979, and have been assessing the participants based on a wide range of variables (e.g., school performance, IQ, leadership, happiness) across multiple contexts (laboratory and home) since. During infancy and the preschool years, the participants were assessed every six months, and then they were assessed annually from the ages of 5 to 17.

One of their findings supports the work of Lubinsky and colleagues: Cognitive giftedness matters. Using the standard cutoff of 130 IQ resulted in 19 percent of the 107 children identified as “intellectually gifted” at the age of 8. While intellectually gifted children were not different than the comparison group with respect to their temperament, behavioral, social, or emotional functioning, they did differ in regards to their advanced sensory and motor functioning starting at age 1.5, their ability to understand the meaning of words starting at age 1, and their ability to both understand and communicate information thereafter. They were also more goal-oriented and displayed a greater attention span. By the time they began kindergarten, they performed at a higher level across diverse subject areas. Teachers rated intellectually gifted children as more competent in the classroom.

Parents of intellectually gifted children reported similar observations and were more likely than those of average children to say that their kids actively elicited stimulation by, for example, requesting intellectual extracurricular activities. (Intellectually gifted students tended to come from families that valued intellectual and cultural pursuits.) Children who become intellectually gifted, the Gottfrieds concluded, “are more environmentally engaged and may benefit more from their environment.”

These results provide a window into the development of intellectual giftedness in relation to cognition. But they only demonstrate part of the picture. The researchers also measured what they described as academic intrinsic motivation and identified the top 19 percent of the 111 adolescent participants as “motivationally gifted,” displaying extreme enjoyment of school and of learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks and an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, and persistence.

Interestingly, they found very little correspondence between intellectual giftedness and motivational giftedness. While the intellectually gifted students tended to show greater intellectual curiosity from infancy through adolescence, only eight children were both intellectually gifted and motivationally gifted. Also, the overwhelming majority of the differences on the academic intrinsic-motivation test could not be explained by differences in IQ scores, and academic intrinsic motivation predicted high-school GPA independently of IQ. The takeaway: Those with gifted curiosity are gifted in their own right.

Students with gifted curiosity outperformed their peers on a wide range of educational outcomes, including math and reading, SAT scores, and college attainment. According to ratings from teachers, the motivationally gifted students worked harder and learned more.

These findings have deep implications for gifted-and-talented education, as well as for education more generally. For one, they suggest that gifted curiosity is a distinct characteristic that contributes uniquely to academic success. As the Gottfrieds put it, “motivation should be considered as a criterion in and of itself to augment the selection of students into programs for the gifted and talented.” For another, they’re evidence of the benefits of programs that engage all students in the learning process—not as a means to developing other forms of giftedness (e.g., IQ, standardized test scores), but as an important characteristic all on its own. “Motivation should not be considered simply a catalyst for the development of other forms of giftedness, but should be nurtured in its own right,” note the Gottfrieds.

Stimulating classroom activities are those that offer novelty, surprise, and complexity, allowing greater autonomy and student choice; they also encourage students to ask questions, question assumptions, and achieve mastery through revision rather than judgment-day-style testing.

But these experiences happen outside of the classroom as well. The Gottfrieds investigated the role parents play in fostering in their children an affinity for science by exposing them to new experiences that make them curious, for example, like taking them to museums. They found that such activities helped children develop an intrinsic motivation for science (e.g., “I enjoy learning new things in science; I like to find answers to questions in science”) and teacher ratings of student academic performance. In turn, both of those factors predicted the number of advanced courses taken and interest in a science career, among other outcomes. This finding has strong implications for the development of STEM considering that curiosity is a fundamental predictor of the aspiration to become a scientist.

All in all, the Fullerton study is proof that giftedness is not something an individual is either born with or without— giftedness is clearly a developmental process . It’s also proof that giftedness can be caused by various factors. As the Gottfrieds write in their book Gifted IQ: Early Developmental Aspects , “giftedness is not a chance event … giftedness will blossom when children’s cognitive ability, motivation and enriched environments coexist and meld together to foster its growth.”

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The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity

Curiosity is a basic element of our cognition, yet its biological function, mechanisms, and neural underpinning remain poorly understood. It is nonetheless a motivator for learning, influential in decision-making, and crucial for healthy development. One factor limiting our understanding of it is the lack of a widely agreed upon delineation of what is and is not curiosity; another factor is the dearth of standardized laboratory tasks that manipulate curiosity in the lab. Despite these barriers, recent years have seen a major growth of interest in both the neuroscience and psychology of curiosity. In this Perspective, we advocate for the importance of the field, provide a selective overview of its current state, and describe tasks that are used to study curiosity and information-seeking. We propose that, rather than worry about defining curiosity, it is more helpful to consider the motivations for information-seeking behavior and to study it in its ethological context.

Curiosity is such a basic component of our natures that we are nearly oblivious to its pervasiveness in our lives. Consider, though, how much of our time we spend seeking and consuming information, whether listening to the news or music, browsing the internet, reading books or magazines, watching TV, movies, and sports, or otherwise engaging in activities not directly related to eating, reproduction, and basic survival. Our insatiable demand for information drives a much of the global economy and, on a micro-scale, motivates learning and drives patterns of foraging in animals. Its diminution is a symptom of depression, and its overexpression contributes to distractibility, a symptom of disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Curiosity is thought of as the noblest of human drives, and is just as often as it is denigrated as dangerous (as in the expression “curiosity killed the cat”). And despite its link with the most abstract human thoughts, some rudimentary forms of it can be observed even in the humble worm C. elegans.

Despite its pervasiveness, we lack even the most basic integrative theory of the basis, mechanisms, and purpose of curiosity. Nonetheless, as a psychological phenomenon, curiosity—and the desire for information more broadly—has attracted the interest of the biggest names in the history of psychology (e.g., James, 1913 ; Pavlov, 1927 ; Skinner, 1938 ). Despite this interest, only recently have psychologists and neuroscientists begun widespread and coordinated efforts to unlock its mysteries (e.g., Gottlieb et al., 2013 ; Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath, 2014 ; Kang et al., 2009 ). The present Perspective aims summarize this recent research, motivate new interested in the problem, and to tentatively propose a framework for future studies of the neuroscience and psychology of curiosity.

DEFINITION AND TAXONOMY OF CURIOSITY

One factor that has hindered the development of a formal study of curiosity is the lack of a single widely accepted definition of the term. In particular, many observers think that curiosity is a special type of the broader category of information-seeking. But carving out a formal distinction between the curiosity and information-seeking has proven difficult. As a consequence, much research that is directly relevant to the problem of curiosity does not use the term curiosity and instead focuses on what are considered to be distinct phenomena. These phenomena include, for example, play, exploration, reinforcement learning, latent learning, neophilia, and self-reported desire for information (e.g., Deci, 1975 ; Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath, 2014 ; Jirout & Klahr, 2012 ; Kang et al., 2009 ; Sutton & Barto, 1998 ; Tolman & Gleitman, 1949 ). Conversely, studies that do use the term curiosity range quite broadly in topic area. In laboratory studies, the term curiosity itself is broad enough to encompass both the desire for answers to trivia questions and the strategic deployment of gaze in free viewing ( Gottlieb et al., 2013 ).

We consider this diversity of definitions to be both characteristic of a nascent field and healthy. Here we consider some classic views with an aim towards helping us think about how to study curiosity in the future.

Classic descriptions of curiosity

Philosopher and psychologist William James (1899) called curiosity “the impulse towards better cognition,” meaning that it is the desire to understand what you know that you do not. He noted that, in children, it drives them towards objects of novel, sensational qualities—that which is “bright, vivid, startling”. This early definition of curiosity, he said, later gives way to a “higher, more intellectual form”—an impulse towards more complete scientific and philosophic knowledge. Psychologist-educators G. Stanley Hall and Theodate L. Smith (1903) pioneered some of the earliest experimental work on the development of curiosity by collecting questionnaires and child biographies from mothers on the development of interest and curiosity. From these data, they describe children’s progression through four stages of development, starting with “passive staring” as early as the second week of life, on through “curiosity proper” at around the fifth month.

The history of studies of animal curiosity is nearly as long as the history of the study of human curiosity. Ivan Pavlov, for example, wrote about the spontaneous orienting behavior in dogs to novel stimuli (which he called the “What-is-it?” reflex) as a form of curiosity ( Pavlov, 1927 ). In the mid 20th century, exploratory behavior in animals began to fascinate psychologists, in part because of the challenge of integrating it into strict behaviorist approaches (e.g. Tolman, 1948 ). Some behaviorists counted curiosity as a basic drive, effectively giving up on providing a direct cause (e.g. Pavlov, 1927 ). This stratagem proved useful even as behaviorism declined in popularity. For example, this view was held by Harry Harlow—the psychologist best known for demonstrating that infant rhesus monkeys prefer the company of a soft, surrogate mother over a bare wire mother. Harlow referred to curiosity as a basic drive in and of itself—a “manipulatory motive”—that drives organisms to engage in puzzle-solving behavior that involved no tangible reward (e.g., Harlow, Blazek, & McClearn, 1956; Harlow, Harlow, & Meyer, 1950 ; Harlow & McClearn, 1954).

Psychologist Daniel Berlyne is among the most important figures in the 20th century study of curiosity. He distinguished between the types of curiosity most commonly exhibited by human and non-humans along two dimensions: perceptual versus epistemic, and specific versus diversive ( Berlyne, 1954 ). Perceptual curiosity refers to the driving force that motivates organisms to seek out novel stimuli, which diminishes with continued exposure. It is the primary driver of exploratory behavior in non-human animals and potentially also human infants, as well as a possible driving force of human adults’ exploration. Opposite perceptual curiosity was epistemic curiosity, which Berlyne described as a drive aimed “not only at obtaining access to information-bearing stimulation, capable of dispelling uncertainties of the moment, but also at acquiring knowledge”. He described epistemic curiosity as applying predominantly to humans, thus distinguishing the curiosity of humans from that of other species ( Berlyne, 1966 ).

The second dimension of curiosity that Berlyne described informational specificity. Specific curiosity referred to desire for a particular piece of information, while diversive curiosity referred to a general desire for perceptual or cognitive stimulation (e.g., in the case of boredom). For example, monkeys robustly exhibit specific curiosity when solving mechanical puzzles, even without food or any other extrinsic incentive (e.g., Davis, Settlage, & Harlow, 1950 ; Harlow, Harlow, & Meyer, 1950 ; Harlow, 1950 ). However, rats exhibit diversive curiosity when, devoid of any explicit task, they robustly prefer to explore unfamiliar sections of a maze (e.g., Dember, 1956; Hughes, 1968 ; Kivy, Earl, & Walker, 1956). Both specific and diversive curiosity were described as species-general information-seeking behaviors.

Contemporary views of curiosity

A common contemporary view of curiosity is that it is a special form of information-seeking distinguished by the fact that it is internally motivated ( Loewenstein, 1994 ; Oudeyer & Kaplan, 2007 ). By this view, curiosity is strictly an intrinsic drive, while information-seeking refers more generally to a drive that can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. An example of an extrinsic type of information-seeking is paying a nominal price to know the outcome of a gamble before choosing it in order to make a more profitable choice. In other words, contexts in which agents seek information for immediately strategic reasons are not considered curiosity in the strict sense. While this definition is intuitively appealing (and most consistent with the use of the term curiosity in everyday speech), it is accompanied by some problems.

For example, it is often difficult for an external observer to know whether a decision-maker is motivated intrinsically or extrinsically. Animals and preverbal children, for example, cannot tell us why they do what they do, and may labor under biased theories about the structure of their environment or other unknown cognitive constraints. Consider a child choosing between a safe door and a risky one ( Butler, 1953 ). If the child chooses the risky option, should we call her curious or just risk-seeking? Or consider a rhesus monkeys who performs a color discrimination task to obtain the opportunity to visually explore their environment. Perhaps the monkey is laboring under the assumption that the view of the environment offers some actionable information, and we should put him in the same place on the curiosity spectrum as the child (whatever that place is). To make things more complicated, perhaps the monkey has decided—or even experienced selective pressure—to favor a policy of information-seeking in most contexts. It would be a challenging philosophical problem to classify this behavior as true or ersatz curiosity by the intrinsic definition.

Thus, for the moment, we favor the rough and ready formulation of curiosity as a drive state for information. Decision-makers can be thought of as wanting information for several overlapping reasons just as they want food, water, and other basic goods. This drive may be internal or external, conscious or unconscious, or slowly evolved, or some mixture of the above. We hope that future work will provide a solid taxonomy of different factors that constitute our umbrella term.

Instead of figuring out the taxonomy, we advocate a different approach: we suggest that it is helpful to think about curiosity in the context of Tinbergen’s Four Questions. Named after Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, these questions are designed to provide four complementary scientific perspectives on any particular type of behavior ( Tinbergen, 1963 ). These questions in turn offer four vantage points from which we can describe a behavior or a broad class of behaviors, even if its boundaries are not yet fully delineated. In this spirit, our Perspective will discuss current work on curiosity as seen through the lens of Tinbergen’s Four Questions, here simplified to one word each: (1) function, (2) evolution, (3) mechanism, and (4) development.

THE FUNCTION OF CURIOSITY

Although information is intangible, it has real value to any organism with the capacity to make use of it. The benefits may accrue immediately or in the future; the delayed benefits require a learning system. Not surprisingly then, the most popular theory about the function of curiosity is to motivate learning. George Loewenstein (1994) described curiosity as “a cognitive induced deprivation that arises from the perception of a gap in knowledge and understanding.” Lowenstein’s information gap theory holds that curiosity functions like other drive states, such as hunger, which motivates eating. Building on this theory, Loewenstein suggests that a small amount of information serves as a priming dose, which greatly increases curiosity. Consumption of information is rewarding but, eventually, when enough information is consumed, satiation occurs and information serves to reduce further curiosity.

Loewenstein’s idea is supported by a recent study by Kang and colleagues ( Figure 1B , Kang et al., 2009 ). They found that curiosity about the answer to a trivia question is a U-shaped function of confidence about knowing that answer. Decision-makers were least curious when they had no clue about the answer and if they were extremely confident; they were most curious when they had some idea about the answer, but lacked confidence. In these circumstances, compulsion to know the answer was so great that they were even willing to pay for the information even though curiosity could have been be sated for free after the session. (The neural findings of this study are discussed below.)

A: Data from Kinney & Kagan (1976) . Attention to auditory stimuli shows an inverted U-shaped pattern, with infants making the most fixations to auditory stimuli estimated to be moderately discrepant from the auditory stimuli for which infants already possessed mental representations. B: Data from Kang et al. (2009) : Subjects were most curious about the answers to trivia questions for which they were moderately confident about their answers. This pattern suggests that subjects exhibited the greatest curiosity for information that was partially—but not fully—encoded.

Kang and colleagues also found that curiosity enhances learning, consistent with the theory that the primary function of curiosity is to facilitate learning. This idea also motivated O’Keefe and Nadel’s thinking about the factors that promote spatial learning in rodents ( O’Keefe and Nadel, 1978 ). This idea is also popular in the education literature (e.g., Day, 1971 ; Engel, 2011 , 2015 ; Gray, 2013 ), and has been for quite some time, as evidenced by attempts by education researchers to develop scales to quantify children’s degree of curiosity, both generally and in specific learning materials (e.g., Harty & Beall, 1984 ; Jirout & Klahr, 2012 ; Pelz, Yung, & Kidd, 2015 ; Penney & McCann, 1964 ). One potential benefit of such research would be to improve education. More recently, the role of curiosity in enhancing learning is gaining adherents in cognitive science (see Gureckis & Markant, 2012 , for a review). The idea is that allowing a learner to indulge their curiosity allows them to focus their effort on useful information that they do not yet possess. Further, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that curiosity enables even infant learners to play an active role in optimizing their learning experiences ( Oudeyer & Smith, in press ). This work suggests that allowing a learner to expose the information they require themselves—which would be inaccessible via passive observation—may further benefit the learner by enhancing the encoding and retention of the new information.

THE EVOLUTION OF CURIOSITY

Information allows for better choices, more efficient search, more sophisticated comparisons, and better identification of conspecifics. Acquiring information, of course, is the primary evolutionary purpose of the sense organs, and has been a major driver of evolution for hundreds of millions of years. Complex organisms actively control their sense organs to maximize intake of information. For example, we choose our visual fixations strategically to learn about the things that are important to us in the context ( Yarbus 1956 ; Gottlieb et al., 2012 , 2013 , 2014 ). Given its important role, it is not surprising that our visual search is highly efficient. It is nearly optimal when compared to an ‘ideal searcher’ that uses precise statistics of the visual scene to maximize search efficiency ( Najemnik & Geisler 2005 ). Moreover, the strong base of information we have about the visual system makes it an appealing target for studies of curiosity ( Gottlieb et al., 2013 , 2014 ). Just as eye movements can be highly informative, our overt behaviors, including choice, can provide evidence for and against specific theories about how we seek information, which can in turn help us understand the root causes of evolution. In this section we discuss the spectrum of basic information-seeking behaviors.

Elementary information-seeking

Even very simple organisms trade off information for rewards. While their information-seeking behavior is not typically categorized as curiosity, the simplicity of their neural systems makes them ideally suited for studies that may provide its foundation. For example, C. elegans is a roundworm whose nervous system contains 302 neurons and that actively forages for food, mostly bacteria. When placed on a new patch (such as a petri dish in a lab), it first explores locally (for about 15 minutes), then abruptly adjusts strategies and makes large, directed movements in a new direction ( Calhoun, Chalasani, & Sharpee, 2014 ). This search strategy is more sophisticated and beneficial than simply moving towards food scents (or guesses about where food may be); instead, it provides better long-term payoff because it provides information as well. It maximizes a conjoint variable that includes both expected reward and information about the reward. This behavior, while computationally difficult, is not too difficult for worms. A small network of three neurons can plausibly implement it. Other organisms that have simple information-seeking behavior include crabs ( Zeil, 1998 ), bees ( Gould 1986 ; Dyer, 1991) ants ( Wehner et al., 2002 ), and moths (Vergasolla et al., 2007). Information gained from such organisms can help us to understand how simple networks can perform information-seeking.

Information-tradeoff tasks

In primates (including humans), one convenient way to study information-seeking is the k-arm bandit task ( Gittins & Jones, 1974 , Figure 2 ). In this task, decision-makers are faced with a series of choices between stochastic rewards ( Whittle, 1988 ). The optimal strategy requires adjudication between exploration (sampling to improve knowledge, and thus future choices) and exploitation (choosing known best options). Sampling typically gives lower immediate payoff but can provide information that improves choices in the future, leading to greater overall performance. Humans and monkeys can do quite well at this task ( Daw et al., 2006 ; Pearson et al., 2009 ). One particular advantage of such tasks is that they allow for sophisticated formal models of information tradeoffs; this level of rigor is often absent in conventional curiosity studies ( Averbeck, 2015 ).

A. In a four-arm restless bandit task, subjects choose on each trial from one of four targets. B. The value associated with each option changes in value (uncued) stochastically on each trial. Consequently, when the subject has identified the best target, there is a benefit to occasionally interspersing trials where an alternative is chosen (exploration) into the more common pattern of choosing the known best option (exploitation). For example, the subject may choose option A (red color) for several trials but would not know that blue (B) will soon overtake A in value without occasionally exploring other options. C. In this task, neurons in posterior cingulate cortex show higher tonic firing on explore trials than on exploit trials.

Daw and colleagues showed that humans performing a 4-arm bandit task choose options probabilistically based on expected values of the options (a “softmax” policy, Daw, 2006 ). This probabilistic element causes them to occasionally explore other possibilities, leading them to better overall choices. The frontopolar cortex and intraparietal sulcus are significantly more active during exploration, whereas striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are more active during exploitative choices ( Daw et al., 2006 ). These are canonical reward areas, thus these results link curiosity to the reward system (a theme that we will return to). They proposed that the activation of higher-level prefrontal regions during exploration indicates a control mechanism overriding the exploitative tendency.

In a similar task, neurons in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) have greater tonic firing rates on exploratory trials than on exploitative trials (even after controlling for reward expectation, Pearson et al., 2009 , Figure 2 ). Firing rates also predict adjustments from exploitative to exploratory strategy and vice versa. These results highlight the contribution of the PCC, a critical yet mostly mysterious hub of the reward system, in both the transition to exploration and in its maintenance ( Pearson et al., 2011 ). PCC is linked to both reward and regulation of learning, thus underscoring the possible linkage between these processes and curiosity ( Heilbronner & Platt, 2013 ; Hayden et al., 2008 ). PCC responses are also driven by the salience of an option, a factor that relates directly to its ability to motivate interest, rather than reward value per se ( Heilbronner et al., 2013 ). The precuneus, a region adjacent to, and closely interconnected with, the PCC, was also associated with curiosity in one study: it is enlarged in capuchins that are particularly curious ( Phillips, Subiaul, & Sherwood, 2012 ).

Above and beyond the strategic benefit of exploration, we have a tendency to seek out new and unfamiliar options, which may offer more information than familiar ones. The bandit task can be modified to measure this tendency ( Wittmann et al., 2008 ). In one case, subjects chose between four different images on each trial; the identity of the images was arbitrary and served to distinguish the options. The value of each image was stable but stochastic, so sampling was required to learn its value. Some images were familiar, others were novel; however, image novelty had no special meaning in the context of the task. Nonetheless, subjects were more likely to choose novel images (that is, they motivated exploratory choices). This bias towards choosing novel images was mathematically expressible as a novelty bonus ( Gittins & Jones, 1974 ). Interestingly, this novelty bonus increased the expected reward for the novel images (as measured by an increase in reward prediction error (RPE) signal in ventral striatum). These results support the idea that novelty-seeking reflects an injection into choice of motivation provided by the brain's reward systems.

Bandit tasks can also be used to measure the effect of strategic context on information-seeking. For example, if the information relates to future events that may not happen, it ought to be discounted. Thus, the horizon (the number of trials available to search the environment before it changes dramatically) matters ( Wilson et al., 2014 ; see also Averbeck, 2015 ). Humans can adjust appropriately to changes in horizon: with longer horizons, subjects were more likely to choose an exploratory strategy than an exploitative one. Together, these results highlight the power and flexibility of bandit tasks as a way of studying information-seeking in a rigorous and highly quantifiable way.

Temporal resolution of uncertainty tasks

What about when the drive for information has no clear benefit? One convenient way to study this is to take advantage of the preference for immediate information about the outcome of a risky choice ( Kreps & Porteus, 1978 ; Lieberman et al., 1997 ; Luhmann et al., 2008 ; Prokasy, 1956 ; Wyckoff, 1952 ). In a temporal resolution of uncertainty task, monkeys choose between two gambles with identical probabilities (50/50) and identical payoffs (a large or a small squirt of juice delayed by 2.25 seconds, Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009 ). The only difference between the two gambles is that one offers immediate information about win vs. loss (that is, immediate temporal resolution of uncertainty) while in the other the information is delayed. The reward is delayed in both cases, so preference for sooner reward would not affect choice. Despite the brevity of the delay, monkeys reliably choose the option with the immediate resolution of uncertainty (the informative option, Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009 , 2011 ; Blanchard et al., 2015 ). This preference for earlier temporal resolution of uncertainty is not strategic because the information cannot improve choices. Thus, these tasks satisfy a stricter notion of curiosity.

We modified this task to quantify the value of information by titrating the values of the rewards ( Blanchard, Hayden, & Bromberg-Martin, 2015 , Figure 3 ). In the curiosity tradeoff task , by determining the indifference point between informative and uninformative options, we found that the value of information about a reward is about 25% of the value of the reward itself—surprisingly high. This finding indicates that monkeys choose information even when it has a measurable cost. In addition, the value of information increases with the stakes. In other words, monkeys will pay more for information about a high stakes gamble than for information about a low stakes gamble. These results are similar to some recent findings observed in pigeons ( Stagner and Zentall, 2010 ). Pigeons will choose a risky option that provides an average of 2 pellets over one that provides an average of 3 pellets as long as the one that provides 2 also provides what they call a discriminative cue—meaning a cue that reliably predicted whether a reward would come (see also Gipson et al., 2009 ).

A. In the curiosity tradeoff task, subjects choose between two gambles that vary in informativeness (cyan vs. magenta) and gamble stakes (the size of the white inset bar). On each trial, two gambles appear in sequence on a computer screen (indicated by a black rectangle); when both options appear, subjects shift gaze to one to select it. Then, following 2.25 seconds, they receive a juice reward. Following choice of the informative option, they receive a cue telling them whether they get the reward (50% chance); following choice of the uninformative option, subjects get not valid information. B. Two subjects both showed a preference for informative options (indicated by a left shift of the psychometric curve) over uninformative ones, despite the fact that this information provided no strategic benefit. C. In this task, OFC does not integrate value due to information (vertical axis) with value due to reward size (horizontal axis).

Zentall and colleagues did make the link between their risk-seeking pigeons and human gamblers ( Zentall & Stagner, 2011 ). This link is potentially important: curiosity is often mooted as an explanation for risk-seeking behavior ( Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009 ). Rhesus monkeys, for example, are often risk-seeking in laboratory tasks ( Blanchard & Hayden, 2014 ; Heilbronner & Hayden 2013 ; Monosov & Hikosaka, 2012 ; O’Neill & Schultz, 2010 ; So & Stuphorn, 2012 ; Strait et al., 2014 and 2015 ). Risky choices provide information about the status of uncertain stimuli in the world, so animals may naturally seek such information. We trained monkeys to perform a gambling task in which both the location and value of a preferred high-variance option are uncertain; knowing the location of that option allowed the monkeys to perform better in the future, but knowing its value was irrelevant (Hayden, Pearson, & Platt, 2009). We found that, following choices of the low variance (and thus non-preferred) option, when it was too late to change anything, monkeys will spontaneously shift gaze to its position, suggesting they want to know information about it.

These findings demonstrate the power of the desire for temporal resolution of uncertainty as a motivator for choice, and thus as a potential tool for the study of information-seeking. This phenomenon is particularly useful because the information sought is demonstrably useless, making it a good potential model for more basic and fundamental (i.e. non-strategic) forms of information seeking than the bandit task. It is also, like the bandit task, one that works well in animals (meaning behavior is reliable and stable across large numbers of trials), so it has potential utility in circuit-level studies.

THE (NEURAL) MECHANISMS OF CURIOSITY

Tinbergen’s third question is about the proximate mechanism of a behavior. The mechanism of any behavior is in device that produces it—the brain.

As noted above, Kang and colleagues used a curiosity induction task to test Loewenstein’s hypothesis that curiosity reflects an information gap ( Loewenstein, 1994 ). Human subjects read trivia questions and rated their feelings of curiosity while undergoing fMRI ( Kang et al., 2009 ). Brain activity in the caudate nucleus and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was associated with self-reported curiosity. These structures are activated by anticipation of many types of rewards, so these results suggest that curiosity elicits an anticipation of a reward state—consistent with Loewenstein’s theory ( Delgado et al., 2000 , 2003 , 2008 ; De Quervain et al., 2004 ; Fehr & Camerer, 2007 ; King-Casas et al., 2005 ; Rilling et al., 2002 ). Puzzlingly, the nucleus accumbens, which is one of the most reliably activated structures for reward anticipation, was not activated ( Knutson et al., 2001 ). When the answer was revealed, activations generally were found in structures associated with learning and memory, such as parahippocampal gyrus and hippocampus. Again this is a bit puzzling, because classic structures that respond to receipt of reward were not particularly activated. In any case, the learning effect was particularly strong on trials on which subjects’ guesses were incorrect—the trials on which learning was greatest.

Jepma et al. (2012) showed subjects blurry photos with ambiguous contents that piqued their curiosity; curiosity activated the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula - regions sensitive to aversive conditions (but to many other things too); resolution of curiosity activated striatal reward circuits. Like Kang and colleagues, they found that resolution of curiosity activated learning structures and also drove learning. However, the differences between the two studies were larger than the similarities. In the Jepma study, curiosity is a fundamentally aversive state, while in the Kang study it is pleasurable. Specifically, curiosity is seen as a lack of something wanted (information) and thus unpleasant, and this unpleasantness motivates information, which will alleviate it.

Gruber and colleagues (2014) measured brain activity while subjects answered trivia questions and rated their curiosity for each question. They were also shown interleaved photographs of neutral, unknown faces which acted as a probe for learning. When tested later, subjects recalled the faces shown in high curiosity trials better than faces shown on low curiosity trials. Thus, the curiosity state led to better learning, even for the things people weren’t curious about. Curiosity drove activity in both midbrain (implying the dopaminergic regions) and nucleus accumbens; memory was correlated with midbrain and hippocampal activity. These results suggest that, although curiosity reflects intrinsic motivation, it is mediated by the same mechanisms as extrinsically motivated rewards.

Single unit recordings from the temporal resolution of uncertainty task further support this overlap. In this task, dopamine neuron activity (DA) is enhanced by the prospect of both a possible reward and early information. Dopamine neurons provide a key learning and motivation signal that is critical for many types of reward-related cognition ( Redgrave & Gurney, 2006 ; Bromberg-Martin, Matsumoto & Hikosaka, 2010 ; Schultz & Dickinson, 2000 ). The phasic dopamine response is thought to serve as a general reward prediction error—indicating rewards or reward prospects of any type that are greater than expected ( Schultz et al., 1997 ). Information is not a primary reward (as juice or water would be in this context), but is a more indirect kind of reward. The fact that dopamine neurons signal both primary and informational reward suggests that the dopamine response reflects an integration of multiple reward components to generate an abstract reward response. This finding further suggests that dopamine responses not associated with rewards—such as surprising and aversive events—may reflect the value that information provides ( Horvitz, 2000 ; Matsumoto & Hikosaka, 2009 ; Redgrave & Gurney, 2006 ;).

These results suggest that, to subcortical reward structures, informational value is treated the same as any other valued good. To further test this idea, the authors asked whether midbrain neurons encode information prediction error ( Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2011 ). While the positive RPE is carried by DA neurons, its inverse, the negative RPE, is carried by neurons in the lateral habenula (LHb). They made use of this fact in task in which there was an option to choose a stochastically informative gamble, meaning it would provide (50/50 chance) valid or invalid information about the upcoming reward. They found that neurons in the LHb encode the unexpected occurrence of information and the unexpected denial of information—just as they do with basic rewards (water and juice).

Where does the domain-general curiosity signal come from? It has recently been proposed that the dopamine reward signal is constructed out of input signals originating in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which in turn receives input from basic sensory and association structures ( Öngür & Price, 2000 ; Schoenbaum et al., 2011 ; Takahashi et al., 2011 ; Rushworth et al., 2011 ). If OFC is an input to the evaluation system, then it should carry information about the reward value of curiosity but may not carry a single general reward signal. In other words, OFC may serve as a kind of workshop that represents elements of reward that can guide choice, but not a single domain general value signal. In the curiosity tradeoff task (see above and Figure 3 ), OFC neurons encode both the stakes of the gamble, and also the information value of the options ( Blanchard, Hayden, & Bromberg-Martin, 2015 ). But it doesn't integrate them into a single value signal. Thus, at least within this one task, curiosity is computed separately from other factors that influence value and combined at a specific point (or points) in the pathway between the OFC and the DA nuclei.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CURIOSITY

The fourth of Tinbergen’s questions concerns development of a behavior. Curiosity has been central to the study of infant and child attention and learning, and a major focus in research on early education for decades (e.g., Berlyne, 1978 ; Dember & Earl, 1957 ; Kinney & Kagan, 1976 ; Sokolov, 1960). The world of infants is full of potential sources for learning, but they possess limited information-processing resources. Thus, infants must solve what is known as the sampling problem : their attentional mechanisms must select a subset of material from everything available in their environments in order to make learning tractable. Furthermore, they must sample in a way that ensures that learning is efficient, which is tricky considering the fact that what material is most useful changes as the infant gains more knowledge.

Infants enter the world with some simple, low-level heuristics for guiding their attention towards certain informative features of the world. Haith (1980) argued that these organizing principles for visual behavior are fundamentally stimulus-driven. For example, infants’ gaze is pulled towards areas of high contrast, which is useful for detecting objects and perceiving their shapes (e.g., Salapatek & Kessen, 1966 ), and motion onset, which is useful for detecting animacy (e.g., Aslin & Shea, 1990 ). Infants also have an innate bias to orient towards faces (e.g., Farroni et al., 2005 ; Johnson et al., 1991 ), which relay both social information and cues that guide language learning (e.g., Baldwin, 1993 ). While this desire for information is surely intrinsic, whether or not these low-level mechanisms that guide infants’ early attentional behavior could be explained with curiosity depends on the chosen definition. If curiosity requires an explicit mental representation of the need for new information, these low-level heuristics do not qualify. However, a broader definition, which sees curiosity as any mechanism that guides an organism towards new information, regardless of mental substrate, they certainly do. Regardless of how you classify them, these attentional biases get the infant started down the road of knowledge acquisition.

Externally driven motivation is not sufficient. Learners also must adapt to changing needs as they build up and modify their mental representations of the world. Many early researchers posited that novelty was the primary stimulus feature of relevance for infants (e.g., Sokolov, 1960). Infants prefer novel stimuli in many paradigms, such as those used by Fantz (1964), the high-amplitude sucking procedure (Siqueland & DeLucia, 1969), and head-turn preference procedure ( Kemler Nelson et al., 1995 ). Novelty preference is also seen in habituation procedures, in which infants’ attention to a recurring stimulus decreases with lengthened exposure. Novelty theories, however, cannot account for infants’ attested familiarity preferences, such as their affinity for their native languages and familiar faces (e.g., Bushnell et al., 1989 ; DeCasper & Spence, 1986 ).

Later theories sought to unify infants’ novelty and familiarity preferences by explaining them in terms of infants’ changing knowledge states. In other words, an infant’s interest in a particular stimulus was theorized to be determined by that infant’s particular mental status. For example, as infants attempt to encode various features of a visual stimulus, the efficiency or depth of this encoding process determines their subsequent preferences. Infants were theorized to exhibit a preference for stimuli that were partially—but not fully—encoded into memory (e.g., Dember & Earl, 1957 ; Hunter & Ames, 1988 ; Kinney & Kagan, 1976 ; Roder, Bushnell, & Sasseville, 2000 ; Rose et al., 1982 ; Wagner, S.H., & Sakovitsjkk, 1986 ). This idea recalls the fact that we are curious for things that we are moderately certain of ( Kang et al., 2009 ).

Among these theories was Kinney and Kagan’s moderate discrepancy hypothesis , which suggested that infants preferentially attend to stimuli that were “optimally discrepant,” meaning those that were just the right amount of distinguishable from mental representations that the infant already possessed ( Kinney & Kagan, 1976 ). Under Dember and Early’s theory of choice/preference , learners seek stimuli that match their preferred level of complexity, which increases over time as they build up mental representations and acquire more knowledge ( Dember & Earl, 1957 ). Berlyne, similarly, noted that complexity-driven preferences could represent an optimal strategy for learning ( Berlyne, 1960 ). Such processing-based theories of curiosity predict that learners will exhibit a U-shaped pattern of preference for stimulus complexity, where complexity is defined in terms of the learner’s current set of mental representations. The theories predict that learners will preferentially select stimuli of an intermediate level of complexity—material that is neither overly simple (already encoded into memory) nor overly complex (too disparate from existing representations already encoded into memory).

Recent infant research supports these accounts (e.g., Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012 , 2014 , Figure 4 ). We showed 7- and 8-month-old infants visual event sequences of varying complexity, as measured by an idealized learning model, and measured points at which infants’ attention drifted (as indicate by looks away from the display). We found that infants’ probability of looking away was greatest to events of either very low information content (highly predictable) or very high information content (highly surprising). This attentional strategy holds in multiple types of visual displays ( Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012 ), for auditory stimuli ( Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2014 ), and even within individual infants ( Piantadosi, Kidd, & Aslin, 2014 ). These results suggest that infants implicitly decide to direct attention in order to maintain intermediate rates of information absorption. This attentional strategy likely prevents them from wasting cognitive resources on overly predictable or overly complex events, thus helping to maximize their learning potential.

A: Example display from Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin (2012) . Each display featured 3 unique boxes hiding 3 unique objects that revealed themselves one at a time according to one of 32 sequences of varying complexity. The sequence continued until the infant looked away for 1-second. B: Infant look-away data plotted by complexity (information content) as estimated by an ideal observer model over the transitional probabilities. The U-shaped pattern indicates that infants were least likely to look away at events with intermediate information content. Infants probability of looking away was greatest to events of either very low information content (highly predictable) or very high information content (highly surprising), consistent with an attentional strategy that aims to maintain intermediate rates of information absorption.

Related findings show that children structure their play in a way that reduces uncertainty and allows them to discover causal structures in the world (e.g., Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007 ). This work is in line with earlier theories of Jean Piaget (1930) that asserted that the purpose of curiosity and play was to “construct knowledge” through interactions with the world. If curiosity aims to reduce uncertainty in the world, we would expect learners to exhibit increased curiosity to stimuli in the world that they do not understand. In fact, this is a behavior that is well attested in recent developmental psychology studies, such as work by Bonawitz and colleagues ( Bonawitz, van Schijndel, Friel, & Schulz, 2012 ) that demonstrates that children prefer to play with toys that violate their expectations. Children also exhibit increased curiosity outside of pedagogical contexts, in the absence of explicitly given explanations ( Bonawitz et al., 2011 ). In an experiment in which Bonawitz and colleagues gave children a novel toy to explore, either prefaced or not with partial instruction of how the toy works, children played for longer and discovered more of the toys’ functions in the non-pedagogical conditions.

In line with the idea that the function of curiosity is to reduce uncertainty, children exhibit increased interest in situations with high degrees of uncertainty, such as preferentially playing with toys whose underlying mechanisms are not yet understood. Perhaps even more impressively, Schulz and Bonawitz (2007) found that children preferentially engaged with toys that allowed them to deconfound potential causal variables underlying toys’ inner workings. In these experiments, Schulz and Bonawitz had children play with toys consisting of boxes and levers. In both the confounded and unconfounded conditions, the researcher would help a child play with a red box with two levers. In the confounded condition, the researcher and the child each pressed down on a lever at the same time and, in response, two small puppets (a chick and a pom-pom) popped out of the top of the red box ( Figure 5 ). The puppets’ location—dead center—was not informative about which of the two levers caused each one to rise. In the unconfounded conditions, the researcher and child took turns pressing down on their respective levers one at a time or the researcher demonstrated each lever independently; thus, in both cases, it was clear which lever controlled each puppet. After this demonstration, the researcher uncovered a second, yellow box. After the demonstration and yellow-box reveal, children were left alone and instructed to play in the researcher’s absence for 60 seconds. During this period, children in the confounded condition preferentially explored the demonstrated red box over the novel yellow one.

Experimental stimuli from Schulz & Bonawitz (2007) . When both levers were pressed simultaneously, two puppets (a straw pompom and a chick) emerged from the center of the box. In this confounded case, the evidence was not informative about which of the two levers caused each puppet to rise. In the unconfounded conditions, one lever was pressed at a time, making it clear which lever caused each puppet to rise. During a free-play period following the toy's demonstration, children played more with the toy when the demonstrated evidence was confounded.

The idea that children structure their play in a way that is sensitive to information gain is further bolstered by a recent study by Cook and colleagues ( Cook, Goodman, & Schulz, 2011 ). They manipulated the ambiguity of various causal variables for a toy box that played music when certain—but not all—beads were place on top of it. A researcher initially demonstrated how the box worked by placing a pair of connected beads on top, thereby making it ambiguous which of the two beads was causally responsible for the music playing. Children were effective at both selecting and designing informative interventions to figure out the underlying causal structure when it was unclear from the demonstration. When given ambiguous evidence, children tested individual beads when possible and—even more impressively—when bead pair was permanently stuck connected together, children held them such that only one side was touching the box in order to isolate the effect of that particular bead on the box.

This hypothesis-testing behavior is now widely attested in the developmental psychology literature. Children appear to structure their play in order to deconfound variables when causal mechanisms at play in the world are unclear (e.g., Denison et al., 2013 ; Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 1999 ; Gweon et al., 2014 ; Schulz, Gopnik, & Glymour, 2007 ; van Schijndel et al., 2015 ), and also make efficient use of information that they encounter in the world to learn correct causal structures (e.g., Gopnik & Schulz, 2007 ; Gopnik at al., 2001 ). These findings are important because they highlight the fact that children’s curiosity appears specifically well suited to teaching them about the causal structure of the world. Thus, these strategic information-seeking behaviors in young children are far more sophisticated than the simple attentional heuristics that characterize early infant attention.

Curiosity has long fascinated laymen and scholars alike, but remains poorly understood as a psychological phenomenon. We argue that one factor impeding our understanding has been too much focus on delineating what is and is not curiosity. Another has been too much emphasis on taxonomy. These divide-then-conquer approaches are premature because they do not rely on empirical data. Perhaps the plethora of definitions and schemes attests more to differences in scholars’ intuitions than to differences in their data. Thus we recommend that the definition stage follow a relatively solid characterization of curiosity, defined as broadly as possible. For this reason, we are reluctant to commit to a strict definition now. This approach has risks, of course. It means that there will be a variety of studies using similar terms to describe different phenomena, and different terms to describe the same phenomena, which can be confusing. Nonetheless, we think the benefits of open-mindedness outweigh the costs.

Broadening the scope of inquiry has several advantages. First, it allows us to study information-seeking in non-humans, including monkeys, rats, and even roundworms. Animal techniques allow for a granular view of mechanism, allows a greater range of manipulations, and allows cross-species comparisons. Second, it allows us to temporarily put aside speculation about decision-makers’ motivations and focus on other questions. Third, by refusing to isolate curiosity from other cognitive processes, we can make bridges with other phenomena, especially reward and learning. Finally, it lets us take advantage of powerful new tasks invented in the past decade for studying the cognitive neuroscience of information-seeking.

Tinbergen’s Four Questions are designed to provide a way to explain the causes of any behavior. This approach already provides a convenient framework for considering the knowledge we have so far. In the domain of function , it seems clear that curiosity serves to motivate acquisition of knowledge and learning. In the domain of evolution , it seems that curiosity can tentatively be said to improve performance, yielding fitness benefits to organisms with it, and is likely to be an evolved trait. In the domain of mechanisms , it seems that the drive for information augments internal representations of value, thus biasing decision-makers towards informative options and actions. It also seems that curiosity activates learning systems in the brain. In the domain of development , we can infer that curiosity is critical for learning and that it reflects both external features and internal representations of own knowledge.

In the future we hope to see answers to some of these questions:

• In what ways does curiosity resemble other basic drive states? How does it differ? To what extent is curiosity fundamentally different from drives like hunger and thirst?
• What is the most useful taxonomy of curiosity? How well does Berlyne’s categorization hold up? What factors unite distinct forms of curiosity?
• How is curiosity controlled? What factors govern curiosity, and how does the brain integrate these factors into decision-making to produce decisions? To what extent is curiosity context-dependent?
• To what extent does curiosity in nematodes overlap (if at all) with curiosity in children? How useful is it to think of curiosity as being a single construct across a broad range of taxa?
• Does our continuing curiosity in adulthood serve a purpose or is it vestigial? Does continued curiosity serve to maintain cognitive abilities throughout adulthood?
• What is the link between curiosity and learning?
• Why and how is curiosity affected by diseases like depression and ADHD? Can sensitive measures of curiosity be used to predict and measure cognitive decline, senility, and Alzheimers’ Disease?

We can already sketch out rough guesses about how some of these questions will be answered. For example, we anticipate that, although useful in the past, Berlyne’s categories will be replaced with other, differently-formulated subtypes, and that these newer ones will be motivated by new neural and developmental data. We suspect that curiosity serves a similar purpose in adulthood as it does in childhood, albeit in perhaps a more refined way. Even as adults we need to continue to adjust our understanding of the world. Finally, we are optimistic that scientists will eventually uncover a consistent set of principles that characterize curiosity across a wide range of taxa.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a R01 (DA038615) to BYH. We thank Sarah Heilbronner, Steve Piantadosi, Shraddha Shah, Maya Wang, Habiba Azab, and Maddie Pelz for helpful comments.

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How do we become historical writers who don’t merely write about facts, but write strong informational essays that develop ideas, arrange facts, and provide supporting evidence and details, all while making connections and drawing conclusions?

Every year, I ask my students to write several informational essays. Essays that require research and research questions, a topic sentence, a main idea, supporting evidence, an introduction, and a conclusion. Inevitably, upon receiving the assignments, students panic and feel unsure of how to address at least one of the stages of the writing process. Sometimes the struggle is with getting started, developing research questions, or writing a strong and relevant topic sentence, and other times it’s with finding sources or adding and citing supporting evidence.

However, the skills required to craft an effective and powerful informational essay are not just important for your high school history class, they are skills and tools that can be used both in college and beyond.

One key skill we must cultivate and always treasure is curiosity. As William Arthur Ward wrote, “Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.” Curiosity is what ignites our learning. It’s what should push us to our topics - to begin to ask meaningful and thoughtful questions. Informational essays must begin with curiosity. If we are curious about our topic, we will WANT to ask questions, we will WANT to do the research, we will WANT to learn the answers, and we will WANT to ask more questions.

Albert Einstein said, “If we knew what it was that we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” Research is about not just looking for the answers we know, but also about finding questions we never knew we wanted to ask.

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Curiosity Can Help Us Overcome Disconnection

We live in a time when our relationships and social fabric are being ripped apart: neighbors screaming at each other at protests, parents at war about banning books at their school, and young people yelling “OK boomer” to elders at work. In one town, a faith congregation plunges into turmoil after a member comes out as gay; in another, a church and mosque are burned down by arsonists. Hate has seemingly infected the very air we breathe—poisoned by the culture of divisiveness and polarization, of “us versus them.”

The result of all this isn’t just discord and deep sadness on a collective level—it affects us all on a deeply personal one, as well. You can’t breathe toxic air like this and not feel it in your own lungs and heart.

I wanted to feel less scared and angry all the time—so in 2019, I quit my job to spend 12 months on the road, living out of my car, showering at Planet Fitness, and meeting people I’d never normally encounter as a city-dwelling liberal Asian American spiritually queer professor and researcher from Hawai‘i (whew, that’s a mouthful). I had my sights set on Trump rallies, anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, and churches. My goal was to understand how we could come back together as a country. How could we heal and forge deeper connections—rather than turn away from each other—to solve the big problems we collectively face?

Through this journey, I realized that there is a path to us overcoming the disconnection and division so pervasive in our country: curiosity. I learned that curiosity is a practice, something we need to use every day, which inspired me to write my new book Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World . When we learn to go deep with curiosity, it can be the key to unlocking positive well-being and relationships in our lives.

An era of incuriosity

Based on my interviews, observations, and research, I’ve come to see that the common thread behind a lot of our disconnection, suffering, and polarization today is in curiosity: closing ourselves off from understanding the perspectives, stories, and humanity of others.

It has become rare to practice deep listening. Instead, we cancel people instead of calling them in (as Loretta Ross says) with accountability, meaning we are more likely to shame, judge, or dehumanize the people we disagree with. This can lead to us staying in our silos and refusing to connect with people who have different beliefs than us. That means we aren’t exposed to other ways of thinking or being, and we further codify our own biases. This can lead to us stereotyping others, as we miss out on the nuance and complexity that comes with the range of identities people hold.

This era of incuriosity is literally killing us. Long-term studies have found that less curiosity chops precious time off our lifespan, and contributes to loneliness and isolation.

If we want to strengthen our relationships rather than rupture them, we have to learn to ask more powerful questions rather than pass judgment. We need to become the kind of people who search for stories rather than positions, and values instead of views. We have to look inside of ourselves, getting curious about our own past and emotions, and not just rely on learning about the world outside of us.

In my work with the Greater Good Science Center, including co-creating the Bridging Differences Playbook , I’ve seen the power of curiosity again and again with all kinds of people: educators, therapists, journalists, community organizers, entrepreneurs, researchers, artists, students, and parents. I’ve spent the last five years rigorously researching how curiosity might help us to bridge social and political divides. In order to glean these benefits, we must be deliberate about how we use curiosity—and we must go much deeper than we customarily go.

Four steps to deeper curiosity

We tend to limit our understanding of curiosity by talking about it as a force for extracting information. Most people see it as a purely intellectual pursuit rather than one that can stir our hearts and spirits. We see how it helps children to develop language and communication skills or to remember what song was just playing on the radio.

While this kind of curiosity is important, there is much more it can offer us. We need to embrace what I call “deep curiosity.” This is the kind of curiosity that invites us to use it as a force for meaningful connection and transformation. This is what strengthens our relationships to ourselves and each other, helping us to better navigate disagreements, revive decades-old marriages, or heal from past pain or trauma. 
 Curiosity begs us to ask questions that invite nuance and surprise. Rather than “What should I do to make money?,” we ask ourselves, “When I’m really flourishing, what does that look like?” Instead of “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?,” we ask others, “What values are important to you?” Rather than “Where did my ancestors come from?,” we ask, “How do I stay connected to them throughout my life?”

I’ve developed an overarching framework called DIVE to help us access our deep curiosity:

Detach: Let go of your ABCs (assumptions, biases, certainty). We attach to assumptions, biases, and certainty because that is how our brains naturally operate. These are automatic human tendencies that help us make sense of the world—and they also provide us with a feeling of security. Not to mention, being right and righteous brings social status and power in today’s twisted culture.

Detaching is a journey of lifelong un learning—about yourself, about others, and about the world more broadly. But when we begin to let go of our ABCs, we change the way we perceive and interact with the people around us.

Tips to detach:

• Back that assumption up. Validate whether your assumptions are true or not by engaging with those about whom you hold assumptions. Through conversation and connection, you’ll often find that the assumptions you’re holding on to are not accurate. For example, if you assume that a friend is late to a lunch date because they don’t respect you or your time, you can directly ask them about it. You might find that they’re struggling to cope with their family or work responsibilities, or view punctuality through a different cultural lens (island time is real!).
• Fact-check your faulty “mind reader” abilities. Metaperceptions are the ways we think others think about us, and they are often negative and inaccurate—because we can’t read another person’s mind. Balance negative metaperceptions with positive ones, and if you’re feeling extra courageous, ask the other person if they’re true or not. If you think your mother-in-law views you as lazy because you’re struggling with unemployment, you can talk to her about it. Or just try to remember other ways she might see you, too, such as funny, engaging, or caring.
• Try out the “garden salad” effect. Imagine another person’s vegetable preference ( do they like broccoli or carrots more? ). This helps you see that person as an individual, appreciating that they have unique tastes and preferences, rather than seeing them strictly in terms of their group identities. You can also find shared identities with people who are different from you—similar to how different vegetables can be put together in a salad.
• Become an “admitter.” See admitting being wrong as an act of intellectual humility that leads to better communication, relationships, leadership, and life satisfaction. You can do this by saying, “Tell me more” when you’re told you’re wrong, prioritizing learning and growth, and reminding yourself that humans are wired for forgiveness.

Intend: Prepare your mindset and setting. Intention means to be deliberate in your practice of deep curiosity rather than haphazard. This is important, since deep curiosity isn’t something that’s given to us—it’s something we choose (or don’t) every day. When we are intentional about bringing more of it into our lives, it begins to infuse the decisions we make.

Part of this involves preparing the right mindset and setting when being curious. For your mindset, think in advance about the questions you’d ask in a conversation or visualize how you’d show up to be as open-hearted as possible if you expect conflict. Picking a setting that encourages curiosity and connection might look like a private space where both people feel safe to express themselves fully, and where there’s little to no distractions so it encourages deep listening.

This kind of preparation can help soothe your nerves and fears before entering a situation that might push your emotional boundaries (in a good way)—say, on a first date, during a difficult conversation at work, or while engaging with someone across the political aisle. Not only will this ease your own personal suffering beforehand, but it will also set you up for a curious encounter that is likely to be far more successful.

Value: See the dignity of every person, including yourself. To value is to see the inherent and ineffable dignity of all people, including yourself. It is to acknowledge the humanity of every single person, no matter what they’ve done or how you feel about them. Full stop and no exceptions. Until we honor the inherent worth of others, and work to see them as complex beings with lives, families, joys, struggles, jobs, personalities, likes, and dislikes, we can’t access deep curiosity.

Psychologists Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske found that we are less likely to consider the emotions of those we devalue. In one study, they asked participants to describe a day in the life of three people: a person who is homeless, a firefighter, and a college student. In their descriptions, participants were less likely to consider the emotional state of the person who was homeless (a group that is often dehumanized) than that of the firefighter or college student.

In contrast, when you value someone, you choose a path of connection rather than distance, understanding rather than judgment, and love rather than incuriosity. For example, you value yourself by exploring how you felt when a friend didn’t extend you an invitation, and sharing your concerns with them. You value your friend by not calling them a bitch and respecting them enough to offer them a chance to respond to your hurt feelings.

While reading this, you’re probably nodding along in total agreement. We like to think that we already see people fully, as complex human beings. But when it comes to that asshole who cut you off on the freeway, that coworker who is a walking microaggression, or being hard on ourselves when we mess up with parenting or loving our spouse, it’s much harder to practice valuing others and ourselves.

Embrace: Welcome the hard times in your life. Embrace is a reminder for us to move toward the things we fear, which usually happens at a moment of change, such as a career shift, a new home, expanding the family, or navigating loss. Instead of trying to push away discomfort, fear, anxiety, or pain, we can get curious about where they’re coming from and what they have to teach us.

You can take the moments in your life, which are rife with uncomfortable feelings, and transform them into something useful. We don’t do this by suppressing negative emotions or pretending that everything is “just fine, thank you very much!” We do this by embracing all of it—the good and the bad—and leaving room for the possibility of change to follow. When we experience grief, for instance, we might reflect on that person’s legacy and the precious memories we’ve shared with them. But we also create the space to honor the anger and sadness we feel that this person is no longer with us, and get curious about where in our body those emotions are coming up for us (such as our gut, throat, or chest).

It’s important to remember that deep curiosity is a practice, meaning we must use it in small and big ways every day to gain mastery in it. As you do, you’ll find it strengthens your relationships to yourself and others so you can feel happier and more connected to the world around you, in addition to the world inside of you. Deep curiosity is a life-changing gift, something you can offer to your family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and strangers. It’s a generous force, which means it’s supposed to be shared.

Not only do we all have this superpower, but we all stand to benefit from it. This is the only way we will dance our way out of this era of division and fear.

About the Author

Scott Shigeoka

Scott Keoni Shigeoka is a storyteller and entrepreneur. He is the Bridging Differences fellow for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and led the development of the Bridging Differences Playbook .

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A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Knowledge at Wharton Podcast

The ‘why’ behind asking why: the science of curiosity, august 23, 2017 • 22 min listen.

A new book examines the different drivers of curiosity, and how this fundamental human trait has been impacted by the digital age.

Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio discusses his new book on curiosity.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge at Wharton: What is it that really drives our curiosity?

Mario Livio: Curiosity has several kinds or flavors, and they are not driven by the same things. There is something that has been dubbed perceptual curiosity. That’s the curiosity we feel when something surprises us or when something doesn’t quite agree with what we know or think we know. That is felt as an unpleasant state, as an adversity state. It’s a bit like an itch that we need to scratch. That’s why we try to find out the information in order to relieve that type of curiosity.

On the other hand, there is something that has been dubbed epistemic curiosity, which is a pleasurable state associated with an anticipation of reward. That’s our level of knowledge. That’s what drives all scientific research. It drives many artworks. It drives education and things like that.

Knowledge at Wharton: There’s a basic difference between being unpleasant or unhappy and being happy. I would think many people feel both of those things pretty much every day of their lives, correct?

Livio: You’re absolutely right. You see something that you completely did not expect or is very ambiguous, and you feel somewhat unpleasant about this. On the other hand, you try to learn something new every day, and that is a very pleasurable state that gives you a reward. So yes, everybody feels both of these things almost every day.

Knowledge at Wharton: Is there an element of curiosity that is enhanced by living in the digital age?

Livio: There are some people who have the feeling that because we have information literally at our fingertips, maybe we’re becoming less curious. But that’s not true. There are two things to remember. One is that when we do scientific research, we try to find answers to questions where we don’t know the answers yet. Therefore, you cannot find those answers on the internet or Wikipedia.

The other thing is that what the internet allows us to do is to satisfy what has been dubbed specific curiosity, namely you want to know a very particular detail. Who wrote this or that book? What was the name of the actor in that film? The digital age allows you to find the answer very quickly. That’s actually good because you don’t want to spend all your time trying to answer a question like that. I don’t know how you feel, but I sometimes can be really obsessed by not knowing the answer to something very, very simple like that.

Knowledge at Wharton: That’s almost a natural component of who we are. There are times when we become obsessed with wanting to know what that information is.

“Curiosity has several kinds or flavors, and they are not driven by the same things.”

Livio: That’s right. In that sense, the digital age helps us because we can find that information, and that may drive us to look for something else about this. And that would drive perhaps epistemic curiosity, which is this love of knowledge and wanting to learn new things.

Knowledge at Wharton: Do you think love of knowledge is truly the driving force behind curiosity and the other pieces are part of the spider web off the core?

Livio: Not necessarily. There have been all kinds of experiments in neuroscience with functional MRI, where they make people curious then put them in these MRI machines and see which parts of their brains are activated. It was found that this perceptual curiosity, the one when you’re surprised or find something unexpected, is associated with activations of the parts in our brain that usually work in conflict or when you’re hungry or thirsty. On the other hand, the parts that are associated with learning new things really activate the parts that are associated with anticipation of reward, like when somebody’s offering you a piece of chocolate or when you sit in a theater and you’re waiting for the curtain to go up.

Knowledge at Wharton: When you think historically, there have been world leaders who have wanted to snuff out curiosity. I’m thinking particularly of Fidel Castro. Some people would say President Trump is trying to do that. Have you seen that as a component in the world?

Livio: Of course. We all know about the Middle Ages, the medieval times when curiosity was almost taken out of existence. It was mostly the church that wanted to convey to the masses the feeling that everything worth knowing is already known. They built walls around all types of knowledge and really oppressed curiosity in this way.

You mentioned a few leaders, but it’s not just leaders. The Taliban destroyed works of art. ISIS is destroying works of art in Palmyra, in Syria. There have been book burnings over the years. The Nazis made a degenerate art exhibit where they tried to deface all the modern painters. There definitely have been oppressive regimes and ideologies that try to stifle curiosity.

Knowledge at Wharton: What I found interesting in the book is that you note there really isn’t one definition of curiosity.

Livio: Yes. I mentioned already two of those types of curiosity: perceptual and epistemic. There is also something that has been dubbed diversive curiosity. That’s the thing when you see young people constantly on their smartphone, looking for text messages to ward off boredom, I think.

Knowledge at Wharton: Curiosity has always been seen as a very good thing because you’re trying to gain knowledge. There is a negative to diversive curiosity because your attention is turned away. But there is the element of searching or looking for information. It’s kind of walking a fine line there.

“There are some people who have the feeling that because we have information literally at our fingertips, maybe we’re becoming less curious. But that’s not true.”

Livio: You’re absolutely right. They’re also looking for information, and also it serves as a social element. They connect with friends. They connect with people, sometimes across countries. It isn’t all negative.

Knowledge at Wharton: Do you think it affects curiosity in general because it has become such an attractive piece to our society? It’s changed the communication skill. Instead of face to face, it’s fingertip to fingertip.

Livio: That may have eventually some negative consequences if people just stay at home and connect through all kinds of digital devices. I can see all kinds of shortcomings for that type of a society. But at the same time, the really important questions like advances in science and so on cannot be found through digital devices.

Knowledge at Wharton: You take time in the book to really delve into the science of this. Tell us what you found and why science has been so intrigued by this.

Livio: If you’re a curious person, then you ought to also be curious about curiosity itself. This has been research by psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. There are two parts to this. One is to understand our state of mind when we are curious. I alluded to that in that one type of curiosity creates an unpleasant sensation and another creates an anticipation of reward. It was found that especially the epistemic curiosity, when we try to learn new things, it really follows the paths of reward of dopamine, which is this neural transmitter that is associated with reward in our brains.

Knowledge at Wharton: I think there are people who are naturally curious. It almost is ingrained in their personality as they come into the world. Is that the case?

“If you’re a curious person, then you ought to also be curious about curiosity itself.”

Livio: Of course. Most psychological traits, and curiosity is no exception, have a genetic component to them. The fact that some people are much more curious than others largely has to do with their genetics. But, as in all cases, genetics is never the whole story. In the same way as nature versus nurture question, the two of them play a role. You can enhance curiosity by doing certain things, by asking questions, by encouraging people to be curious about things. Or you can suppress curiosity as we just noted, sometimes by regime, sometimes by ideologies, and so on.

People have something in them which they are born with, but the environment can help or be against enhancing this curiosity. Just to give an example, if you are the children of refugees that have to cross countries and look for food all the time, you may be curious about where do you find your next meal and not about contemplating the meaning of life.

Knowledge at Wharton: With all of the innovation that goes on right now, it feels like we’re constantly looking to improve so many aspects of our lives. Is it fair to say that curiosity is one of the things that might be hard to improve?

Livio: No. I don’t think it is hard to improve. You cannot change your genetic makeup, but through the education system you can actually improve on curiosity. I’ll give you a very simple example. If you teach science to young children, don’t start by trying to teach them things that they may not be interested in. Start with something they’re already curious about, like dinosaurs. Start with dinosaurs and then find interesting ways to connect from that to other concepts you would like them to learn, rather than starting from the beginning with something they may not be interested in. Most people know that very young children are extremely curious. They constantly ask questions. That’s largely because they especially want to understand cause and effect. They want to understand how the world around them is functioning so that they make fewer errors.

Some people think that as we grow up we lose our curiosity, and that’s not entirely true. We do lose some elements of diversive curiosity or the ability to be surprised. But actually epistemic curiosity, that love of knowledge, appears to be roughly constant across all ages.

Knowledge at Wharton: When you are older, you do not take the risks that you did when you were, say, 20 or 30. But I would think that your curiosity doesn’t wane that much when you’re older, correct?

Livio: Correct. Your love of knowledge remains and your willingness to learn new things appears to be constant across all ages. People at very old ages are still willing to learn things, to discover new things, to read. The topics in which you are curious about may change with age or with time or with whatever occupation you are in. Different people are curious about different things, and the level of intensity of their curiosity may be different.

“Different people are curious about different things, and the level of intensity of their curiosity may be different.”

Knowledge at Wharton: Are kids more curious than adults?

Livio: Kids are more curious in terms of diversity than perceptual curiosity. But I think in terms of epistemic curiosity, adults are as curious. This probably all started for survival. We needed to understand very well our environment in order to be able to survive, so there was an evolutionary pressure to this. But somehow humans are always more curious than just for mere survival. I’m an astrophysicist. What we study in science will probably become applicable at one point, but it is not applicable at the moment. We’re still very curious about this because we want to understand everything around us.

Knowledge at Wharton: What is it that makes you curious?

Livio: I’m really curious about the universe, things that relate to the beginning of the universe, to the fate of the universe, the nature of the dark energy that is pushing the cosmic expansion to accelerate. But I’m also interested in things like how did life emerge in the universe, the nature of consciousness, many things.

Knowledge at Wharton: We talked about the potential for curiosity to be enhanced further. Is that an expectation of yours?

Livio: The nature of scientific research, but sometimes even artistic contemplation, is that the answer to every question just brings about a new question. Sometimes the new question is even more intriguing than the original question, so you may become more curious about it.

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The power of curiosity.

There are essentially two different modes of thought you can apply when deciding what to do: purpose and curiosity . Acting through purpose means accomplishing a project or task because you have a known outcome. Writing this article is an act of purpose, I want to update my blog with new content, so I’m writing with the intent of finishing an article.

Curiosity, however, is a more interesting perspective that is often underused. In taking on an activity because of curiosity, you aren’t taking on a task despite an uncertain outcome. You’re taking on a task or project, because the result is uncertain. While acting from purpose comes from the need to achieve something known, curiosity drives us to learn something new.

Lost Curiosity

When you don’t know anything, curiosity will drive the majority of your actions. If you were stuck next to a machine that had many buttons, but you didn’t understand how it worked, you would probably experiment until it’s functions were known to you. Small children take a lot of actions out of curiosity, building basic knowledge about the world.

At some point, however, curiosity starts to taper off. With a minimum understanding, the emphasis switches from curiosity-driven actions to purpose-driven actions. When learning how to use blogging software, I was initially unfocused, trying to figure out the function of everything. After using WordPress for three years, I’m almost completely purpose-driven, focusing on writing articles rather than trying to uncover new features in the software.

The problem is that curiosity can die off too soon. When was the last time you invested time into a project or activity simply because you wanted to see what would happen? If you’re over twenty, I’m guessing that those types of projects and activities make only a small part of your free time. Curiosity is replaced with purpose, and in that replacement, something important has been lost.

The Curiosity Valley of Death

There comes a point when you have enough understanding of a system to achieve results. Further studying of the system then becomes less productive than actually working with what you know. An hour spent uncovering new features is less useful than working with the features you understand.

However, the problem of lost curiosity is a problem of a local maximum. Curiosity may be less valuable, in the short run, but added curiosity can often ratchet you to an even greater level of achievement. Getting out of the valley of death is difficult both intellectually and emotionally.

From an intellectual standpoint, because you are on a local maximum, it appears as if curiosity-driven actions are a waste of time. Why waste six months on an experimental business idea when you can guarantee yourself $30,000 by completing a known project? Why try a new diet when you’ve had success in losing weight on a previous diet? Why take a martial arts class for fun when you know you’ll be entertained by playing video games?

From an emotional perspective, curiosity can be frightening. There’s a reason it killed the cat. In a prehistoric world, being too curious could mean eating a poison mushroom or getting too friendly with a bear. So it’s not surprising that humans are engineered with a disposition towards purpose-driven actions after a short period of time.

But we don’t live in prehistoric times. What’s the worst that will happen? You’ll lose a few months, a promotion or some cash? More, because the world has become more complex, there are even more local maxima, so the chances that you’ve stumbled upon the best strategy for living is rare. Curiosity has become more valuable, but most people still avoid it.

Reigniting Curiosity

Purpose-driven activities are still worth doing. Known outcomes are useful for your finances, relationships and health. But in a complicated world with infinite choice and variety, curiosity becomes a more powerful long-term tool for achievement.

What are some ways you can reignite your curiosity?

• Work on projects with no defined results . Write a novel when you’ve never written a short story before. Train for a marathon when you aren’t athletic. Find something you’re bad at and make a project out of it, because chances are if you’re bad at something it’s because you know very little about it. Ignorance is the starting point for curiosity.
• Read books about a topic you don’t normally read about . The point of a book isn’t knowledge, it’s wisdom. Your most important decisions aren’t going to come in the form of a citation, they’re going to be divulged from the background ideas you’ve been exposed to. Reading a huge variety, and taking advantage of curiosity, gives you new ideas.
• Waste time on something creative . Try learning how to use a tool you’ve never practiced before. Curiously exploring new tools can often have unintended benefits. The programming skills I built on completely unrelated projects have helped me in running a website. The artistic skills I built allowed me to do much of my own design work for products.

Have Fewer Long-Range Goals

I’m a big proponent of goal-setting. Goal-setting is the purified product of purpose-driven thinking. Goal-setting can also help in a curiosity context as well. Thirty day trials are a type of goal, but involve experimenting with a new form of behavior. Goal-setting can give you the momentum to get over your natural aversion to trying new things.

But goal-setting can also inhibit creativity, particularly when long-range goals overwhelm all of your time and energy. I started goal setting by making five and ten year goals, I’ve since stopped doing this practice because I felt it took away my ability to see new directions. Now, I set goals of six months to 2-3 years, but I don’t set any longer than this.

Long-range goals, particularly those that consume a lot of time and energy, restrict the flow of new inputs. When I’m engaged in a six-month project, I’m constantly being exposed to new ideas that I need to put on hold because I’m purpose-driven. However, once the goal is reached, I then have the opportunity to explore some of those ideas. If one of them is significant enough, I may devote an entirely new project for exploring this direction.

When writing my longest ebook, Learn More, Study Less , I had the idea to go in a completely different direction. I wanted to work on a book that was shorter, easier to digest and distilled into individual ideas rather than a long essay. I put the idea on hold, but after I finished, I worked on The Little Book of Productivity , an experiment in a completely different direction.

Maintaining an Idea Folder

Aside from musings in my journal, I don’t actually maintain a written folder with new ideas for projects to pursue. However, I always keep new ideas in the forefront of my thinking. Whenever I read or stumble upon something that seems interesting and different, I make a mental note. Then, later, I can pursue the best ideas in a separate project.

If you’re stuck in purpose-driven actions, you may want to create an actual folder with written cards to accomplish this. I have a to-read list which serves a similar function of storing books I want to explore.

Planting Seeds Versus Watering Trees

Purpose-driven action is like watering a tree. You are putting inputs into a known system with a known result. For the most part, the watering the tree will encourage it to grow. Curiosity-driven actions are like planting new seeds. Only a small fraction will sprout, but if you plant enough, some may become healthy trees.

If you only water existing trees, you’re in a risky position. A bolt of lighting or disease could kill off a big tree and you’d be left with nothing. There is also the risk that you might water a stunted tree, and by planting no more seeds, you have no opportunities to find a bigger, healthier tree to put your energies into.

A lot of people I talk to have sickly trees. They aren’t happy with their lives and can’t seem to find a way out. One strategy is simply to water the trees more. If you aren’t taking care of your health, finances or relationships, then you shouldn’t be surprised when they’re withered and shrunken.

But often the problem isn’t in your effort, it’s in the trees. Working harder at a job you hate won’t help. In these cases, curiosity, planting more seeds, is the solution. Even if your current situation seems grim, planting more seeds can give eventual opportunities.

The 20% Rule

Twenty percent of your energy, time and money should be devoted to experimental and curiosity-driven pursuits. I’m borrowing from the successful strategy used in Google where employees must devote 20% of their time towards self-directed projects. Twenty percent is an arbitrary figure, the actual optimal result may be 50% or 75%, depending on your situation, but for most people I’d say 20% is a good start.

See how you could free up one day per week to invest into projects or activities where you can’t predict the material outcome. Even if you need to free up eight hours on a Saturday for this activity, it is worth the expense. First, novelty makes life more interesting, remember: boredom is the enemy . Second, the unintended benefits of seed projects can have huge repercussions in only a short period of time. I started this website without any definite expectations, now it can support me through University.

One day, once per week, do one thing new. Either add up all the time and invest it into an experimental project, or devote it separately to something completely different each time. Whatever the case, be curious and enjoy planting new seeds.

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Why Curiosity Enhances Learning

A neurological study has shown that curiosity makes our brains more receptive for learning, and that as we learn, we enjoy the sensation of learning.

It's no secret that curiosity makes learning more effective and enjoyable. Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers. Without curiosity, Sir Isaac Newton would have never formulated the laws of physics, Alexander Fleming probably wouldn't have discovered penicillin, and Marie Curie's pioneering research on radioactivity may not exist.

Instilling students with a strong desire to know or learn something is what every teacher lives for, and research has even shown that curiosity is just as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school. But how much do we really know about its role in the learning process?

Your Brain Likes Curiosity

Recently, researchers from the University of California, Davis conducted a series of experiments to discover what exactly goes on in the brain when our curiosity is aroused. For the study , the researchers had participants rate how curious they were to learn the answers to more than 100 trivia questions, such as "What Beatles single lasted longest on the charts, at 19 weeks?" or "What does the term 'dinosaur' actually mean?" At certain points throughout the study, fMRI scans were carried out to see what was happening in the brain when participants felt particularly curious about the answer to a question.

So what did these experiments reveal? Here are two of the most important findings.

1. Curiosity prepares the brain for learning.

While it might be no big surprise that we're more likely to remember what we've learned when the subject matter intrigues us, it turns out that curiosity also helps us learn information we don't consider all that interesting or important.

The researchers found that, once the subjects' curiosity had been piqued by the right question, they were better at learning and remembering completely unrelated information. One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Matthias Gruber, explains that this is because curiosity puts the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it.

So if a teacher is able to arouse students' curiosity about something they're naturally motivated to learn, they'll be better prepared to learn things that they would normally consider boring or difficult. For instance, if a student struggles with math, personalizing math problems to match their specific interests rather than using generic textbook questions could help them better remember how to go about solving similar math problems in the future.

2. Curiosity makes subsequent learning more rewarding.

Aside from preparing the brain for learning, curiosity can also make learning a more rewarding experience for students.

The researchers found that when the participants' curiosity had been sparked, there was not only increased activity in the hippocampus, which is the region of the brain involved in the creation of memories, but also in the brain circuit that is related to reward and pleasure. This circuit is the same one that lights up when we get something we really like, such as candy or money, and it relies on dopamine, a "feel-good" chemical that relays messages between neurons and gives us a sort of high.

So not only will arousing students' curiosity help them remember lessons that might otherwise go in one ear and out the other, but it can also make the learning experience as pleasurable as ice cream or pocket money. Of course, most teachers already instinctively know the importance of fostering inquisitive minds, but to have science back it up is undeniably satisfying.

Asking the Right Question

Naturally, there are still a few things that remain unclear about curiosity's role in learning. For one thing, scientists have yet to determine its long-term effects. For instance, if a student's curiosity is stimulated at the beginning of a school day, will it help them better absorb information all day long? Another thing the researchers are keen to investigate is why some people are more naturally curious than others, and which factors most influence how curious we are.

For the moment, though, these findings serve as a reminder that there is no such thing as a dumb question, because as cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham notes in his book Why Don't Students Like School? , it's the question that stimulates curiosity -- being told the answer quells curiosity before it can even get going.

So rather than jumping straight into the answers, let's try to start students off with the sort of questions that encourage them to do their own seeking.

What questions tend to spark greater curiosity among your students?

3c. From Curiosity to Inquiry

Topic development and prewriting, learning objectives.

• Deploy a range of prewriting strategies to choose a topic and narrow the focus of an essay.
• Develop a working thesis statement to help you outline and draft an essay

For most students (and their teachers), the most difficult part of any writing project is knowing where to begin and how to fill a blank page.  The other difficult part, sharing your work with other people who might criticize it, becomes much easier if you have a positive start to a project. When faced with a blank page, it is easy to be overwhelmed, shut off the screen, and procrastinate. Experienced writers do not wake up each day, start typing, and crank out page after page of perfect prose or poetry. They take their time, try to keep a schedule, and follow a common writing process while developing their own style.

Just as you need a recipe, ingredients, and proper tools to cook a delicious meal, you also need a plan, resources, and adequate time to create effective academic essays, presentations, and other writing assignments. Writing is a process that works best when you follow steps and use time-tested strategies to accomplish your goals and meet the rigorous expectations of your professors. Chefs, surgeons, architects, musicians, and athletes do not become professionals overnight; they practice and practice their craft until they become technicians and artists.

Prewriting Techniques

In addition to composing Questions at Issue, a strategy explored elsewhere in Chapter 3, academic writers use a variety of prewriting techniques to develop a topic and begin their writing projects.  These include:

Task Analysis

Freewriting.

• Idea mapping
• Journalist’s questions (5WH)
• Web browsing

If you take the time prewrite while developing your topic, you will feel more prepared to develop a working thesis for your essay and begin outlining and drafting.

Using the strategies in this section can help you begin filling any blank page or screen with your ideas and evidence and confidently begin the writing process. As you try out the various prewriting strategies in this chapter and begin to draft, revise, and edit your essays, the following topic checklist can help you decide if your working thesis is narrow and focused enough for your assignment:

• How can I develop curiosity and interest about an assigned topic?
• How can my curiosity and reading help me develop my own topic?
• Will my topic suit the purpose and audience for my writing task?
• What do I already know about the topic? Is my personal experience related to the topic or task?
• What more do I want to learn about this topic and where I can I learn more about it?
• Do other writers disagree about this topic or have different perspectives than mine?
• Is my topic focused and specific enough to fit the length requirements of the writing task?

Many writing topics in college and the workplace are assigned as tasks. You may be tasked with answering a question written by your instructor or required to come up with your own topic for an essay with relatively little guidance.  When starting any writing processes, being with a task analysis. Read and analyze the task instructions both closely and critically, from the purpose and scope of the task to details about topic, length, deadlines, style, sources, and other requirements.

Writing assignments can vary widely by subject and instructor in college so you may have to ask follow-up questions in class, by email, or during office hours to make sure you understand the expectations of the task.  Just as some college writing begins with an assigned topic, professors and professional writers typically begin new writing projects based on topic suggestions from editors. When given the opportunity to develop your own topic, the following strategies can also be helpful:

• Consider whether you can identify the purpose of the writing task and your audience
• Reflect on what you already know about the topic and any personal experiences with it
• Read the task guidelines critically and sympathetically and ask questions about the expectations
• Annotate the task guidelines and highlight key words or information you need to remember

Freewriting is an exercise in which you handwrite or type without stopping for a set amount of time. During a freewrite, your goal is to fill the page with writing as quickly as possible without worrying about spelling, sentence structure, or punctuation. If you get stuck, you can copy the same word over and over again, insert tangents, and generally do all you can to stay focused on the task – whether you are brainstorming a topic from scratch or developing ideas for an assigned topic. You can write in full sentences, bullet points, rhyming couplets, or whatever strikes your fancy as you let your mind wander and write down all words that you can think of about your topic. You might try entering these words into a wordcloud generator (for example, Wordclouds or Wordart ) to look for patterns that emerge or discover that you have a strong set of keywords to type into library and internet search engines.

Freewriting exercises the muscles we use to produce writing, which makes it easier on our bodies to sit down and compose paragraphs and pages of text required for essays.  If you can find a comfortable space to do your freewriting, you can relax and put away distractions like phones and social media. Try to write without doubting your ideas or worrying whether or not they make sense to someone else. Your flow of thoughts may lead you to unexpected or even uncomfortable places, but the exercise will definitely pay off later as you reflect, read, and further develop your topic.

Idea Mapping

Idea mapping is a form of brainstorming that turns the space of the page into a visual canvas. One way to brainstorm visually is to use your writing and art skills to fill the page with a visual interpretation of your topic or concept.  Graphic novelists, advertisers, and web designers are just a few of the people whose work requires the ability to combine text and images on the page.  If you are a visual learner or nonlinear thinker, sometimes starting in your comfort zone as you develop a topic or concept can help you prepare for the structured work of developing an outline for a formal academic essay.

Idea mapping is a structured brainstorming exercise that allows you to visualize your ideas and develop connections between keywords using circles, lines, and arrows.  This technique is also known as “clustering” because the ideas become clustered across the page and grouped together using lines and arrows. Many writers use larger and smaller circles to signify the scope or importance of certain words and help narrow a topic. Using idea mapping, you might discover interesting connections between topics that you had not thought of before.

To create an idea map, start with a blank sheet of paper and write or draw your main topic in the center and draw a circle or other shape around it. Use lines or arrows to connect ideas and keywords as you fill the space of the page. Create clusters of keywords and ideas across the page as your ideas emerge.  Idea mapping is a great excuse to get some markers, crayons, or anything that helps you think visually and use large sheets of paper. Use a camera to snap a record of your work to review later. You can also create idea maps on using slideshow software or other publication applications.

Figure 1: Idea Map

Journalist’s Questions (5WH)

Before narrowing a topic all the way down to a single question at issue that can be answered in a thesis statement, a general topic or concept can be effectively narrowed down and focused by applying the six journalist’s questions:

Also know as 5WH, these six questions are a great place to start because they will inevitably lead you to asking secondary questions about how you can locate information in books, articles and other sources.  If the sources for an essay have been assigned to you (such a course textbook or set of shared readings), the journalist’s questions can help you read those texts sympathetically and critically to gather information and direct quotations that can be used to provide supporting evidence in your essays.

Web Browsing

For thousands of years, students and scholars had to go to a library, archive, or bookstore to browse encyclopedias, books, academic journals, magazines, government documents, and other kinds of source material to analyze and use as evidence in their essays.  Developed by computer scientists, the military, and universities during the second half of the 20 th century, the internet became widely available for use schools, libraries, and homes during the 1990s.  Since then, students and their professors have been using web browsers, search engines, and online databases to brainstorm topics, read articles, and conduct research.

Your university library website is a great resource for topic development because librarians are highly trained to provide students and researchers access to information.  Information literacy is the ability to find, identify, evaluate, and use information effectively.  Librarians trained in information literacy pass on those skills by developing research guides and other materials that will be useful guides on your journey.  Librarians these days are very welcoming people who are happy to chat about your writing at any stage in the process. Your library website may also have a web page with tips on how to get the most out of your browsing experience.

As you browse, look for three types of useful sources to develop a broad perspective of your topic: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

When searching for information on a topic, it is important to understand the value of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.  

Primary sources allow researchers to get as close as possible to original ideas, events, and empirical research as possible. Such sources may include creative works, first-hand or contemporary accounts of events, and the publication of the results of empirical observations or research.

Secondary sources analyze, review, or summarize information in primary resources or other secondary resources. Even sources presenting facts or descriptions about events are secondary unless they are based on direct participation or observation. Moreover, secondary sources often rely on other secondary sources and standard disciplinary methods to reach results, and they provide the principal sources of analysis about primary sources.

Tertiary sources provide overviews of topics by synthesizing information gathered from other resources. Tertiary resources often provide data in a convenient form or provide information with context by which to interpret it.

The distinctions between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources can sometimes be ambiguous. An individual document may be a primary source in one context and a secondary source in another. While these definitions are clear, the lines can begin to blur in the different discipline areas.

Sources in the humanities and social sciences

In the humanities and social sciences, primary sources are the direct evidence or first-­hand accounts of events without secondary analysis or interpretation. In contrast, secondary sources analyze or interpret historical events or creative works.

Sources in the sciences

In the sciences, primary sources are documents that provide full descriptions of the original research. For example, a primary source would be a journal article where scientists describe their research on the genetics of tobacco plants. A secondary source would be an article commenting on or analyzing the scientists’ research on tobacco.

Developing a Working Thesis

A writer’s thesis statement–the main point, idea, or argument–will typically change and develop throughout the writing process.  Sometimes, you will feel such passion about topic or have such a clear understanding of the purpose of a writing assignment that a thesis can spring to mind quite early in the process.  At other times, the most concise and expressive version of the main idea of an essay does not reveal itself until you have drafted the essay and revised it several times.  Before developing a formal outline or composing the first draft of an academic essay, write out your working thesis will help you stay focused on your main point or controlling ideas as you compose the paragraphs of your first draft.  Keep in mind that your thesis is quite likely to evolve during the writing process. A working (or preliminary) thesis should be a one or two sentence statement of your perspective, position, or opinion of a topic.

Chapter 3c. Key Takeaways:

• Prewriting strategies can help every writer effectively begin the writing process
• The steps in the writing process are prewriting, outlining, drafting, revising, and editing
• Prewriting is the transfer of ideas from abstract thoughts into words on a page or screen
• A good topic interests the writer, appeals to the audience, and fits the purpose of a writing task
• Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources can each help a writer develop their topic
• A working thesis that includes both a claim and a reason or evidence helps writers stay focused on their main idea while outlining and drafting

Acknowledgments:

Chapter 3c is, including Figure 1, is adapted from Chapters 8 and 9 of Writing for Success by University of Minnesota, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources section of Chapter 3c, is adapted from a handout created by the Virginia University Libraries [pdf] , which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Writing as Inquiry Copyright © 2021 by Kara Clevinger and Stephen Rust is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, how to express intellectual curiosity in college essays.

I want to write a college essay that highlights my intellectual curiosity and love for learning. Can anyone share some examples or tips on how to write an engaging essay on this topic? I'm a little stressed about getting this right, thanks!

While it is understandable that you want to showcase your intellectual curiosity in your college essay, it's important to choose a specific story or experience that best represents this aspect of your personality. Many college applicants would consider themselves intellectually curious, so it's crucial that your story is personal and detailed enough to show what makes your curiosity distinct. Here are a few tips and examples to guide you in writing an engaging essay on this topic:

1. Focus on a specific experience or realization: Rather than trying to cover every single instance where you've exhibited intellectual curiosity, choose one particular event, realization, or even a project that sparked your interest and led you to dive deeper into a subject. Use this experience as the focal point of your essay, and demonstrate how it showcases your innate love for learning.

Example: You encounter a challenging math problem that you are unable to solve initially, but rather than giving up, you devote your time and energy to working it out and advancing your math skills.

2. Show, don't tell: As with any essay, it's essential that you use vivid, descriptive language and anecdotes to show your intellectual curiosity, rather than simply stating that you have a desire for knowledge. Explain the process of learning or exploration, and describe the emotions you experienced as you pursued your interests.

Example: Describe the late nights spent reading research papers or attending seminars, the joy of uncovering a new concept, or the frustration of encountering an unfamiliar theorem and how you overcame it.

3. Discuss the impact and personal growth: To illustrate the broader importance of your intellectual curiosity, explain how your passion for learning has influenced your life and personal growth. Focus on the skills you've developed or the lessons you've learned, and make connections to your goals and aspirations for college - admissions officers need to understand why this story is relevant to understanding what kind of college student you'll be.

Example: By immersing yourself in independent research on a scientific topic that fascinates you, you discovered a potential career path or academic interest that you might otherwise not have considered, inspiring you to pursue advanced studies in that field.

Finally, consider either taking advantage of CollegeVine's Free Peer Essay Review Tool or submitting your essay for a paid review by an expert college admissions advisor through CollegeVine's marketplace. Sometimes, getting a more objective set of eyes on your essay is just the thing that takes it from good to great.

Remember, overall your college essay is an opportunity to showcase who you are as an individual, beyond test scores and grades. By providing specific examples and anecdotes, and relating your intellectual curiosity to your personal growth and future college experience, you can create an engaging essay that leaves a lasting impression on admissions officers.

Happy writing!

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CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

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Capturing, clarifying, and consolidating the curiosity-creativity connection

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The cognitive-motivational concepts of curiosity and creativity are often viewed as intertwined. Yet, despite the intuitively strong linkage between these two concepts, the existing cognitive-behavioral evidence for a curiosity-creativity connection is not strong, and is nearly entirely based on self-report measures. Using a new lab-based Curiosity Q&A task we evaluate to what extent behaviorally manifested curiosity—as revealed in autonomous inquiry and exploration—is associated with creative performance. In a preregistered study ( N  = 179) we show that, as hypothesized, the novelty of the questions that participants generated during the Curiosity Q&A Task significantly positively correlated with the originality of their responses on a divergent-thinking task (the conceptually-based Alternative Uses Task). Additionally, the extent to which participants sought out information that was implicitly missing in the presented factual stimuli ("gap-related information foraging") positively correlated with performance on two predominantly convergent-thinking tasks (the Remote Associates Task and Analogy Completion). Question asking, topic-related information foraging, and creative performance correlated with trait-based "interest-type" curiosity oriented toward exploration and novelty, but not with "deprivation-type" curiosity focused on dispelling uncertainty or ignorance. Theoretically and practically, these results underscore the importance of continuing to develop interventions that foster both creative thinking and active autonomous inquiry.

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Introduction.

It is almost considered a commonplace that curiosity goes hand-in-hand with creativity. It seems but a short step from our concept of curiosity —a desire to know, typified by such traits and activities as inquisitiveness, the exploration of novelty, and questioning 1 , 2 , 3 , to our concept of creativity , an exploratory endeavor involving the generation of original, useful, and valuable ideas, processes, or products 4 , 5 , 6 . The meanings of the two concepts seem to shade and blend, one with the other. Yet, despite our intuitive conjoining of curiosity with creativity, the empirical evidence supporting such an association is neither as direct, nor as probative, as we might initially suppose 7 , 8 .

At first glance, a 2019 meta-analysis of 10 studies, including data from more than 2600 individuals 9 , could be taken as securely documenting a strong positive association between the two constructs. The study reported a weighted effect size r of 0.41 between curiosity and creativity, with a 95% confidence interval {0.27, 0.54} for which the lower bound was a comfortable distance from zero. But a closer look uncovers a rather different picture. Much of the apparent robust strength of this association was attributable to comparing self-reports of creativity with self-reports of curiosity. Exclusive reliance on measures of self-report is well-known to be inferentially problematic on multiple counts, such as liability to socially-desirable responding, self-verification biases, influences arising from respondent's implicit theories about the covariation of traits, behaviors, or outcomes, and the potential inaccessibility of nonconscious cognitive-motivational processes 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . When, instead, consideration was confined to the subset of studies that assessed the relation between curiosity and judge-rated or performance-based creativity—rather than self-assessed creativity—the effect size was markedly smaller: weighted effect size r  = 0.16, 95% CI {0.10, 0.22}.

Equally important, every study in the meta-analysis relied on self-reports of curiosity. The meta-analysis is, then, entirely silent on the question of whether behaviorally-assessed curiosity and behaviorally-assessed creativity are positively associated, or on the strength of that association. Studies that reported positive associations between self-reports of trait curiosity and creative self-efficacy 14 , 15 or between subjective trait-ratings of curiosity and performance-based creativity 16 , 17 do not address the question: Is there a positive relation between behaviorally-based evaluations of creative performance and behaviorally-based measures of curiosity? If so, how strong is that relation, and how consistent is it across different ways of operationalizing or evaluating either construct?

The current research addresses this gap. We ask: How strong is the curiosity-creativity connection when both constructs are defined not by self-report but by independently assessed and quantified cognitive-behavioral measures? To what extent is curiosity—as evaluated by actually observed lab-based behaviors involving autonomous inquiry and exploration—associated with creative performance on lab-based tasks requiring the generation of original, varied, and creative ideas?

A nomological network approach to individual differences and cognitive process factors highlights several reasons we would expect to find that curiosity-related behaviors, such as the asking of questions 18 , 19 and autonomously seeking information 20 , would be positively linked to creativity 21 , 22 . One prominent construct relevant here is that of openness to experience. Openness to experience—involving a cognitive-motivational disposition to flexibly and receptively approach novel ideas—is amongst the most consistently observed personality characteristics associated with creativity 23 , 24 . Notably, questionnaire-based assessments of openness to experience often tap into cognitive-behavioral predispositions related to curiosity, such as seeking to learn new information or exploring novel stimuli, ideas, or cultures. A recent factor analysis of the lower-level structure of the openness construct including items from 36 different openness-related scales, identified Curiosity as one of six facets of the overall trait, with individuals scoring high on this facet characterized as "inquisitive, perceptive," as having "a thirst or desire for knowledge" and as "interested in why and how things happen" (p. 35) [ 25 , see also 26 ].

Additional reasons to expect a positive relation between curiosity and creativity are provided by process-based theoretical approaches to creativity. In process-based views, the initial impetus for a creative endeavor may be highly similar to curiosity. Creative endeavors are often launched with such "information prospecting" actions as the motivated gathering of information, newly or uniquely identifying a problem, and combining or reorganizing extant knowledge structures 27 , 28 , 29 . Similarly, there are conceptual links from cognitive, computational, and educational perspectives on active self-directed learning, such as open inquiry and discovery-focused inquiry 30 , to cognitive search processes essential to innovation, including exploring information from varied sources and generating multiple potential ideas to solve a problem 31 , 32 , 33 . Indeed, one of the very few studies to experimentally induce curiosity and then to examine the downstream effects of such state curiosity on creative behavior found that inducing specific curiosity about a particular puzzle was later associated with heightened creative solutions to that puzzle 34 .

In the current report—including an initial smaller pilot study and a larger preregistered conceptual replication ( https://osf.io/9cbxs )—we systematically examine the relation between two new behaviorally-based measures of curiosity, obtained using our recently developed Curiosity Q&A Task 35 and several performance-based measures of creativity. The behavioral assessments of curiosity were independent of the creativity measures—allowing an evaluation of the curiosity-creativity connection in a context uninfluenced by an individual's prior task-specific interest or prior attentional-motivational investment in the same task.

In both the pilot study and the preregistered study, we assessed curiosity in three primary ways: (1) the number and novelty of topic-related questions that participants generated in response to encountering various factual statements presented in the Curiosity Q&A Task; (2) the extent to which participants autonomously sought-out information that was implicitly missing or that implied a knowledge "gap" 22 in those statements ("gap-related information foraging") or engaged in more general exploration of the topic ("topic-related information foraging"); and (3) standardized questionnaires of trait curiosity and the curiosity-based facet of openness to experience, included to allow examination of proposed subtypes of curiosity (explained below) that might differentially correlate with creative ideation.

Creativity was similarly assessed in multiple ways. Given the centrality of divergent thinking—that is, the ability to flexibly generate a plurality of varied novel ideas in response to a comparatively open-ended prompt 36 , 37 —to the creative process, we included two different assessments of predominantly divergent thinking. These included participants' responses to (1) the often used conceptually-prompted Alternative Uses Task 38 , 39 ; and (2) a recently developed perceptually-based ambiguous object construal task, the "Figural Interpretation Quest" 40 , 41 , 42 . For each of these divergent tasks we assessed the originality of the ideas participants generated, the number of ideas they gave (i.e., fluency), and the variety of the ideas they generated across different semantic or conceptual categories (i.e., flexibility). Furthermore, recognizing that the creative process is widely viewed as also calling on aspects of convergent thinking, where one or a few optimal problem-solving solutions must be identified that aptly meet specified constraints 37 , 43 , we also included two different assessments that predominantly (although not exclusively) call upon convergent ideation, including (3) the Remote Associates Task 44 , and (4) (in the main study only) an Analogy Completion task 45 .

Some researchers 46 , 47 , 48 have additionally differentiated between curiosity that is broadly oriented toward exploration and novelty (termed "Interest-type curiosity" or "Joyous Exploration"), as opposed to curiosity that is somewhat more narrowly oriented toward acquiring information that is missing from one's current knowledge or that is needed to solve a particular problem (termed "Deprivation-type" curiosity or "Deprivation Sensitivity"). As its name suggests, "Joyous Exploration" is characterized as a diversive, exploratory form of curiosity that involves the anticipated pleasure and enjoyment of learning new ideas or concepts (e.g., "I find it fascinating to learn new information"; "I enjoy learning about subjects that are unfamiliar to me"). This type of curiosity may map most closely to curiosity based on novelty, and the long-standing proposal that gaining information about novel stimuli is intrinsically rewarding 32 , 49 . In contrast, deprivation-type curiosity is more focused on particular instances of problem solving, and a desire to reduce uncertainty or remove ignorance (e.g., "I can spend hours on a single problem because I just can't rest without knowing the answer"; "I feel frustrated if I can't figure out the solution to a problem, so I work even harder to solve it"). This type of curiosity may map to an alternative construal of curiosity that emphasizes not novel stimuli but, instead, complex partially familiar stimuli about which the individual already has moderate knowledge—but that knowledge can be continually extended to progressively remove uncertainty. For example, in the "learning progress account" of curiosity 50 , 51 acquiring further knowledge is intrinsically rewarding because "the brain is intrinsically motivated to pursue tasks in which one's predictions are always improving" 32 (p. 457). To provide a more fine-grained assessment of the relation of these types of trait curiosity to creative performance, we also separately considered subsets of items that assessed Interest-type/Joyous Exploration versus Deprivation-type curiosity.

By including multiple ways of assaying curiosity, and multiple ways of assaying creativity, we aimed to capture, clarify, and consolidate our understanding of the curiosity-creativity connection. We hypothesized that each of the behaviorally-based measures of curiosity from the Curiosity Q&A Task (that is, active generation of novel topic-related questions and "gap-provoked" information foraging) would be positively correlated with creative ideation on the divergent thinking tests of creativity. Given that originality is a core aspect of creative or innovative thought, and is most directly related to novel ideational search, our hypotheses focused particularly on this dimension, but we also report assessments of fluency and flexibility. Additionally, we asked whether Interest-type/Joyous Exploration curiosity might differentially correlate with measures comprised of participants' (a) generation of novel questions, (b) foraging for topic-related information, and (c) their divergent creative thinking performance (e.g., originality of responses on the AUT and FIQ), whereas deprivation-type curiosity might be more closely related to measures comprised of participants' (a) generation of gap-provoked questions, (b) foraging for gap-related information, and (c) their performance on the two tasks (Remote Associates Task and Analogy Completion) that especially call upon convergent creative thinking. More specifically, our preregistered hypotheses ( https://osf.io/9cbxs ) were:

Hypothesis 1

Curiosity as measured by the novelty of topic-related questions on the Q&A task will significantly positively correlate with originality on the divergent thinking tasks, including (a) originality on the Alternative Uses Task, and (b) originality on the Figural Interpretation Quest.

Hypothesis 2

Curiosity as measured by asking gap-related questions and by gap-provoked information foraging during the Curiosity Q&A Task will significantly positively correlate with the proportion of correct responses on the (predominantly) convergent Remote Associates Task, and perhaps also the (predominantly) convergent Analogy Completion task.

Stimulus materials and scoring

Assessments of curiosity

Question asking

In the Curiosity Q&A task, participants were presented with six brief factual statements about a variety of subjects, such as notable feats of mountain climbing, the origins of molecular gastronomy, and scientific findings relating to the use of hammocks. (See Supplementary Materials for the Curiosity Q&A task stimuli.) After each stimulus, participants were given the opportunity to ask—by typing into a text box—any questions that might naturally arise in relation to that stimulus.

For example, participants might read the following factual stimulus: "Although cochineal may seem like an unusual ingredient used during the manufacturing process of modern-day makeup, it has also been used to dye various other products." After reading this statement, participants might type questions relating to the two implicit gaps in the statement, that is, " What are cochineals?" and " What other products use cochineals as dye?" Participants might also ask a diverse array of other topic-related questions, including questions that could be novel, atypical, or surprising such as "How is it used in makeup?" "How long has cochineal been used?" "Is cochineal dangerous?" "Is it better than other dyes?" "Is it harmful to the environment?" and "Is it usually listed on the ingredient label?".

Participants' questions to each factual stimulus from the Curiosity Q&A task were separately and independently evaluated by two raters. The two raters first assessed whether the questions pertained to the implicit information gaps in the factual stimuli (gap-related Qs) or concerned other topic-related matters (topic-related Qs). Disagreements on the classification of responses as gap-related versus topic-related were resolved by discussion with a third independent rater. Then, for each factual stimulus, two raters evaluated the comparative novelty of participants' questions on a three-point scale (0 = not novel, 1 = somewhat novel, 2 = clearly novel). Interrater reliability for these assessments was excellent ( r  = 0.96); analyses are based on the average of the two raters' scores.

Gap-provoked information foraging

After generating their questions to a given factual statement, participants were provided the opportunity to discover the missing information by clicking on one or both of 2 screen-displayed "buttons" that would reveal the answers to those gap-related questions. Additional buttons could reveal the answers to 7 other topic-related questions that they, or others, may have asked about the topic. These additional questions were developed in earlier pilot work with this paradigm. For the illustrative factual statement about cochineal, provided above, other topic-related questions that participants could choose to look at for answers included "How is the dye made from cochineals?" and "Do humans ever respond poorly to cochineal dye?". Clicking on a button would reveal the answer to the stated question. So, for instance, clicking on the gap-related button "What are cochineals?" revealed the answer, "Cochineals are insects." (See Supplementary Materials for the full set of Curiosity Q&A stimuli.) Participants could choose to look at the answers to any of the 9 questions associated with each factual statement (i.e., the 2 gap-related questions and the 7 topic-related questions), with no time limit, and, when they were ready, could advance to the next factual statement by clicking a "Next" button. The measure of gap-provoked information foraging was the number of times (out of the 2 opportunities per stimulus) that participants chose to "look" so as to view gap-related answers; the measure of topic-related information foraging was the number of times (out of 7 opportunities per stimulus) that participants chose to look to see topic-related information.

Trait-based assessments of curiosity

To explore the relations between behaviorally-assessed curiosity and creativity and self-reported measures of curiosity and openness to experience, we administered: (a) the Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale-Revised 47 , 24 items, newly added here, and (b) the Woo Openness to Experience measure 25 , 54-items; also administered in the pilot study. Given these are exploratory questions, and to avoid influencing behavioral assessments, the questionnaires of trait curiosity and openness to experience were administered after the key behavioral tasks.

Assessments of creativity

Alternative Uses Task (AUT) In the current implementation of this extensively used measure of divergent thinking 36 , 38 , 39 , participants were presented the names of three common objects (cardboard box, flashlight, wooden ruler), one at a time, and asked to indicate all of the unusual ways the object might be used. The typical or standard use of the object was indicated (e.g., for wooden ruler, "used for measuring lengths"). Participants responded without a time limit by typing their answers into a text box. Responses were evaluated by two independent condition-blind raters for fluency, flexibility, and originality according to lab-based scoring rubrics. Interrater reliability was strong for all three measures ( r  = 1.00 for fluency, r  = 0.86 for flexibility, r  = 0.86 for originality); analyses are based on the average of the two raters' scores.

Figural Interpretation Quest (FIQ) Participants were shown three ambiguous colored line-drawn shapes, one at a time, and asked to indicate all of the various things the object might be. For example, a teal colored shape that fans out at both ends with a thinner middle may be interpreted as a wine glass, a vase, or a shovel. The stimuli were a selected subset of items originally developed to examine semantic contributions to episodic memory 52 , and adapted to provide a perceptually-prompted measure of divergent thinking 40 , 41 , 42 . Following the methods used in 42 , each item was shown for 40 s, but participants also could choose to advance to the next item if they chose to do so. Illustrative items from the FIQ are shown in Fig.  1 .

Illustrative items from the figural Interpretation Quest.

Responses were scored by two independent condition-blind raters for fluency, category flexibility, and originality (3-point scale of 0, 1, or 2) according to lab-based scoring rubrics. Interrater reliability was excellent for all three measures ( r  = 1.00 for fluency, r  = 0.92 for flexibility, r  = 0.90 for originality); analyses are based on the average of the two raters' scores.

Remote Associates Task (RAT) In this task, participants were shown 20 problems, of a range of difficulty levels, drawn from published normative data 44 . For each problem, participants were shown three words (e.g., safety, cushion, point ) and were tasked with identifying a fourth word that was related to, and could be meaningfully combined with, each of the three words. (In the given example, the correct response is pin: safety pin, pin cushion, pinpoint ). Participants were given 4 min for this task.

Analogy Completion Task This task was not given in the pilot study but was previously administered in another recent study in our lab with a similar population. In the task, participants are shown an incomplete analogy and are asked to provide the missing term (e.g., bear:cave :: bird: ___ ). The items were selected from various published sources (e.g. 45 ) and instructions on what makes a valid analogy were provided. Participants were given 4 min for this task. Participants' written analogy completion responses were assessed using the scoring rubric developed for the recent lab study. Some of the analogies were semantically-near comparisons (e.g., kitten:cat::___:dog ) whereas others spanned different domains and were semantically distant (e.g., tile:mop::tooth:___ ). As noted in our Preregistration ( https://osf.io/9cbxs ), analogy scores were considered separately for the easier semantically-near analogies (10 items) versus semantically-distant analogies (18 items), with analyses focused on the semantically-distant items. Semantically-near items served as an attentional control for this online study; specifically, to be included, participants must have correctly answered 5 or more of the 10 semantically-near (easy) analogy completion items (in prior work, the average score for these items was 0.95).

Pilot study findings and power analysis The pilot study was conducted over two sessions, with the first session conducted individually and in-person, and the second session, approximately two days later, performed online via Qualtrics. A total 67 undergraduate participants (51 female, 16 male, M age = 19.68, SD  = 2.06, M years education = 13.29, SD  = 1.29) completed both days, including the Curiosity Q&A task on Day 1 and assessments of creative performance on Day 2. We based our power analyses on the primary research questions, and the effect sizes observed in this pilot study involving a similar population and behavioral measures. Specifically, for Hypothesis ( 1 ) Curiosity as measured by the novelty of (topic related) questions on the Q&A task will be positively correlated with originality on the divergent thinking tasks, the pilot study correlations were Novel Qs (all) with AUT Originality, r  = 0.43; Novel Qs (all) with FIQ Originality, r  = 0.48. For Hypothesis ( 2 ) Curiosity as measured by gap-related information foraging will be positively correlated with the proportion of correct responses on the Remote Associates Task, the pilot study correlations were, RAT Total, r  = 0.50; RAT Medium Difficulty, r  = 0.47, RAT High Difficulty, r  = 0.41. Assuming, conservatively, that the effect sizes may be somewhat smaller, for r  = 0.30, we need N = 112 to achieve power of 0.90 (for a non directional bias-corrected test).

Experimental design and procedure

The study was completed entirely online (via Qualtrics). It employed a within-subjects experimental design, with all tasks and measures administered to all participants. There was one between-subjects factor of task order, which manipulated the order of the three main behavioral measures, including the Curiosity Q&A task, the Divergent thinking tasks, and the Convergent thinking tasks. There were an approximately equal number of participants in each of the three task orders of administration: Order A (Informed Consent, Q&A, Divergent, Convergent, Questionnaires, n  = 61); Order B (Informed Consent, Divergent, Q&A, Convergent, Questionnaires, n  = 56); Order C (Informed Consent, Convergent, Q&A, Divergent, Questionnaires, n  = 62).

All experimental protocols were approved by the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board (IRB) and all methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Participants

A total of 189 participants completed the study; of these 10 participants were excluded from data analyses because they did not meet the study inclusion criteria (age range, native English speaking, n  = 3), they failed the attention check ( n  = 1), and/or they correctly answered fewer than half of the control (easy) analogies ( n  = 8). Analyses were thus performed on data from 179 participants; in a few cases, data were missing for a single task or questionnaire; in these cases the corresponding sample size is reported.

Participants (154 female, 25 male) were, on average, 19.65 ( SD  = 1.74) years of age, and reported an average of 13.63 ( SD  = 1.33) years of formal education. Participants self-reported as being in generally good health ( M  = 5.70 on a 7-point Likert scale, SD  = 1.09), and overall well-being ( M  = 5.05 on a 7-point Likert scale, SD  = 1.21), and in a moderately positive overall mood ( M  = 6.02 on a 9-point Likert scale, SD  = 1.53).

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics for the Curiosity Q&A Task and the creative ideation measures. The final column of Table 1 also provides the inter-rater reliability (Pearson's r ) for the rater-based assessments of the Curiosity Q&A Task measures and the divergent thinking tasks.

Question asking and creative performance

Table 2 presents the Pearson correlations between the Curiosity Q&A task measures of question-asking and the creative ideation measures. From Table 2 it can be seen that, as hypothesized, Originality of responses on the AUT significantly and positively correlated with the Novelty of questions that participants asked on the Curiosity Q&A task ( r  = 0.35, p  < 0.001); Originality of responses on the FIQ also positively correlated with Novelty of questions, but not significantly ( r  = 0.13, p  = 0.093). Furthermore, as hypothesized, the frequency of asking Gap-related questions on the Curiosity Q&A task significantly positively correlated with the proportion of correct answers provided to the predominantly convergent thinking tasks, including both the RAT ( r  = 0.20, p  = 0.007) and the Analogy Completion task ( r  = 0.21, p  = 0.005).

Gap-related information foraging and creative performance

We next evaluated the curiosity-creativity connection from the perspective of our second main behavioral measure of curiosity, namely the extent to which participants autonomously sought out information that was implicitly missing from the factual statements, or "gap-related information foraging." Here we calculated the number of gap-related "looks" in the Curiosity Q&A Task. Given that there were 6 factual stimuli, and each factual stimulus had 2 gaps, there were a total of 12 opportunities for participants to seek out the gap-related information. On average, participants chose to look at the gap-related information for 7.48 of the 12 gap-related buttons (95% CI: 6.91, 8.05), or an average of 1.25 out of 2 opportunities per stimulus.

Table 3 presents the correlations between the proportion of gap-related information foraging, and broader topic-related foraging with the creative ideation measures. As can be seen from Table 3 , as hypothesized, the frequency of specifically gap-related information foraging was associated with higher accuracy on the two convergent-thinking tasks, with both performance on the RAT ( r  = 0.18, p  = 0.018) and the Analogy Completion task ( r  = 0.18, p  = 0.018) modestly but significantly correlated with gap-related looks, and not with more diffuse or general topic-related information foraging. The divergent thinking measures generally showed little association with either gap-related or topic-related information foraging, with the exception that AUT fluency significantly correlated with gap-related looks.

Trait-based self-reported curiosity and creative ideation measures

Table 4 provides the descriptive statistics for the Woo et al. 25 Openness to Experience Questionnaire and the Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale-Revised 47 . Correlations of the three trait-based curiosity measures (Woo Curiosity, Joyous Exploration, and Deprivation Sensitivity) with each of the creative ideation measures are provided in Supplementary Materials, Table S1 . Additionally, given the well-established association between openness to experience and creative ideation 23 , 24 , to allow examination and comparisons of specifically the contribution of the curiosity component of Openness to creative ideation, Supplementary Materials, Table S2 gives the correlations between the Global measure of Openness (that does not separately consider curiosity but simply averages it together with all of the other facets into the overall score), and also the intermediate aspects of Intellect (which includes Efficiency, Ingenuity, and Curiosity) and Culture (which includes Aesthetics, Tolerance, and Depth) with each of the creative ideation measures.

Next, to provide a more fine-grained probe of the relation between trait curiosity and creative performance, we separately considered the Interest-type/Joyous Exploration and Deprivation-type items in relation to comparatively divergent (AUT and FIQ) and the comparatively convergent (RAT and Analogy Completion) creative tasks, in conjunction with comparatively divergent curiosity measures (asking novel questions and foraging for topic-related answers) and comparatively convergent curiosity measures (asking gap-related questions and foraging for gap answers). These correlations are found in Table 5 , with the upper panel (Panel A) focusing on intercorrelations with the predominantly divergent measures and the lower panel (Panel B) focusing on intercorrelations with the predominantly convergent measures.

From Table 5 it can be seen that the two predominantly divergent Curiosity Q&A measures of posing novel questions and foraging for topic-related information were significantly correlated with one another ( r  = 0.20), as were the two predominantly convergent Curiosity Q&A measures of posing the gap questions and gap-related foraging ( r  = 0.50). Additional noteworthy observations from Table 5 are the robust intercorrelations of the two divergent thinking task assessments of originality (AUT originality with FIQ originality, r  = 0.42) and between performance on the two convergent thinking tasks (RAT and Analogy Completion, r  = 0.43). There were also strong intercorrelations of the three self-report measures of curiosity, including with deprivation sensitivity ( r  = 0.58 and r  = 0.51), with an especially strong correlation between the joyous exploration measure and the Woo Curiosity subscale ( r  = 0.73).

Finally, as an exploratory and broadly integrative overview analysis, we performed a principal components analysis on all of the behaviorally-assessed indices of curiosity and creative ideation. As shown in Table 6 , this analysis yielded five components with eigenvalues greater than one, and inclusion of the five components, with no rotation, explained approximately 82% of the variance.

From Table 6 , it can be seen that all of the curiosity and creative ideation measures loaded positively on the first component, and together explained about one-third of the variance. This suggests that there is indeed a common latent construct that fuels both curiosity and creative ideation. The second component, however, bifurcated the indices of these two constructs with strong positive weightings of all of the Curiosity Q&A task measures, including both question-asking and information foraging, together with negative weightings from the two divergent-thinking tasks. This thus suggests that—despite their commonality—curiosity and divergent creative ideation also differ from one another/partially rely on different mechanisms. The third component mainly involved positive weightings from tasks that may be grouped in that they provide relatively greater perceptual or external-environmental scaffolding for idea search, including the information-foraging measures, the perceptually-prompted FIQ, and the two convergent-thinking tasks, accompanied by negative weightings for tasks demanding more autonomously-guided internal search (question generation and AUT responding). The fourth and fifth components also both have positive weightings from the two convergent-thinking tasks but further differentiate between question-asking and information-foraging and also differentiate between the two divergent-thinking tasks.

The primary aim of this preregistered study was to examine the association between curiosity and creative ideation when (a) both curiosity and creative ideation are assessed with behaviorally-observed outcomes (rather than only self-report) and (b) both curiosity and creativity are assessed using behavioral measures that assess core aspects of each construct. For curiosity the two core aspects involve: (1) internally generated exploration and identification of what an individual does not know or desires to know, here operationally assessed through the formulation and posing of questions ("question asking") regarding experimentally presented factual information; (2) externally supported exploratory information seeking, here operationally assessed through an individual's choosing to look at the answers to visually provided questions ("information foraging"). For creativity the two core aspects involve: (1) divergent thinking, the generation of multiple, varied, and original ideas in response to an open-ended problem, for which a large number of possible responses are acceptable and may be deemed correct; (2) convergent thinking, the generation of the single best (or correct) answer to a clearly defined problem or question.

We hypothesized that curiosity, as measured by the novelty of topic-related questions on the Q&A task, would significantly positively correlate with originality on the divergent thinking tasks, including (a) originality on the Alternative Uses Task 36 , 39 and (b) originality on the Figural Interpretation Quest 40 , 41 , 42 . We further hypothesized that curiosity as measured by asking gap-related questions and by gap-provoked information foraging during the Curiosity Q&A Task would significantly positively correlate with the proportion of correct responses on the (predominantly) convergent Remote Associates Task, and perhaps also the predominantly convergent Analogy Completion task.

The results partially supported the first hypothesis and fully supported the second hypothesis. Our primary behavioral curiosity measure of novel question-asking was positively associated with the independently-assessed behavioral measure of originality on the Alternative Uses Task (AUT). Additionally, we found evidence that our second behavioral curiosity measure of gap-provoked information foraging was especially linked to performance on the RAT and the Analogy Completion task, which are predominantly convergent-thinking measures of creativity. These outcomes are among the first empirical demonstrations of a strong positive curiosity-creativity connection under conditions where both of those constructs are behaviorally and independently assessed in performance-based tasks, rather than one or both constructs being indexed by self-report.

The comparatively weaker correlation between our curiosity measure of novel question-asking and originality on the FIQ task was unanticipated, and differed from our finding in the pilot study, which showed a significant positive correlation between FIQ originality and novel questions. It is notable that, in the current study, this weaker correlation was nonetheless accompanied by other indications that (as expected) the AUT and FIQ were both successful prompts for divergent ideation; for instance, there was a strong correlation between originality of responses on the two divergent-thinking measures (AUT originality correlated with FIQ originality, r  = 0.42, p  < 0.001). One possible explanation focuses on the differences in the material for the two divergent-thinking tasks, in particular, that there is a closer match between the verbally-based Curiosity Q&A task and the verbally-presented AUT items than between the Q&A task stimuli and the perceptually-based FIQ items. Another possible interpretation is that the association between behaviorally-assessed curiosity and original creative ideation may emerge more strongly when the divergent ideation task is untimed (like the AUT in the current study) rather than timed (like the FIQ in the current study). Indeed, the stronger association between FIQ Originality and Novel Questions that was observed in the pilot study did involve an untimed administration of the FIQ task and the average fluency, flexibility, and originality for the FIQ were numerically higher in the pilot study than in the current study.

Our more fine-grained probe of the relation between trait curiosity and creative performance, separately considering the Interest-type/Joyous Exploration and Deprivation-type items in relation to the comparatively divergent (AUT and FIQ) versus comparatively convergent (RAT and Analogy Completion) creative tasks, yielded little support for a uniquely predictive role of Deprivation-type curiosity for convergent creativity. Deprivation-type curiosity did not correlate either with the posing of gap questions or with foraging for gap answers, and was largely uncorrelated with performance on both the RAT and the Analogy Completion tasks. Similar outcomes were observed in our pilot study. It is possible that deprivation-type curiosity is more closely tied to an individual's specific individuated goals or longer-term cognitive-motivational concerns, that are not well-typified by brief and incidental exposure to experimental materials. For instance, the types of problems that might lead one to strongly endorse the item, "I can spend hours on a single problem because I just can't rest without knowing the answer" may be quite different from the knowledge gaps implicitly hinted at in the Curiosity Q&A factual statements.

In contrast, there was stronger support for associations between especially Interest-type/Joyous Exploration curiosity and more divergent forms of inquiry (posing novel questions) and originality of ideation responses for the AUT. In general, Interest-type/Joyous-Exploration curiosity showed intercorrelations similar to those of the Woo curiosity subscale 25 , with which it was highly correlated. The majority of the 9 items on the Woo curiosity subscale do appear to be oriented to Interest-type curiosity (e.g., "I try to learn something new every day"; "I love to do experiments and see the results"). Consistent with this, a recent psychometric network analysis of several openness to experience measures 53 found that Woo's curiosity subscale was associated with emergent facets of intellectual curiosity, nontraditionalism, diversity, and intellectual interests.

Despite the new probative evidence for a curiosity-creativity connection that this study has provided—particularly demonstrating a strong positive association of behaviorally-based assessments of curiosity (assayed by question asking and information foraging) with independently behaviorally-based assessments of creativity (assayed by creative performance on the AUT, RAT, and Analogy Completion)—some limitations should be noted. That all of the participants were college-aged students in the United States, and predominantly female, may constrain generalizability. Additionally, the study was completed entirely online. On the one hand, several quality-control mechanisms such as attention-check items were in place, and it is possible that online compared with in-lab assessments may allow more comfortable environments that, in turn, allow for more natural responding—considerations arguably important for creative ideation. On the other hand, the particular contexts under which participants complete an online research study vary and are uncontrolled. Furthermore, although the inclusion of several ways of behaviorally assessing both curiosity (indicated by the autonomous generation of questions and the frequency of searching for information that might be missing from one's knowledge network) and creative ideation (indicated by independent assessments of both divergent and convergent ideation) is a noteworthy strength, both curiosity and creativity are complex and multi-faceted constructs. While our exploratory principal component analysis on all of the behaviorally-based assessments of these constructs demonstrated clear commonalities between them (explaining 34% of the variance), it also underscored differences. One such difference is the extent to which a task is externally environmentally-supported (e.g., information foraging) compared with a task that requires more autonomously-guided, often effortful 54 internal cognitive search (e.g., question generation). For example, question asking loaded strongly on the first two components, but information foraging additionally loaded on the third component. We also saw that performance on the convergent measures (RAT and Analogy Completion) loaded on four of the five components––an observation congruent with the position that most cognitive tasks are not "process pure." For instance, although the Analogy Completion task is largely convergent in nature, it also calls upon divergent ideation 55 .

Another limitation of the current research is that, despite newly empirically documenting the correlation of behaviorally-assessed curiosity with behaviorally-assessed creativity, the directionality of the relation cannot be determined from the present findings. Does curiosity fuel creativity, does creativity ignite curiosity, or are both in some measure true? One hint at the directionality of these associations may come from an examination of the between-subject effects of task order in the current study, where the Curiosity Q&A task was sometimes administered as the first task, sometimes followed the divergent-thinking tasks, and sometimes followed the convergent-thinking tasks. The generation of novel questions, and also of topic-related questions, during the Curiosity Q&A task was especially elevated when the Q&A task followed the divergent-thinking tasks (Order B) compared both to when the Q&A task was the first cognitive task administered (Order A), and to when the Q&A task was given after the convergent-thinking tasks (Order C) [see Supplementary Materials, Table S3 and Table S4 ]. This may suggest that, at least on a shorter time-scale, engaging in creative activities that recruit divergent thinking processes may bolster subsequent curiosity. Additional research on such across-task cognitive-procedural priming effects is warranted (see also 56 ).

From a pedagogical, organizational, and social-community perspective, the evidence provided here that there is a strong behavioral connection between curiosity and creative ideation underscores the importance of continuing to develop interventions that foster both creative thinking and active autonomous inquiry. The striking similarities between process-based theoretical approaches to creativity and active self-directed learning, noted earlier 31 , 32 , are relevant here. Both innovative thinking and inquiry-based learning entail flexibly exploring information from different sources and perspectives, generating new ideas, and combining or reconfiguring what one knows. Both likewise hinge upon cognitive-motivational factors such as a sense of intellectual engagement and autonomy that an individual's (or team's) working and learning environment can support—or squelch 57 , 58 , 59 . Promoting—and individually and collectively modelling—a welcoming receptivity to experimentation 60 , to divergently asking questions 1 , 61 , and openly seeking feedback 62 are all promising places to start, especially if combined with a positive, learning attitude toward uncertainty, ambiguity, and the occurrence of failures 31 , 60 . Neither engaging in acts of curiosity, nor attempts at creative flexibility, are guaranteed success, and becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity is integral to the forging of new and valuable ways of doing and thinking 63 , 64 , 65 .

A recent review titled, "cultivating an understanding of curiosity as a seed for creativity" concluded that "our understanding of the curiosity-creativity relationship is limited" and that research on this topic is "hampered by methodological limitations, particularly the scarcity of state and behavioral measures, as well as experimental manipulations evoking states of curiosity" (p. 80) 7 . The work presented here takes a step in the needed direction. Many additional steps are necessary, if we are to fully "capture, clarify, and consolidate the curiosity-creativity connection." But we'll get there—with sufficient (shared, collaborative) creative thinking, plus a healthy dose of curiosity.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and analysed during the current study are available in Harvard Dataverse: Koutstaal, Wilma, 2022, "The Creativity Curiosity Connection—Preregistered Replication Study", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/R6WTNN , Harvard Dataverse, V1.

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Koutstaal, W., Kedrick, K. & Gonzalez-Brito, J. Capturing, clarifying, and consolidating the curiosity-creativity connection. Sci Rep 12 , 15300 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19694-4

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I was accepted to Yale. Here's everything I included in my successful Ivy League application.

• I got into Yale University after submitting a successful college application.
• I included my SAT score and high GPA in the application, along with an essay about my culture.
• Ultimately, I tried to highlight all the ways I would be a benefit to the Yale community.

I recently reviewed my Yale admissions file after being a student there for three years. It was strange but enlightening to read what the admissions officers really thought of my application.

Since then, many people have respectfully requested to hear about my stats, extracurriculars , and essays.

I believe that everyone's college application journey is unique and that mine is just one sample, but I equally understand the urge to hear about other people's experiences. I devoured hundreds of college decision reactions on YouTube just three years ago, hoping to find that secret formula.

So, I'm now sharing a deeper look into my college application. But I want to first emphasize that as complicated and stressful as the process of applying to college may be, the best application you can ever show others will be the one you enjoy writing the most. I know I enjoyed every second of writing mine.

My GPA and standardized test scores were important factors in my application

With colleges such as Yale and Dartmouth reinstating standardized testing requirements , the reality is that academics will always be the first line of assessment for admission.

The GPA I submitted to Yale was 98.23/100. An admissions officer commended my GPA in the context of my financially underprivileged upbringing.

I also tried to take the most rigorous workload possible while also prioritizing my mental health , ultimately sending in six AP test scores. My SAT score was 1590.

I credit a lot of my academic achievements to the fact that I surrounded myself with peers who were very serious about their education.

My pre-calculus teacher's recommendation — the one that the admissions team rated higher — emphasized that I held the second highest grade in her class over her 20-year teaching career.

I tried to highlight my passions in my extracurriculars

My activities were a confusing mosaic of interests and impulses, but one that perfectly captured this 17-year-old boy who was still very unsure about who he was and what he wanted.

I researched human visual perception at a local community college , I performed spoken word poetry, and I hit about 80% of the notes in the choir (on a good day).

Related stories

My primary extracurricular, however, was the one I connected with most. At the start of the pandemic, I founded a language-learning program for children called "Spanish Meets You." I used the proceeds I made from the program, which featured tutoring and pen-palling services, to host community giveaways of essential health supplies — such as masks, face shields, and hand sanitizer.

"Spanish Meets You" evolved from my experience growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which was predominantly Hispanic and Asian. I loved going to cookouts and finding a diligent spread of both spicy tamales and fried rice. Despite our cultural differences , the two groups were united in our challenges and our respect for each other.

When I submitted my application, I worried that I didn't have a coherent theme for my extracurriculars, nor enough leadership — but based on the admissions team's comments, my genuine passion for one or two activities mattered in the end.

I wanted to capture who I truly am in my college essay

When I started drafting my essay, I knew I wanted to capture what was unextractable from my résumé: my curiosity, thick skin, and mistakes.

I decided to make the topic of my college essay about Chinese New Year, a holiday I celebrated with my 14 floormates in this tiny Brooklyn apartment building that we all called home for two decades. Every year, I would wait for my father by the door with mandarins, only to be disappointed by his absence.

Ultimately, however, I learned to enjoy this holiday — even if my celebration was unorthodox. My 14 floormates and I are unrelated by blood, but I remember we would gather over food every holiday, tell stories, and play a game of JENGA. Their laughter still ricochets in my ears hundreds of miles away as I now sit in my college dorm room , wrapping up my junior year.

I tried not to overthink the other essay questions

I would jot down whatever came to mind in the first 30 seconds, asking myself: "How would 7-year-old Brian answer this?"

Whenever I took too long to craft a response, it was a sign that I was probably sacrificing genuineness to make a false good impression.

One of the essays asked about my favorite intellectual concept. Instead of showing off by detailing some obscure scientific theory, I moved forward with writing about the diversity of motherhood in the animal kingdom, tying it back to my close relationship with my own mother.

My application was focused on proving how I would fit into the Yale community

Colleges are searching for those who will enrich the lives of their peers in different ways.

Therefore, in my application, I tried to highlight all the parts of me that would prove to Yale I would benefit their campus and their students. In doing so, I was accepted and met students doing just that.

One of my friends, for instance, is studying law. She also loves to rap and surprise her friends with midnight ice cream. Another is a science journalist who gives the best dating advice .

I would say Yale wouldn't be home even if one of them were missing. Everyone is here; everyone ends up where they are.

For students applying to Ivy League schools , I implore you to tell your dynamic, unique story — to think about how your rhythm will fold into a community's song.

Watch: How the Latin Kings gang actually works, according to a former member

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It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother

Some reasons why i’ll rarely admit this in public..

I recently published a book about caregiving that is, in part, a rigorously researched explanation of why I love motherhood, despite living in a country that gives parents so little support. One might imagine that constructing and then promoting my arguments as to why caring for others can be meaningful and emotionally enriching, even when it’s challenging, may have led me to feel comfortable saying I like being a mom in casual social settings. It hasn’t. When I am with friends or acquaintances, or connecting with others online, the admission gets stuck in my throat, where it remains with all the other things that are better left unsaid.

It’s a feeling that traces all the way back to the time when my first son was born. I became a mom in 2012, which I unscientifically suspect was right around the time negative messages about motherhood became more common than positive ones. Or at least it certainly felt like this, in the liberal, largely coastal circles I inhabited online and in real life. To voice any delight about my relationship with my son felt a mix of tone-deaf, out of style, and potentially alienating to others.

Over a decade into motherhood, I now see that there are concentric circles to my hesitation to voice positive feelings, layers of potential relational, political, and personal harm I would fear I would unleash if I came clean. I worry about making others who struggle with motherhood feel bad; I worry about undermining the fight to get mothers and other caregivers more systemic support; I worry about turning back the clock on feminism; and I worry about outing myself as sentimental, and therefore intellectually unserious and uncool. Making it all the harder is that this fear doesn’t feel like a product of my tendency to second-guess things, but rather pretty realistic.

When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others

By Elissa Straus. Simon & Schuster.

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The relational piece is the most immediate. When a close friend admits to me that she is struggling with motherhood, the feeling tends to come coated with a heavy dose of physical and emotional exhaustion, shame, maybe even regret. For so long, motherhood was locked up in easy metaphors of goodliness and saintliness. To deviate from this one-note portrayal and refuse to meet unrealistic expectations, to not want to be endlessly giving and enthusiastic about it, was, in this formula, to be a bad person. Ambivalence about either one’s children, or about how motherhood changes the way one can experience the world, was not seen as a healthy part of a huge life undertaking, but a sign that one was not dedicated enough. Even though we have let go of these simplified and unrealistic definitions of a “good mom,” particularly in online discourse, those old-fashioned notions can still get under the skin for those having a hard time. To be in that state, and to hear that I am loving motherhood—a matter of personal disposition as much as it is luck in having children with milder temperaments—might, very understandably, only make things worse.

On a more public level, I fear that me, or anyone, saying I like motherhood, even though it can be tough, has the potential to undermine political efforts to get necessary and overdue support for parents from the government and workplaces. In our current system, moms are suffering because they are moms, which makes managing a job or affording a (not terribly indulgent!) life pretty difficult. For those in the laptop class, they may have scheduling flexibility at work, but that tends to come with an expectation to always be available. Or, for those who work onsite, there is often little flexibility and, too often, very little advance notice of weekly schedules, giving moms a tight 24 hours to figure out caregiving support for the week. We lack universal paid leave, we lack universal and affordable child care and elder care—a one-two punch for all those sandwich-generation parents out there. To say you are having a good time can feel like you are dismissing all the unnecessary suffering that moms experience in the United States because of a lack of societal support. Inversely, to complain about being emotionally spent has become a message of solidarity, a protest chant against everything that makes life so impossible for moms.

Cutting deeper than the threat to pro-mom activism is the threat to feminism. So much of late-20 th -century feminism—though, as I learned when researching my book, mostly white feminism—was about allowing women to have other identities outside of motherhood. To insist on motherhood as a path to meaning, purpose, let alone joy, can feel like I am doing the bidding of conservative forces in our culture, who don’t just advocate for embracing motherhood, but a return to a patriarchal domestic structure in which Dad is on top. What I’d like to do is see what embracing care could look like outside the patriarchy, to look inside the homes women like Betty Friedan encouraged us to escape, and see what is worth appreciating there. With the erosion of reproductive rights and the new popularity of tradwives on social media, pointing out all that is worth celebrating in motherhood can feel dangerous, for people with my politics. And yet, if we don’t do it, what vision of feminism are we promoting for the next generation? Another one in which care is sidelined, marginalized—left to underpaid working-class women, mostly women of color, while wealthier, mostly white women leave the home and do the big, important stuff? I don’t want that either—and yet, still, how to express this?

This disquiet lingers even in solitude, particularly when I am reading smart writing by a smart woman in which motherhood is presented as something that limits or subtracts. It’s not that I have a problem with them feeling that way, or writing about it. I don’t expect anyone to feel the same as I do about this relationship or any of my other relationships, including my relationship with my parents or my husband. The problem isn’t that I feel unseen, so much as I often detect an unspoken assessment that intelligence and motherhood are incompatible. Or, as is the case in many fictional portraits of maternal ambivalence, a feeling that being honest about one’s desires and seeking them out can’t happen in the context of caring for one’s kids. To like motherhood makes me dumb and repressed, I temporarily conclude, cheeks on fire even though nobody is watching.

Because, even when I believe loving motherhood makes me tragically unhip, or when I hesitate to discuss my experience with it with others, my affection for it never wavers. This is the point in the essay when I tell you why. I, like so many women, went into motherhood with a defensive posture. I had no ambivalence about becoming a mom, and am fortunate enough to have a pretty easy time connecting with my children. My big fear was not exactly the act of parenting itself, but how becoming a parent would stop me from living an otherwise interesting and meaningful life.

As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with  feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges—and yes, my kids annoy me sometimes, and yes, I appreciate working and other time I spend away from them—became part of a larger narrative arc.

I really do want to be able to say all this in the company of others—and not just in writing but during unscripted, person-to-person exchanges. While I am so glad moms feel liberated to talk about the hard parts of parenting, I worry that only talking about the hard parts make it so the experience of taking care of our children is kept small, devalued, something not worthy of our curiosity, nor our collective investment. I often long for a whole new language, a whole new vocabulary and even context for discussing motherhood, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Whereas once, we diminished motherhood by easy praise, we now often diminish it with easy complaint. Is there a way to think more expansively and holistically in our conversations about motherhood? To be open to the ways in which the good and the bad are not oppositional, but essential, inevitable parts of a rich, friction-filled experience we may not always like but can love and grow from? I’m still working on it.

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A Conversation With

Hilary Cass Says U.S. Doctors Are ‘Out of Date’ on Youth Gender Medicine

Dr. Hilary Cass published a landmark report that led to restrictions on youth gender care in Britain. U.S. health groups said it did not change their support of the care.

By Azeen Ghorayshi

After 30 years as one of England’s top pediatricians, Dr. Hilary Cass was hoping to begin her retirement by learning to play the saxophone.

Instead, she took on a project that would throw her into an international fire: reviewing England’s treatment guidelines for the rapidly rising number of children with gender distress, known as dysphoria.

At the time, in 2020, England’s sole youth gender clinic was in disarray. The waiting list had swelled, leaving many young patients waiting years for an appointment. Staff members who said they felt pressure to approve children for puberty-blocking drugs had filed whistle-blower complaints that had spilled into public view. And a former patient had sued the clinic, claiming that she had transitioned as a teenager “after a series of superficial conversations with social workers.”

The National Health Service asked Dr. Cass, who had never treated children with gender dysphoria but had served as the president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, to independently evaluate how the agency should proceed.

Over the next four years, Dr. Cass commissioned systematic reviews of scientific studies on youth gender treatments and international guidelines of care. She also met with young patients and their families, transgender adults, people who had detransitioned, advocacy groups and clinicians.

Her final report , published last month, concluded that the evidence supporting the use of puberty-blocking drugs and other hormonal medications in adolescents was “remarkably weak.” On her recommendation, the N.H.S. will no longer prescribe puberty blockers outside of clinical trials. Dr. Cass also recommended that testosterone and estrogen, which allow young people to develop the physical characteristics of the opposite sex, be prescribed with “extreme caution.”

Dr. Cass’s findings are in line with several European countries that have limited the treatments after scientific reviews . But in America, where nearly two dozen states have banned the care outright, medical groups have endorsed the treatments as evidence-based and necessary .

The American Academy of Pediatrics declined to comment on Dr. Cass’s specific findings, and condemned the state bans. “Politicians have inserted themselves into the exam room, which is dangerous for both physicians and for families,” Dr. Ben Hoffman, the organization’s president, said.

The Endocrine Society told The New York Times that Dr. Cass’s review “does not contain any new research” that would contradict its guidelines. The federal health department did not respond to requests for comment.

Dr. Cass spoke to The Times about her report and the response from the United States. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What are your top takeaways from the report?

The most important concern for me is just how poor the evidence base is in this area. Some people have questioned, “Did we set a higher bar for this group of young people?” We absolutely didn’t. The real problem is that the evidence is very weak compared to many other areas of pediatric practice.

The second big takeaway for me is that we have to stop just seeing these young people through the lens of their gender and see them as whole people, and address the much broader range of challenges that they have, sometimes with their mental health, sometimes with undiagnosed neurodiversity. It’s really about helping them to thrive, not just saying “How do we address the gender?” in isolation.

You found that the quality of evidence in this space is “remarkably weak.” Can you explain what that means?

The assessment of studies looks at things like, do they follow up for long enough? Do they lose a lot of patients during the follow-up period? Do they have good comparison groups? All of those assessments are really objective. The reason the studies are weak is because they failed on one or more of those areas.

The most common criticism directed at your review is that it was in some way rigged because of the lack of randomized controlled trials, which compare two treatments or a treatment and a placebo, in this field. That, from the get-go, you knew you would find that there was low-quality evidence.

People were worried that we threw out anything that wasn’t a randomized controlled trial, which is the gold standard for study design. We didn’t, actually.

There weren’t any randomized controlled trials, but we still included about 58 percent of the studies that were identified, the ones that were high quality or moderate quality. The kinds of studies that aren’t R.C.T.s can give us some really good information, but they have to be well-conducted. The weakness was many were very poorly conducted.

There’s something I would like to say about the perception that this was rigged, as you say. We were really clear that this review was not about defining what trans means, negating anybody’s experiences or rolling back health care.

There are young people who absolutely benefit from a medical pathway, and we need to make sure that those young people have access — under a research protocol, because we need to improve the research — but not assume that that’s the right pathway for everyone.

Another criticism is that this field is being held to a higher standard than others, or being exceptionalized in some way. There are other areas of medicine, particularly in pediatrics, where doctors practice without high-quality evidence.

The University of York, which is kind of the home of systematic reviews, one of the key organizations that does them in this country, found that evidence in this field was strikingly lower than other areas — even in pediatrics.

I can’t think of any other situation where we give life-altering treatments and don’t have enough understanding about what’s happening to those young people in adulthood. I’ve spoken to young adults who are clearly thriving — a medical pathway has been the right thing for them. I’ve also spoken to young adults where it was the wrong decision, where they have regret, where they’ve detransitioned. The critical issue is trying to work out how we can best predict who’s going to thrive and who’s not going to do well.

In your report, you are also concerned about the rapid increase in numbers of teens who have sought out gender care over the last 10 years, most of whom were female at birth. I often hear two different explanations. On the one hand, there’s a positive story about social acceptance: that there have always been this many trans people, and kids today just feel freer to express who they are. The other story is a more fearful one: that this is a ‘contagion’ driven in large part by social media. How do you think about it?

There’s always two views because it’s never a simple answer. And probably elements of both of those things apply.

It doesn’t really make sense to have such a dramatic increase in numbers that has been exponential. This has happened in a really narrow time frame across the world. Social acceptance just doesn’t happen that way, so dramatically. So that doesn’t make sense as the full answer.

But equally, those who say this is just social contagion are also not taking account of how complex and nuanced this is.

Young people growing up now have a much more flexible view about gender — they’re not locked into gender stereotypes in the way my generation was. And that flexibility and fluidity are potentially beneficial because they break down barriers, combat misogyny, and so on. It only becomes a challenge if we’re medicalizing it, giving an irreversible treatment, for what might be just a normal range of gender expression.

What has the response to your report been like in Britain?

Both of our main parties have been supportive of the report, which has been great.

We have had a longstanding relationship with support and advocacy groups in the U.K. That’s not to say that they necessarily agree with all that we say. There’s much that they are less happy about. But we have had an open dialogue with them and have tried to address their questions throughout.

I think there is an appreciation that we are not about closing down health care for children. But there is fearfulness — about health care being shut down, and also about the report being weaponized to suggest that trans people don’t exist. And that’s really disappointing to me that that happens, because that’s absolutely not what we’re saying.

I’ve reached out to major medical groups in the United States about your findings. The American Academy of Pediatrics declined to comment on your report, citing its own research review that is underway . It said that its guidance, which it reaffirmed last year, was “grounded in evidence and science.”

The Endocrine Society said “we stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care,” which is “needed and often lifesaving.”

I think for a lot of people, this is kind of dizzying. We have medical groups in the United States and Britain looking at the same facts, the same scientific literature, and coming to very different conclusions. What do you make of those responses?

When I was president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, we did some great work with the A.A.P. They are an organization that I have enormous respect for. But I respectfully disagree with them on holding on to a position that is now demonstrated to be out of date by multiple systematic reviews.

It wouldn’t be too much of a problem if people were saying “This is clinical consensus and we’re not sure.” But what some organizations are doing is doubling down on saying the evidence is good. And I think that’s where you’re misleading the public. You need to be honest about the strength of the evidence and say what you’re going to do to improve it.

I suspect that the A.A.P., which is an organization that does massive good for children worldwide, and I see as a fairly left-leaning organization, is fearful of making any moves that might jeopardize trans health care right now. And I wonder whether, if they weren’t feeling under such political duress, they would be able to be more nuanced, to say that multiple truths exist in this space — that there are children who are going to need medical treatment, and that there are other children who are going to resolve their distress in different ways.

Have you heard from the A.A.P. since your report was published?

They haven’t contacted us directly — no.

Have you heard from any other U.S. health bodies, like the Department of Health and Human Services, for example?

Have you heard from any U.S. lawmakers?

No. Not at all.

Pediatricians in the United States are in an incredibly tough position because of the political situation here. It affects what doctors feel comfortable saying publicly. Your report is now part of that evidence that they may fear will be weaponized. What would you say to American pediatricians about how to move forward?

Do what you’ve been trained to do. So that means that you approach any one of these young people as you would any other adolescent, taking a proper history, doing a proper assessment and maintaining a curiosity about what’s driving their distress. It may be about diagnosing autism, it may be about treating depression, it might be about treating an eating disorder.

What really worries me is that people just think: This is somebody who is trans, and the medical pathway is the right thing for them. They get put on a medical pathway, and then the problems that they think were going to be solved just don’t go away. And it’s because there’s this overshadowing of all the other problems.

So, yes, you can put someone on a medical pathway, but if at the end of it they can’t get out of their bedroom, they don’t have relationships, they’re not in school or ultimately in work, you haven’t done the right thing by them. So it really is about treating them as a whole person, taking a holistic approach, managing all of those things and not assuming they’ve all come about as a result of the gender distress.

I think some people get frustrated about the conclusion being, well, what these kids need is more holistic care and mental health support, when that system doesn’t exist. What do you say to that?

We’re failing these kids and we’re failing other kids in terms of the amount of mental health support we have available. That is a huge problem — not just for gender-questioning young people. And I think that’s partly a reflection of the fact that the system’s been caught out by a growth of demand that is completely outstripping the ability to provide it.

We don’t have a nationalized health care system here in the United States. We have a sprawling and fragmented system. Some people have reached the conclusion that, because of the realities of the American health care system, the only way forward is through political bans. What do you make of that argument?

Medicine should never be politically driven. It should be driven by evidence and ethics and shared decision-making with patients and listening to patients’ voices. Once it becomes politicized, then that’s seriously concerning, as you know well from the abortion situation in the United States.

So, what can I say, except that I’m glad that the U.K. system doesn’t work in the same way.

When asked after this interview about Dr. Cass’s comments, Dr. Hoffman, the A.A.P.’s president, said that the group had carefully reviewed her report and “added it to the evidence base undergoing a systematic review.” He also said that “Any suggestion the American Academy of Pediatrics is misleading families is false.”

Azeen Ghorayshi covers the intersection of sex, gender and science for The Times. More about Azeen Ghorayshi