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How to Rekindle Curiosity
When we tailor problems to match our capacity, learning becomes a primal reward
Learning is a primal pleasure, and so is wanting to know. Curiosity correlates tightly with the dopamine brain circuit — the same circuit that fires in response to food, drugs, and sex. The more curious you are, the more those regions light up.
These neurobiological curiosity signals predict not only how much you learn, but what you retain. The more curious you are about something, the likelier you are to recall even incidental details linked to the information at hand. If you’re anticipating a tantalizing piece of gossip, for example, you’re more likely to remember what your source of information was wearing or the expression on their face. The degree of your craving for knowledge controls the strength of your memory.
Curiosity is a propulsive force that pushes animals to act, just like hunger, thirst, the need for security, or the desire to reproduce. But it’s also part of what makes humans, as a species, unique. Whereas other animals merely visit the physical space around them, we explore conceptual worlds. We rejoice, for example, in the symmetry and pure beauty of mathematical patterns. A clever theorem can move us much more than a piece of chocolate. And when we suddenly discover that one of our implicit assumptions is wrong — say, that a road sign for “xing” means “crossing,” and not something that rhymes with “zing” — our brain triggers a response of amusement. We laugh at the absurdity of having been so wrong, but we’re also delighted to be corrected. Studies show that, when all other factors are equal, laughing during learning seems to increase curiosity and enhance subsequent memory.
Several psychologists have tried to specify the algorithm that underlies human curiosity. If we understood it better, we could perhaps gain control over this essential ingredient of our learning scheme, and even reproduce it in a machine that would eventually imitate the performance of the human species: a curious robot.
This algorithmic approach is beginning to bear fruit. Some of the greatest psychologists, from William James to Jean Piaget to Donald Hebb, have speculated on the nature of the mental operations that underlie curiosity. Over time, these…
