Regardless of whether these facts are true, they likely made you curious enough to want to know more. And that alone is a win. According to experts, curiosity alone makes us value learning, which is always beneficial.
“If you feel positive after learning something, then you now understand the joy of learning, which motivates you to learn next time,” educational psychologist Dr. Kou Murayama told Scientific American.
But what drives our curiosity? What makes us want to dig deeper into pieces of information we come across and eventually ingest? According to astrophysicist and author Mario Livio, curiosity has “several flavors.”
As he explained in an interview with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, perpetual curiosity, for example, happens when something surprises us or when something isn’t in accordance 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,” Livio said of perpetual curiosity, noting that it’s why we try to find out more to scratch that itch and find relief.
Livio also discussed the concept of epistemic curiosity, which he described as a “pleasurable state associated with an anticipation of reward.” He says it’s the level of knowledge we possess that drives scientific research, many artworks, and education.
Livio also discussed the concept of specific curiosity, which the digital age brought about. It’s about wanting to know a particular detail, much like what many of you will likely experience after reading some of the facts on this list. And Livio says it is actually a good thing.
“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,” he said.
Given the stimulus overload we often find ourselves in because of technology, it’s easier to be less fascinated by the world around us. To keep the curious mind going, here’s a piece of advice from Dr. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, research director at the University of Bordeaux:
“Focus on learning activities that are neither too easy nor too difficult, the ones where you have maximum improvement in speed, which will progressively get you to more and more complicated and yet learnable activities.”
