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

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The ability to stimulate curiosity, on the other hand, can save lives, as Scheherazade experienced in the 1001 nights she told cliffhanger stories that needed to be finished before she was ready to die. Obviously, as a mother and teacher, I focus on stimulating curiosity, rather than punishing it, as it is part of effective learning. That's the theory, anyway. Something else happened during that year of being a legal clerk that was just as important. It was the year I started to actively appreciate the real power of curiosity.

The situation is little better in the offices and workplaces where most adults spend their lives. Sure, software coders or pharmaceutical researchers or university professors are encouraged to be curious because it’s a big part of their jobs. But what if the typical hospital nurse or bank teller gets curious and starts questioning how things are done? Outside of some truly exceptional places like Google and IBM and Corning, curiosity is unwelcome, if not insubordinate. Good behavior—whether you’re fourteen years old or forty-five—doesn’t include curiosity. The serpent is appealing directly to Eve’s curiosity. You don’t even know what you don’t know, the serpent says. With a bite of the forbidden fruit, you will see the world in a completely different way. Unlike some other Internet alarmists, though, Leslie does not damn the Web completely, but simply concludes that it's a wonderful tool for the truly curious, and a damaging distraction for those who either have little curiosity or only a superficial desire to be amused for seconds at a time. He also cites studies to show that, besides such character traits as resilience and determination, the biggest factor in future life success, according to some meta-analyses, is the acquisition of core knowledge.One of the classic examples which was much debated in the 16th century, often attributed to [Renaissance physician and occultist] Paracelsus is called the weapon salve. This was the theory that you could heal a weapon-inflicted wound by applying an ointment not to the wound but to the weapon. It makes no sense and sounds like complete nonsense from our perspective, but the idea was that there was a hidden, occult force connecting the two, so you were transmitting the agency from one to the other. That’s what my “I have to hand these papers over in person” line was, a pretext—it worked for me, it worked for the assistants, it even worked for the people I was visiting. “Oh, he needs to see me in person, sure.” The author combines the results of research with anecdotes to provide an illuminating volume on why curiosity is so important to lifelong learning and our advancement as a global society. He examines the risks inherent in some current technological trends, such as smart phones and internet searches, and how to overcome them. He looks at what arouses curiosity and what quenches it.

In psychology, there’s a well-known concept called confirmation bias. We filter out information that conflicts with what we already believe and focus on information that fits our world view. It’s a mental shortcut — we gather pieces of information to confirm our pre-existing beliefs and dismiss conflicting information that could lead to new insights. We need to fight that bias and be aware of it. If you see something that makes you think, “How could someone think that?” consider it a sign pointing you towards a topic you should explore. Don’t shy away from it. I didn’t drive myself to be buff. And I don’t look like a movie star. But I also don’t really look like what you might imagine a movie producer looks like. I have my own slightly offbeat style. I wear sneakers to work, I gel my hair so it stands straight up, I have a big smile.Barbara Benedict is a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and a scholar of the eighteenth century who spent years studying the attitude about curiosity during that period, as scientific inquiry sought to overtake religion as the way we understand the world. The parable could not be blunter: curiosity causes suffering. Indeed, the story’s moral is aimed directly at the audience: whatever your current misery, reader, it was caused by Adam, Eve, the serpent, and their rebellious curiosity. You know what’s curious: throughout that entire time, no one ever called my bluff. No one said, “Hey, kid, just leave the contract on the table and get out of here. You don’t need to see Warren Beatty.”