CURIOSITY

Understanding ideas is essential for a thoughtful, flourishing life—an examined life worth living for pleasure and profit, a purposeful life of possibility, meaning, and value.
What key ideas and concepts would you need to understand and use for such a life?
Why might you value those ideas and concepts?
How could they help improve your personal, professional, and learning lives?

What is curiosity?

Curiosity is so common a concept as to seem hardly necessary to define. What’s better is to identify its core elements. First, curiosity is embedded in questions. Children are relentless questioners, as they are curious about everything, learning little by little as they feed their developing minds. Second, curiosity is rooted in desire—the desire to learn, the absolute need to learn something, anything, everything that interests us. Third, curiosity knows no bounds; it can’t be mandated; it comes from within, an intrinsic, basic human need. One that seeks to be satisfied. Curiosity remains essential for us all our lives.

Why is curiosity important?

Curiosity drives learning. It enables us to continue learning all our lives. It may, indeed, be the single most important influence on our ability to learn. Without curiosity, our minds stagnate; they don’t move forward; they stop learning. Which, of course, raises the more basic question: why is learning important; what is its value? We need to keep learning to continue surviving; we continue learning to improve our lives; we remain curious and continue learning so we can fulfill our human potential, and flourish, as thinking beings. Curiosity matters because we seek answers to the changing circumstances of our lives. Its value lies in enabling us to remain vibrant and vital—interesting to ourselves and to others.

How can we use curiosity effectively?

We can use curiosity in ways we might readily imagine. We can apply curiosity in our everyday lives by following our interests in whatever matters to us—people and places, activities such as sports and music and shopping and eating and drinking and socializing—and more and more. What these are for you, of course, only you can determine. Second, we can use our curiosity for our work, among our colleagues, if we work with others. What are these colleagues doing and why? How are they doing their work, and how does their work relate to ours? We can also maintain an interest in our co-workers as fellow human beings seeking fulfillment in their lives as we seek it in ours. This can improve how relate to them. And third, we might consider how curiosity can keep us alert and alive in our learning lives—whether formally in academic settings, or informally—wherever, whenever, however the need arises for us to learn something. This is especially true in a rapidly changing technological world—one in which AI is a dominant force. These are questions for us all to ponder.

Going Further with Curiosity. From Robert DiYanni's Critical and Creative Thinking: A Brief Guide, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

Creative thinking begins with curiosity—with wondering why something is the case, how something came to be, what might happen if something else could be done.

How might sound be carried great distances? How might books and newspapers and magazines be delivered electronically?  How might humans orbit the planet and land on the moon?  How might polio be prevented, malaria and tuberculosis treated?  

In Curious, Ian Leslie explains how curiosity is foundational for higher order thinking, especially for creative thinking.  He suggests that in addition to the human 

drives for food, sex, and shelter, a fourth drive, curiosity, distinguishes humans from all other species—and also from computers.  Though computers are “smart,” they are not curious.  Only humans are.  

Curious learners, as Ian Leslie notes, go both deep and wide.  They are hedgehogs, who know one big thing deeply and well.  They are also foxes, who know lots of different things.  Charles Darwin, whose singular big idea, evolution by means of natural selection, makes him a hedgehog thinker.  Yet Darwin was also a fox, a voracious reader curious about many things.  It was Darwin’s reading of Thomas Malthus on population growth that sparked his thinking about species competing for resources, which led him to an idea about how their survival might occur.

Is it better to know one big thing well—to have expertise in one discipline—or to know many things across diverse areas of knowledge? Neither, of course, is better.  Both approaches to knowledge are highly valuable.  The curiosity that drives the deep learning of the hedgehog also stimulates the broad knowledge of the fox.  Today’s employers want people with specific knowledge and deep expertise.  But they also want quick learners who can adapt and collaborate with others who know many different things.  They want hedgehogs and foxes.  They seek employees who have “T-shaped knowledge,” with the vertical line of the “T” indicating depth and its horizontal line, breadth.

Curiosity is essential for innovation and progress.  The inquiring minds of individuals constitute the most valuable asset of any society.  But curiosity isn’t valuable only because of what it can do.  Curiosity possesses intrinsic value; it fulfills, enlivens, 

and makes you more interesting to yourself and to others.  In Curiosity, Alberto Manguel claims that curiosity is an essential human attribute, defining what it is to be a human being.  If in developing your curiosity, you expand your intellectual and cultural range, why wouldn’t you be curious?

Curiosity drove Leonardo da Vinci’s inquiries.  He was fascinated by many aspects of life and exhibited an intense interest in both the natural and human worlds. Sir Kenneth Clark has described Leonardo as “the most relentlessly curious man in history.”  His interests took him into human anatomy, geometry and geology, mechanics, the flight

of birds, plant and animal biology, optics and hydraulics, architecture, engineering—and music.

Leonardo’s vigorous curiosity was driven by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.  “Iron rusts from disuse,” he wrote, “stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather freezes; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.”  Exercising curiosity keeps your intellectual muscles in shape.  Leonardo contended that we come to love the things we learn; “Great love is born of great knowledge,” he noted.

Curiosity begins with questions—useful questions, productive questions, questions that lead to other questions.  It is the right questions more than the right answers that stimulate successful critical and creative thinking.

In his book on Leonardo, Michael Gelb also suggests asking “awkward” questions—the kinds of questions that cause difficulty or discomfort--or at least questions that provoke thinking.  Some examples:  Why is this a problem?  Why is it done this way?  Who says we are required to do it like this?   In general, asking questions that begin with “What If” and “How,” with “Why” and “Why not” tend to yield fresh thinking.

Applications

• Of the following pairs, which is a hedgehog thinker and which a fox?  Plato and Aristotle.  Shakespeare and Milton?  George W. Bush and Bill Clinton?  Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs?

• Develop a set of questions—perhaps a dozen—about a subject that interests you or is important to you.   See where your curiosity leads you.  Begin to think about some answers for five of those questions.  

• What are some of the most challenging questions you have ever asked?  What are some of the most challenging questions you have ever been asked? How were they answered?  With what results?

Recommended Readings:

• Leslie, Ian. Curious. Basic Books, 2014.
• Manguel, Alberto. Curiosity. Yale University Press, 2015.
• Gelb, Michael. How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. Dell, 2021.