The Psychology Of Curiosity

The Psychology Of Curiosity: Curiosity is the drive to close gaps in what we know, powered by the same dopamine reward circuits that respond to food and money; it boosts learning and memory, and it is exactly what headline writers, TV cliffhangers and apps are built to exploit.

George Loewenstein: His 1994 information gap theory argues curiosity feels like an itch that appears when we know just enough to realize what we are missing.

Matthias Gruber: His 2014 study found that when people were curious about a trivia answer, they also remembered unrelated faces shown to them during the wait, as if curiosity switches the brain into record mode.

Min Jeong Kang: Her 2009 brain imaging study showed trivia curiosity activates the caudate, a reward region, and people would spend scarce tokens or wait longer just to learn an answer.

Jaak Panksepp: The neuroscientist identified a SEEKING system in the mammalian brain, a dopamine driven urge to explore that he considered one of our most basic emotions.

Ivan Pavlov: Before his famous dogs drooled on cue, Pavlov described the 'What is it?' reflex, the automatic turning toward anything new that he saw as the root of curiosity.

Daniel Berlyne: The psychologist split curiosity into types, like the restless urge to escape boredom versus the focused hunger to answer one specific question.

Harry Harlow: In 1950 his rhesus monkeys solved mechanical puzzles over and over with no food reward at all, early evidence that curiosity is its own motivation.

Bluma Zeigarnik: She noticed waiters remembered unpaid orders but forgot them once settled, leading to the Zeigarnik Effect: unfinished tasks stick in the mind.

Christopher Hsee: His 2016 'Pandora effect' experiments found people clicked pens they knew might give them electric shocks, just to find out which ones would.

Suzanne Oosterwijk: Her 2017 study showed people repeatedly chose to view images of death and violence over neutral ones, putting numbers on our morbid curiosity.

Sophie von Stumm: Her 2011 research argued that a 'hungry mind' is a third pillar of academic success alongside intelligence and effort.

Todd Kashdan: His research links curiosity to greater well being and stronger relationships, since curious people ask more questions and are seen as more likable.

Pandora's Box: In Hesiod's myth, Pandora's curiosity releases every evil into the world, though the original container was a large jar, not a box.

Lot's Wife: In Genesis she is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at the destruction of Sodom, one of history's oldest warnings against curiosity.

Curiosity Killed the Cat: The proverb began as 'care killed the cat,' meaning worry, in a 1598 Ben Jonson play, and only later shifted its blame to curiosity.

Scheherazade: In One Thousand and One Nights she survives by ending each story on a cliffhanger, so the king has to spare her life to hear what happens next.

Charles Dickens: His novels ran in cliffhanger installments, and legend holds that crowds at New York's docks shouted to arriving ships to ask whether Little Nell had died.

Upworthy: The viral site perfected the 'curiosity gap' headline in the early 2010s, reportedly writing 25 headlines per story and testing which one people could not resist clicking.

Serial (podcast): The 2014 true crime series hooked millions by withholding answers week after week, becoming one of the first podcasts to reach mass audiences.

J.J. Abrams: In his 2007 TED talk he showed an unopened 'mystery box' he bought as a kid, explaining that mystery is more powerful than knowledge when telling stories.

Leonardo da Vinci: His notebooks are full of to do lists like 'describe the tongue of the woodpecker,' a record of one of history's most restless minds.

Albert Einstein: In a 1952 letter he wrote that he had no special talents and was only passionately curious.

Richard Feynman: While working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, he taught himself to crack the base's classified safes purely because he wanted to know how.

Curiosity Rover: NASA's Mars rover got its name from a 2009 essay contest won by a sixth grader from Kansas, Clara Ma, who wrote that curiosity is a flame that burns in everyone's mind.