What is Curiosity?

Curiosity sets us apart from other species. It allows us to develop our intellect and invent new tools that make our life easier. Curiosity is not only the engine for material progress, but also closely correlated to individual mental and physical health, intelligence, happiness, and positive outlook on life in general. Curiosity in us is innate and can anchor us in the present while we are deeply involved in investigating, researching, and exploring. It makes us feel more awake, more alive, more passionate and has a rejuvenating effect. Considering all these positive qualities that accompany curiosity, one can only wonder why we don't cultivate and harvest its positive energy much more. It seems that with age, curiosity is slipping away and with it a lot of fun, passion, empathy, happiness and a special connection to the world that we live in. Wouldn't our lives be a lot more interesting, if we regularly dared to try new things, never stopped challenging ourselves to learn new skills and pick up new interests? Wouldn't we feel much happier in our neighborhoods, communities, and towns, if people were a little more curious about their surroundings, each other, the world, big and small ideas, and all the infinite possibilities in our communities that we currently leave unexplored?

In babies and toddlers curiosity is the driving force. They rely on it to learn all skills necessary to survive in their habitat. Constant observation helps them to figure out how things work. Little children touch things to understand what they are, what they are made of, what they can do, and what they can be useful for. They play around with them in as many different ways as possible. Every object is worth discovering and exploring in the same meticulous way, because it will help with comparing all new things to these first ones and will allow them to make sense of their world. Parents and caregivers know that the acquisition of knowledge and curiosity are intrinsically connected and encourage their little ones actively to explore and discover. But as they master the basic skills of walking, talking, eating, and understanding of how human interaction works, they become integrated into a broader learning system, in which curiosity gradually becomes marginalized.

Once institutionalized learning takes place, children remain encouraged to explore, but in much more directed ways. As they gradually become part of institutionalized learning, students' curiosity is just one aspect among many that dictate the curriculum and prepare the students for important standardized assessments. Due to teachers' performance pressures, kids' curiosity often becomes discouraged as it can slow down or even disrupt teaching. Institutionalized learning at times backs away from hands-on investigation in favor of a reproduction of knowledge in pre-selected, pre-approved packages. As a well-known study of divergent thinking of 2011 showed, schooling actually has a negative effect on creative thinking and creativity in kids. One specific experiment asked Kindergarteners to come up with as many uses for a paper clip as possible and the average 5-year old could think of 200. When the experiment was repeated with kids a few years older, the results were sobering: on average these older kids were only able to imagine 5 uses for a paper clip in contrast to 200 imagined by 5-year-olds.

As adults with steady jobs and more static lives, curiosity and imagination recede even further. Unless we perform a diverse set of tasks or have jobs in creative fields like research, design or the arts, we generally do not have many chances to follow our curiosity or interests. Considering that 80% of adults in the U.S. admitted to "hating their jobs" in 2010 and spent endless hours on tasks without being positively emotionally engaged, they live a rather monotonous lives. While some individuals may manage well accepting this dull outlook thinking that it is part of being an adult, the majority of us becomes discontent, bored, and frustrated not only with work-life, but also with themselves, their relations, and their surroundings. Without taking the extra time or effort to make our lives more interesting by doing something different and incorporating curiosity into the little stretches of free time that we do have, we tend to become lazy and depressed. We accept the social expectations that adulthood means lots of responsibilities and obligations and don't expect much excitement.

Last year, research confirmed that the brain of curious individuals worked much better and enhanced the individual's ability to learn information easier than those of the less curious people. They found that when curiosity is piqued, new information can be best learned and turned it into useful facts. It will also be memorized for much more extended period of time than for those who are less curious. In addition, the investigators found that when curiosity is stimulated, there is increased activity in the brain circuit related to reward. When curiosity motivated learning, there was increased activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that is important for forming new memories, as well as increased interactions between the hippocampus and the reward circuit. So curiosity recruits the reward system, and interactions between the reward system and the hippocampus seem to put the brain in a state in which you are more likely to learn and retain information, even if that information is not of particular interest to you. This could be useful information in the classroom or the workplace, when learning what might be considered boring material could be enhanced if teachers or managers are able to harness the power of curiosity about something they are naturally motivated to learn.

Big market leaders like Google or Apple have long integrated this knowledge into their companies. They have elevated the role of curiosity, imagination, and creativity and allowed employee's to have a more flexible work schedule which leads to more free mental space that in turn encourages and embraces different, innovative ways of thinking that can lead to great inventions. Google for example has allowed employees to spend 20% of their work time on projects of personal interest. Giving employees control over their time and how they approach a project, the management gives up control, but gains loyalty, passion, and furthers the talent of their employees, who in turn engage with the project on a much deeper level than they otherwise would. Google understands not only that unstructured time, inspiring surroundings, and minimal supervision are necessary for more creative output, but also that monotony poses a main obstacles to innovation. In the last couple of years, many other business leaders have confirmed that the specific skills that the job market will require in the near future cannot be known for sure at this point, but the qualities that many companies will look for are creativity, adaptability, and critical thinking skills, which are most likely found in humanities or art majors.

Despite the popularity and wide distribution of these findings (also to be found in some great TED talks), the current trend unfortunately continues to favor the opposite. At universities more and more funding has been cut for the arts and humanities, where the instructional focus lies on the development of critical and free thinking skills, as well as creativity. Japan has taken this to the extreme as the recent announcement by Minister of Education Hakubun Shimomura shows in which he said that all Japanese universities will stop accept entering students into programs of social sciences, law, and humanities. In the U.S. and many other nations (like Britain) the government are partial to STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) over the arts, social sciences, and humanities, which resulted in massive budget cuts for the latter. While this decision is clearly driven by economic concerns, it may have a much larger impact. Not only will it further pre-select areas of interest to humanity and thus limit the direction in which curiosity and imagination are allowed to operate, but it will ultimately also create a world in which even more people favor a calculable reality. If the broad majority of higher educated people worked in STEM fields, it would alter our world significantly, but not in a positive way. In the end, it would be a less colorful and far less diverse place, where most of our interests center around similar things. It would become a static and grim world of decreasing tolerance for alternative ways of thinking, being, and approaching life.

The power of curiosity, which demands an open mind and is inherently connected to hope, can transform us and should not be sidelined in our lives no matter our age. Life is an adventure and can remain such in all stages of life, if we stay curious. If we dare to look at the world beyond our daily framework, we can only benefit from it. Acquiring new skills, challenging ourselves to learn, we view life from different perspectives, which helps us to remain energized and awake. When exposed to the new, we --like children-- reevaluate the old, the traditional and have the chance to create something new. Not only does it add to our basic sum of experiences, but it also allows us to rethink our own identity. This may be especially valuable in an age when many people are unhappy with their jobs and we are regularly confronted with horrible violence committed by individuals who struggle to find a place in this world. Engaging people, arousing and channeling their curiosity may create a way to transform their frustrations and anger into something positive and lead them to reconnect with their peers and their communities.