Nautilus Magazine: Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know

Curiosity is not just wanderlust, though. We’re curious about specific things, and different people are interested in different specific things. Some are hobbyists, seekers of the arcane, others jacks-of-all-trades. This divergence of interests tells us that something beyond a tendency to roam must be guiding each of our unique obsessions.

Indeed, scientists who study the mechanics of curiosity are finding that it is, at its core, a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time. Like the links on a Wikipedia page, curiosity builds upon itself, every question leading to the next. And as with a journey down the Wikipedia wormhole, where you start dictates where you might end up. That’s the funny thing about curiosity: It’s less about what you don’t know than about what you already do. [...]

The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that life’s chief task is “subsisting at all,” followed directly by “warding off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall whenever it sees a life secure from need.” To be content is to be bored, and curiosity is our ticket out. The anthropologist Ralph Linton went even further. “It seems probable that the human capacity for being bored, rather than man’s social or natural needs, lies at the root of man’s cultural advance,” he wrote in 1936. Humans, in other words, have managed to amass immeasurable knowledge—language, the Taj Mahal, the Snuggie—because we loathe monotony.

But boredom alone can’t fully explain curiosity. “The very old view is that curiosity and boredom are opposite ends of the same continuum,” Loewenstein says. The new view: bored is not to curious as hungry is to full or thirsty is slaked. Rather, boredom is “a signal from your brain that you’re not making good use of a part of the brain,” like the tingling of a foot you’ve sat on too long. Boredom reminds us that we need to exercise our minds, but there are antidotes to boredom besides curiosity—food or sex, for example. What’s more, curiosity strikes even when we’re not bored. In fact, we will readily give up things we want or enjoy in order to learn something new.

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