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CHAPTER 1
Curiosity
We ascended as a species through incandescent curiosity — that hallmark of scientists in every century — at play in the world.
— Barbara Kiser, "Learning Through Doing," Nature
Curiosity is nearly universal in babies, and, in our culture at least, continues to propel children, intellectually, through early childhood. Beyond early childhood, however, its fate rests in great part on the people and experiences that surround and shape a child's daily life. While there are some situations where it would not be good to ask too many questions, or to investigate too persistently, there is a clear empirical link between the hungry mind and the educated mind.
— Susan Engel, The Hungry Mind
I only began drinking coffee shortly after my daughter Lucy was born. That may be hard for some to believe, but it is true. Oh, I was no caffeine-saint, but diet soda had always been my poison. When the sleep deprivation that accompanies parenthood set in, I realized I needed something that had a little bit more octane in it, and I finally switched to coffee, much to my wife's delight. Why am I telling you, dear readers, about coffee? Because of our red coffee cups, that's why. We had, at that time, two red coffee cups that were bigger than all the others. Given the amount of sleep that had abandoned me, I often used these cups in the vain hopes that some amount of coffee might restore me to my previous levels of wakefulness. Sadly, this experiment failed, but another one quickly began.
At about six months of age, I noticed that Lucy became deeply curious about these red cups. She would stare at them, reach her hand out to touch them, rub them (when they were not hot), and try to grab them. She did this with many things around the house, frequently attempting to put them in her mouth as well. For her, learning was about necessity: "That's an interesting looking cup. I need to touch it RIGHT NOW." It was about relevance: "I wonder if that funny red cup is important for my daily needs." It was about trial and error: "I have judged this cup and determined that it is not of immediate significance." I could see all of this being played out concretely each time I drank from one of the cups.
What was revelatory for me, however, was the completely unbridled curiosity I witnessed from her in those moments. I began to wonder how, as a teacher, I could spark the same kind of intellectual curiosity in my students — about the Middle Ages as opposed to, say, red cups. We were all children once, so what happens to this curiosity that was once the driving force of our daily lives? This key question sent me on the quest for information that I document in this chapter. The more I looked, the more I noticed that many of the arrows began to point in one direction: curiosity is an essential part of the way human beings learn, and it always has been. In order to learn something, we must first wonder about it. This was true of our distant ancestors, and it is true of all of us. Somewhere between the time when children are very young and when they make their way to our college classrooms, however, some of this curiosity gets lost.
Let's go find it.
What Is Curiosity?
Any discussion of curiosity must first begin with the thorny question of definitions. Nearly every article I read about curiosity while conducting research for this project contained some version of the question, "How can we possibly talk about curiosity if we cannot specifically define it?" In fact, perhaps the best place to start my discussion is with the recent declaration by Min Jeong Kang and her coauthors that "despite the importance of curiosity, its psychological and neural underpinnings remain poorly understood." As a biological response, or even as an intellectual construct, curiosity is so complex and nuanced that the only thing scholars can really agree on is its importance. George Loewenstein, one of the foremost researchers on curiosity, has summarized this point of consensus nicely: "Curiosity has been consistently recognized as a critical motive that influences human behavior in both positive and negative ways at all stages of the life cycle. It has been identified as a driving force in child development ... and as one of the most important spurs to educational attainment." Loewenstein's depiction of the trait's significance cuts across many spheres here, demonstrating both the breadth of the field with respect to the study of curiosity, as well as the reasons for the disparate approaches to the subject. Researchers are bringing to the table a host of methodologies from a variety of disciplines. This is never a bad thing, of course, and the outcome has been important discoveries and multiple lenses through which to view curiosity.
Once we move past the recognized importance of curiosity, though, the multidisciplinary nature of the subject makes things a bit muddy. I'm okay with muddiness as long as we are eventually able to see through to the object itself, and this is the case with curiosity, though its shape and size may look different from what we would expect. Curiosity has been sliced and diced, categorized and recategorized, divided and subdivided, all in an attempt to figure out what it is and whether distinct types of it are at play at various times. Some studies tackle the nature of curiosity head on, while others try to avoid this quagmire by reframing the concept into something else closely related. Interest, novelty, and wonder are all analogous ideas that have been studied in order to isolate a particular aspect of curiosity that could yield verifiable insights. For similar reasons, some have posited that curiosity is a kind of exploration or have linked it to creativity.
Those who study curiosity on its own terms, though, have taken a number of approaches to defining it. In the landmark article from which his earlier comments were taken, Loewenstein sought to cull through the many descriptions and explanations of curiosity in order to derive a definition that could readily be tested. To do so, he first analyzed the dominant theories that governed our understanding of curiosity for much of the twentieth century. Two approaches emerged as being foundational to our early conceptualization of curiosity, both of which fit under the umbrella of behaviorism — a school of thought that was very much in vogue in the early part of the twentieth century. One of these approaches saw curiosity as being a series of behavioral responses to stimuli. The other largely stemmed from the work of Daniel Berlyne, who diverged from this earlier view and began to suggest in the 1950s and 60s that curiosity was a biological drive stemming from an arousal brought on by novelty. In Berlyne's view, it is this drive-arousal pairing that steers our behavior.
What bothered Loewenstein about these definitions was the inability to test any of them. Above all else, he felt that the study of curiosity was in desperate need of this kind of operational definition. As a result, Loewenstein proposed that curiosity is an "information gap," which he explains as the distance between "what one knows and what one wants to know." Explaining a bit further, he notes that "curiosity, in this view arises when one's informational reference point in a particular domain becomes elevated above one's current level of knowledge." Unlike other researchers before him, Loewenstein was very clear that he was not addressing questions about the "cause" of curiosity, which he deemed to be "inherently unanswerable." He was also clear that his information gap theory was developed specifically for the purpose of designing experiments to test for levels of curiosity. It is easy to get the impression from recent work on the subject of curiosity, though, that Loewenstein's approach has become the dominant lens for exploring the subject. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Loewenstein's work has been influential and has led to tremendous insights on curiosity. However, we must always remember the limitations he himself set out for his theory, and Emily M. Grossnickle acknowledges these constraints in a paper where she attempts to construct a working definition of curiosity to complement Loewenstein's operational one. Hers goes the farthest to capture the many facets of curiosity: "At its core, curiosity is the desire for new knowledge, information, experiences, or stimulation to resolve gaps or experience the unknown." Like Loewenstein's definition, Grossnickle's is derived from a methodical reading of the voluminous literature on curiosity. Though the debt to Loewenstein is clear by the use of the term "gaps," this definition is designed to allow for broad exploration of the concept more generally.
Recently, neuroscientists have also sought to understand curiosity in terms of the brain's activity and, in particular, the role played by curiosity in motivation and reward. M. T. Bardo and his colleagues have gone as far as to suggest that humans appear to have an "innate biological need for novelty" and has linked this need directly to our curiosity. But what happens in our brains when we are curious? To move toward answers to this question, several labs have designed experiments that centered on asking participants trivia questions both while undergoing an fMRI and without the use of this technology. Min Jeong Kang has led the way with this approach. Her widely cited paper describes the process of asking participants questions of a quality not unlike those one might find at a local pub quiz night. The questions varied in their degree of difficulty, and participants rated both their level of curiosity about the answers and their confidence in their answers. Kang and her coauthors discovered that when participants rated their curiosity about an answer as being high, their brains showed more activity in areas like the caudate, which is linked to "reward anticipation, or reward learning, across a wide variety of primary and secondary reinforcers." High ratings of curiosity were also linked to activity in areas of the brain responsible for memory, particularly when the first guess had been wrong (more on this later in the chapter).
In a subsequent study, Matthias J. Gruber, Bernard D. Gelman, and Charan Ranganath achieved similar results and added two important elements to the mix. They found an increase in participants' levels of dopamine when curiosity was high. Dopamine is a neurochemical that has been linked to pleasure activation and addiction, among many other things, and plays a number of important roles in our brains. Its connection to curiosity here is therefore quite fascinating. Gruber and his colleagues also discovered that participants were more likely to remember incidental information (in the case of this experiment, details about human faces) when curiosity was activated. Neuroscientifically speaking, then, we might say curiosity is a mechanism by which we anticipate a reward of information and then remember this acquired knowledge later when we need to access it. In some ways, these new findings loop us back to Berlyne's much earlier discussion of curiosity as a biological drive connected to arousal. The combination of his older work and the information we are learning from neuroscientists adds important facets to the definitions constructed by Loewenstein and Grossnickle.
If we move beyond these attempts to define curiosity, though, we will find that some researchers have addressed our subject's gargantuan nature by identifying different varieties of curiosity and exploring the nuances of each type. Of these different categories, one in particular (epistemic curiosity) is the most relevant for a study of education because it is so closely tied to cognition and the acquisition of knowledge. It should be noted that this is the type of curiosity on which Loewenstein focused. I don't think it can be entirely separated from the other ways in which people are curious, however. It is in part our brain's attraction to novelty that drives us more deeply into subjects that interest us.
You'll notice that we haven't come to any conclusions here. There is no doubt that these studies, and many others like them, have allowed for a nuanced understanding of curiosity, but curiosity is so vast a subject that is it is difficult to favor one approach over another. I'm not sure we need to do that, however. Curiosity is perhaps best viewed as a combination of all of these perspectives. Now that we have a broad sense of the term's various meanings, we can turn to the question of why it is so essential for human learning. To answer that we will need to begin by looking millions of years into our past.
A Curious Species
Human beings aren't the only curious creatures, of course. Anyone who has ever seen a dog cock his head, staring quizzically, knows this to be the case. Apes, our closest relatives, are famously curious animals as well, but what distinguishes us is our ability to use the information we acquire to build knowledge and complex conceptual frameworks. Indeed, according to Juan Luis de Arsuaga, "we are distinguished from chimpanzees by only about 1.6 percent of our sixty to eighty thousand genes. In fact, no more than fifty to one hundred genes are responsible for the cognitive differences between us and them. A very small but very significant genetic change has given us a unique intelligence, making us radically different from all other species." One important element of this intelligence is our profound curiosity. It might be said, in fact, that Homo sapiens is the species of curiosity. The medievalist in me thinks that we should dive right into etymology here. If we did, we would discover that the Latin word sapiens connotes wisdom and very literally means "knowing." But to truly know anything we must first ask questions, seeking to dig deeper. In other words, we need to be curious. We are a species characterized by our inquisitiveness and our desire to know.
The story of our deep-seated curiosity is a tangled one, especially because discussing the evolution of cognition and intelligence is a tricky business that combines highly technical considerations regarding changes in brain size over the course of millions of years with detailed analysis of the environmental factors that might have led to enhanced cognitive capacities over this same period of time. But it is possible to weave together a narrative from the evolutionary record. As we start to look more closely at the evidence, it turns out that everything begins with our extraordinarily big noggins. Well, not the noggins per se, but the actual brains inside of them. In fact, renowned anthropologist Dean Falk specifically attributes our innate curiosity to, as she puts it, the "unusually large brain" of human beings.
Harry Jerison was one of the first researchers to study the evolution of our intelligence by attending to the question of brain size. His premise was "that the integrative functions of the brain, which will define intelligence for us, are limited by the amount of brain that is typical for an animal of a particular species." Jerison believed that "by treating relative brain size as a measure of intelligence at the species level, a between-species measure, it is possible to develop a coherent story about the probable history of intelligence as a biological phenomenon. Like other biological processes, intelligence must have evolved under the influence of natural selection." His research provides the foundation for much of the current work on the evolution of both brains and our intelligence, but what does it all mean? Let's look at his methods. Jerison developed a metric called the encephalization quotient, or EQ, as a way to study relative brain size. I'm sure many readers of this book already have a good handle on the intricacies of the encephalization quotient. Perhaps, though, you're like me: when I first encountered the term, I figured I'd better turn right around and go back to writing about medieval literature again. My trepidations were ultimately ill founded, since, as it happens, the concept is rather easy to understand and is particularly important as we look at the evolution of cognition. In Jerison's own words, the EQ is the "ratio of actual brain size to expected brain size. ... Our brain is, thus, about 6 times as large as we should expect it to be were we typical mammals, which puts us with the dolphins, at the head of the living vertebrates, with respect to relative brain size." This is a stunning finding! To call the difference between expected and actual brain size in our species an aberration of nature is too strong, but it is certainly almost unheard of, as Jerison noted. As we follow the breadcrumbs toward understanding the evolution of curiosity, it may be beneficial to pause for a moment and to consider why the brains of human beings are so big.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How Humans Learn"
by .
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