Being Curious
What’s the upside of curiosity?
One of the principles we need to abide by at my workplace is ‘Be Curious’. However, why do we need to be told to be curious? We are curious by nature. Novelty is the deep wellspring of happiness that a toddler taps into when he observes a snail crawling about in a garden for the first time or watches the leaf turn ochre in autumn. This curiosity then plays out in the hormonally charged teenage years when experimentation and the desire for unique experiences brings about a heady profusion of dopamine. "Exciting curiosity" was first used in English in 1917 and was a euphemism for erotic. Such material was called curiosa. Old French origins (‘curios’) date back to the mid-14th century, when it was used often in a bad sense to mean inquisitive, anxious and strange.
Finally, there is a reversal in our level of curiosity during our balding middle age as we get used to established patterns and our need for stability and order dominates the need for novelty. We move from sitting at the window to the aisle seat. Finally, as old age approaches, we may want to experience that novelty one last time before our heart stops beating. One of my old uncles has now gone back to sitting at the window seat, where he used to sit as a child. They want to hold their grandchild and vicariously experience the joy of seeing a sunset from a beach for the first time. Research has shown that curious people also happen to experience higher levels of positive emotions, lower levels of anxiety, more satisfaction with life, and greater psychological well-being.
Being inquisitive helps us figure out what path we should not undertake. Knowing what works and what doesn’t may be costly (for example, there is a spike in mortality during teenage years), but it provides humanity with a wholesome experience that becomes the bedrock of our personal and professional lives. Curiosity helps us remain vigilant and gain knowledge about our constantly changing environment and indeed, can be the most important trait that companies look for in candidates today. Openness to learning can signify humility. According to author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one reason why surrounding ourselves with bookshelves replete with unread books might augur well for one’s success is because they constantly remind us of what we don’t know.
Inventing the wheel, paper and electricity required curiosity. However, mere curiosity cannot account for path-breaking discoveries. The underlying curiosity may need an anchor in discipline and adherence to “no harm” rules, for if left untethered, it can wreak havoc (“Let’s see what happens if we create this virus!”). Is curiosity fundamentally incompatible with religion? Francis Bacon wrote: “Knowledge is the rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate…a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.” Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal and Johannes Kepler were religious men who made important scientific contributions to physics and astronomy. The rules and discipline can provide a basis for scientists to collaborate and experiment. While some may find that religion also gives a deeper meaning to the understanding of the world, religion is certainly not necessary to fuel curiosity. Neither does a framework of morals and ethics necessarily hinder curiosity about the world. Indeed, the ability to test an unexplored hypothesis within an ethical framework is the basis of how science makes progress.
I think of curiosity as the inherent tendency to tinker with inputs in a system and see how the output changes. Chemists play with chemicals in a lab to create life-saving drugs for Cancer. Computer scientists toy with their code to improve the user experience on websites. Biologists fiddle with rats to further gene therapy. Authors love to tinker with plots, characters and milieus and reading fiction set in an unfamiliar environment can fuel empathy. Children love to play, tinker and fiddle and ask “Why not?” Just yesterday, my three-year old son asked me chirpily why his pee was yellow and not blue? I was initially stumped for an answer but then asked him to drink a lot more water and see how its colour changes. This tactic has distracted him for now. But as he becomes ‘curiouser and curiouser’, this pallid reasoning may not placate him.
