Your brain wants you to be curious, not anxious
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Your brain wants you to be curious, not anxious
In a letter Albert Einstein wrote to his biographer in 1952, the brilliant scientist claimed to possess no special talents other than being “passionately curious.” False modesty aside, it was only through pursuing his interest in the world’s mysteries during his time on this planet that Einstein managed to reveal so many hidden secrets about the universe.
Curiosity may be humanity’s brightest, most powerful spotlight for illuminating the unknown—whether it’s quantum mechanics in the case of Einstein or, gulp, the possibility of AI replacing all our jobs—and a new study appears to back that up. It may even offer a new way to think about anxiety.
A research team from Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute recently published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience about what happens in the human brain when feelings of curiosity develop. By revealing how certain brain areas tend to process uncertainty as curiosity in visually ambiguous situations, the study’s findings show how deeply the two elements are interrelated.
“What distinguishes human curiosity is that it drives us to explore much more broadly than other animals, and often just because we want to find things out, not because we are seeking a material reward or survival benefit,” one of the study’s authors, Jacqueline Gottlieb stated on the Zuckerman Institute’s website. “This leads to a lot of our creativity.”
Gottlieb and her team of researchers used a type of MRI scan on 32 volunteers, monitoring changes in blood-oxygen levels within each subject’s brain as they viewed a series of images with varying degrees of distortion. While observing participants’ brain activity, the researchers asked them to rate their confidence and curiosity about each image. As uncertainty rose, so did curiosity.
The brain scan data seemed to confirm the subjects’ verbal responses, showing high activity in two regions: the occipitotemporal cortex, known to be involved in vision and recognizing types of objects; and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which helps determine a person’s perception of value and confidence about a situation. According to Gottlieb, the latter region seemed to pick up on the former region’s encoded uncertainty and helped subjects decide whether to be more curious about an image. The scientists were thus able to observe uncertainty driving curiosity in participants’ brains.
While this study is limited to the visual realm, its implications may extend to how we deal with other forms of uncertainty—perhaps even the intrusive, existential kind that keeps some of us up at night.
Most people seem to hate uncertainty. It signals a lack of control, along with an unshakable sense of trouble looming over the horizon; difficult to anticipate and even harder to brace for.
“To the human mind, uncertainty equals danger,” Bryan E. Robinson wrote in an article for Psychology Today back in 2020, when uncertainty seemed to run particularly rampant. “If your brain doesn’t know what’s around the corner, it can’t keep you out of harm’s way. It always assumes the worst, overpersonalizes threats, and jumps to conclusions.”
Uncertainty is a critical driver of stress. In fact, a scientific study from 2016 concluded that uncertainty is even more stressful than situations with predictable negative outcomes—meaning most people might generally prefer knowing their day will surely end with a slap in the face from a stranger than to instead have only a 50% chance of getting slapped.
But maybe they shouldn’t.?
Another way people can deal with other forms of uncertainty is to intentionally treat it the way their brains automatically treat the visual kind. It might be as simple as a matter of reframing. For instance, Amy Poehler once described dealing with nervousness by reframing it as excitement, since the two feelings resemble each other: “That way you acknowledge the physical feelings without putting a negative spin on things.”
The same goes for uncertainty and curiosity.
Instead of stewing within the unbearable absence of instant answers, another way to process ambiguity is as an opportunity for discovery. Anything agonizingly unclear in one’s life can likely be broken down into its component parts for further analysis. Practically all possibilities are rife with potential for obsessive research and exploration, rather than mere dread. The paradigm shift to an attitude of curiosity won’t just magically resolve the issue at hand, but it can certainly help one prepare for, or deal with, whatever awaits.
The flipside of “I’m worried about the unknown” is “I’d like to learn more about the unknown.” The second option just happens to feel a lot better, and is far more constructive. It doesn’t take an Einstein to understand that.
OK Bo?tjan Dolin?ek
An MBA in General Management, Business Leader at BASF, MBA
8 个月Useful tips!.. thanks for sharing
MS O365, DEX, SharePoint, & VBA Data Integration Specialist Increasing end-user productivity with MS 365 tools and tips consulting!
8 个月Very interesting article. I never really thought about this, but curiosity drives me on a daily basis. When someone comes to me for help, I am curious about their business process/workflow, curious about how our MS Office 365 tools can solve their pain points. The article talks about turning an upcoming unknown stressful event into being curious about the event/task. Thus changing your mind set which changes your stress level.
"The sky is not the limit" - CEO and co-founder at MarineXcell
8 个月Very interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Director of Content, Senior Content Writer & Editor
8 个月Interesting article! I regularly reinvent my career because I'm always seeking new knowledge and new challenges. I?love working as a writer and content director — I'm constantly learning new things and researching emerging or current trends across multiple industries. It's cool to read that scientists have conducted research into this topic.