Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

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The Age of Wonder takes us forward to the scientific enlightenment of the Romantic period, in the late 18th century. A few months after I started at Warner Bros., a senior vice president of the studio was fired. I remember watching them peel his name off the office door. I've been slow-reading this, and remember the era of the first few chapters when the two main types of curiosity are discussed - Diversive (shallow/fleeting) and Epistemic (deep/effortful). There is also Empathic curiosity. Build the database. Eureka moments: they arise from the gathering and working over - the slow, deliberate, patient accumulation of knowledge. I also realized that curiosity had saved my ass that Thursday afternoon. I’ve been curious as long as I can remember. As a boy, I peppered my mother and my grandmother with questions, some of which they could answer, some of which they couldn’t.

After reading, encourage your child to give their loved ones a call to ask questions and learn more family stories and perspectives. “This is a great way to pass down traditions and celebrate family history,” she says. That’s what my “I have to hand these papers over in person” line was, a pretext—it worked for me, it worked for the assistants, it even worked for the people I was visiting. “Oh, he needs to see me in person, sure.” There is another point that I am not fully aboard with. The author argues that schools can't teach thinking skills without teaching knowledge. I think the issue here is how that knowledge is imparted. Is it rote memorization, or hands-on learning?The problem for this tradition of magic is that all of the stuff in it which was of any value – ideas of occult forces that fed into, for example, Newton’s conception of gravity or early studies of magnetism – eventually became assimilated into science. What was left was the folk traditions that have always existed, that really are pure superstition. So if you talk about the occult now, it is clearly discredited. Any value in that kind of thinking had long since transferred itself onto science, and we’re just left with the residue. But there’s a continuity between those early ideas about magic which goes through Rosicrucianism and eventually comes out in Mormonism in the United States. Yes, it was. The position of a lot of theologians in the Middle Ages was that there was no need to be curious, because everything we needed to know was in the scriptures, or in Aristotle and Aquinas which had acquired the status of quasi-scripture. The idea was that there was no need to look any further than that. The author traverses the topic through research and many stories and examples. He discusses the impact of modern digital technology on curiosity and presents a very strong argument for the importance of knowledge and knowledge-based education in supporting and cultivating curiosity. My only complaint is that I felt it was light on content and wish it delved deeper into the topics discussed.⁣

I particularly enjoyed the analysis of the correlation between knowledge and curiosity, and that learning more about a topic creates more interest in it. As a grown-up, I am responsible for giving my children a basis of knowledge that opens up wider horizons for them to be curious about. It is not enough to hand them a laptop and tell them to explore whatever they are interested in. The randomness of the information they will find online will rather kill their wish to know more than make them develop further interest in it. In a world where inequalities in access to information are being leveled, a new divide is emerging - between the curious and the incurious. “The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.”

BOOKS ABOUT CURIOSITY

I went right to the telephone, dialed 411, 2 and asked for the main number at Warner Bros.—I still remember it, 954-6000. 3 This guy got my attention. I opened the window a little more so I wouldn’t miss the rest of the conversation, and I quietly closed the curtain. I would recommend this book to parents or educators who would like to refresh some common sense reflections on why we work daily to create an environment of inquiry, and how we can keep it alive as adults as well. Curiosity can be trained, and nurtured, or stifled, depending on how much we work on it and feed it.

The Adam and Eve story, she says, is a warning. “?‘You are a serf because God said you should be a serf. I’m a king because God said I should be a king. Don’t ask any questions about that.’ Stories like Adam and Eve,” Benedict says, “reflect the need of cultures and civilizations to maintain the status quo. ‘Things are the way they are because that’s the right way.’ That attitude is popular among rulers and those who control information.” And it has been from the Garden of Eden to the Obama administration. The ability to ask any question embodies two things: the freedom to go chase the answer, and the ability to challenge authority, to ask, “How come you’re in charge?” Can you drop us a couple of examples? I gather there are passages about how to sire a multicoloured horse, or create an egg the size of a human head. Whenever you can connect real life to reading, your child will have a greater understanding of the world around them, says Stoufer. She recommends exploring books from the National Geographic Kids and Who Would Win? series to get started, then heading out for a walk around the neighborhood or nearby park to let curiosity — and discovery — run wild! I worked myself up the ladder. Talking to one person in the movie business suggested a half dozen more people I could talk to. Each success gave me the confidence to try for the next person. It turned out I really could talk to almost anyone in the business.Do you remember when you were young and put everything you touched in your mouth? Endlessly annoyed the living hell out of every adult within earshot with a barrage of ‘but whys’? And flat out just refused to accept, ‘because I said so”, as a suitable or worthy response. Well Ian Leslie, the author of Curious - The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, is hoping you have not left that precocious and inquisitive little bugger behind. That was the start of something that changed—and continues to change—my life and my career, and which ultimately inspired this book. Sitting there in his office, I could clearly understand that the movie business was built on ideas—a steady stream of captivating ideas, new ideas every day. And it was suddenly clear to me that curiosity was the way to uncover ideas, it was the way to spark them.

ONE THURSDAY AFTERNOON, THE SUMMER after I graduated from the University of Southern California (USC), I was sitting in my apartment in Santa Monica with the windows open, thinking about how to get some work until I started law school at USC in the fall.

The situation is little better in the offices and workplaces where most adults spend their lives. Sure, software coders or pharmaceutical researchers or university professors are encouraged to be curious because it’s a big part of their jobs. But what if the typical hospital nurse or bank teller gets curious and starts questioning how things are done? Outside of some truly exceptional places like Google and IBM and Corning, curiosity is unwelcome, if not insubordinate. Good behavior—whether you’re fourteen years old or forty-five—doesn’t include curiosity. A final devil’s advocate question – whether we’re looking at the cosmos or the Higgs Boson, isn’t curiosity-driven science too much of an expensive distraction from the really valuable, life-changing science? I was curious about who was on the lot and who was working with whom. This was during the time when I made myself meet someone new in show business every single day. I liked to shout down from my window at the people walking by—Howard Koch, who cowrote Casablanca; Michael Eisner, who would become CEO of Disney; and Barry Diller, who was CEO of Paramount and Michael Eisner’s boss.