Allowing contemporary network sensibilities to resonate with past relational paradigms, we therefore attend to conceptualizations of curiosity as inherently interconnective rather than individualizing—conceptualizations of curiosity not as nodal acquisition but as edgework.

We as scientists spend our lives channeling our curiosity in the service of certainty. Yet along the way, we increasingly embrace uncertainty and celebrate the paths toward understanding, without expecting its conclusive acquisition.

Now, while we have long relinquished the conviction that curiosity is a sin, we have held onto a sense that curiosity lives in the soul, or at least in that part of us where we wonder, learn, doubt, and remember. Augustine’s account is, then, a direct predecessor of psychological and neuroscientific accounts of curiosity today.