Curious

a major concern of this book is that digital technologies are severing the link between effort and mental exploration. By making it easier for us to find answers, the web threatens habits of deeper enquiry – habits that require patience and focused application.

‘to thinker’

They are also the ones most likely to make creative connections between different fields, of the kind that leads to new ideas, and the ones best suited to working in multi-disciplinary teams. Consequently, they are the ones whose jobs are least likely to be taken by intelligent machines; in a world where technology is rapidly replacing humans even

Curiosity prepares us for epiphanies by making us aware of our own blind spots, interested in our own ignorance. It makes us lucky.

Diversive curiosity is where the hunt for knowledge begins; in the desire for new information, sensations, experiences and challenges. But it’s only a beginning.

Critics of fact-based learning will sometimes ask, ‘Why does it matter if a child knows the date of the Battle of Hastings?’ It matters because facts stored in long-term memory are not islands unto themselves; they join up with other facts to form associative networks of understanding.

Brown and Antonelli use the term to describe a social, collaborative way of working. But I’m using it to name a style of cognitive investigation that mixes the concrete and the abstract, toggling between the details and the big picture, zooming out to see the wood and back in again to examine the bark on the tree.

Another way of framing it is to ask how Apple, or any company, can remain aware of its own unknowns. The great physicist James Clerk Maxwell once remarked that ‘thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.’

To teach someone to be an engineer or a lawyer or a programmer is not the same as teaching them to be a curious learner – and yet the people who make the best engineers, lawyers and programmers tend to be the most curious learners.