Curious

being curious means wanting to find out about things you don’t yet care about and aren’t interested in – things you didn’t know you were interested in until you find out that you are.

‘I was suddenly seeing that the world is incredibly interesting. If you’re paying attention, everything in the world – from the nature of gravity, to a pigeon’s head, to a blade of grass – is extraordinary.’

‘Our comforting conviction the world makes sense rests on secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.’

As an example of what I mean, give yourself five seconds to memorise the following string of 14 digits: 74830582894062 I’m guessing that you found this impossible; most people would, because you had to rely on your short-term memory. Now attempt the same with this string of 21 letters: LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS This time, you barely needed a se

it’s likely that we are at the beginning of a cognitive polarisation – a division into the curious and the incurious.

The unusually long period for which children are dependent on adults is a clue that humans are designed to learn from others, rather than just through their own explorations.

according to a landmark 1956 study by the cognitive psychologist George Miller, we can cope with about seven numbers at once,

Creativity starts in combination.

the principle of constantly expanding your experience, both personally and vicariously, does matter tremendously in any idea-producing job.’ Building the database is the surest route to producing ideas that will some day become part of someone else’s database.