Curious

In recent years, psychologists studying differences in educational achievement have been paying more attention to the question of ‘non-cognitive traits’, by which they mean something like personality, or character. It’s now recognised that the attitude students take towards the learning process, and the habits they practise, have a bigger impact on

A Technique for Producing Ideas. Written in 1960, when Young was in semi-retirement, the book was intended for advertising people, but its lessons are widely applicable.

there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product … Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things togeth

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

Steve Jobs was a merely competent technician and, though highly intelligent, not a particularly original thinker. What made him exceptional were a ferocious will to succeed and a burning sense of epistemic curiosity. Jobs was interested in everything: the Bauhaus movement, the poetry of the beats, Eastern philosophy, the workings of business, the l

Richard Mayer, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, examined studies carried out from 1950 to the 1980s, comparing unguided learning with more traditional methods. In each case, children learned more and better under the old method of adult instruction than in the experimental classrooms. Mayer noted that the same

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

Diversive curiosity can be a strength, leading people to take in more from their environment. But it can quickly become aimless, distracting and frustrating.

Some people are expert users of information gaps in conversation – they might refer in passing to the time they met Fidel Castro, knowing that until they close that gap, they have you hooked.