Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

“intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.”

Long before psychology used qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the science of curiosity as a mental state or a personality trait with corresponding behaviors, there was philosophy. And long before neuroscience used neuroimaging and data science to understand the neural circuitry and systems that precondition curiosity, there was ph

We call up different canons, explore different peripheries, and take scholastic risks of different altitudes depending on our field-specific expectations. We do this because we believe in the promise of curiosity, but also the pleasure of curiosity.

“all great problems demand great love,”

We propose a new framework that understands curiosity as a practice of connection, a way of building relations between and among systems of knowers, knowledges, and things known.

In what follows, we revisit the long philosophical history of conceptualizing curiosity as an individual desire to know or, in contemporary scientific nomenclature, a drive for information or to fill knowledge gaps.

And yet across its long and messy history, philosophy also houses all kinds of other possibilities for thinking differently—possibilities that surfaced here and there, but never got codified into paradigms or sedimented into theories; possibilities that still lie dormant.

In the early 1900s, the strain was so great that educational leader Abraham Flexner founded the Institute for Advanced Study as a place where a scientist could once again think about questions that were simply interesting, irrespective of their utility. In his now-classic essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Flexner suggests that our concep

In poetry, we hear in the background the swirling connotations and corollaries, sedimented lines of comeanings, and fossilized records of concept histories; in science, we hear similar material resonances, eerie, and far away, as we listen to Nature’s lyrics.