Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate.”

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 believe so heartily that curiosity is crucial to societal achievement, moreover, that we have spent little energy in cultivating its attunement with societal generosity.

Humanists with a book, a sketchpad, or a whiteboard are similarly sketch- and scribble-happy.

Determined, she returns to casting her line, over and over again, until the arc of her queries weaves a tapestry: A Room of One’s Own. In this masterful piece, she puts two and two together: thinking requires the freedom to fish, or “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

This latter observation leads us to a third key property that a unit of analysis in scientific inquiry could usefully have: namely, that it can be placed in a model that offers a parsimonious and accurate prediction of the object or process that it is meant to explain.

Anderson joins philosopher Angela Potochnik and others in arguing that there exists no privileged scale for explanation. In fact each scale is characterized by its own laws, concepts, and generalizations, which cannot be explained by those of any other scale.

The two axes of epistemic to perceptual and specific to diversive together form a two-dimensional plane, with each distinct quadrant describing a wide range of exploratory behaviors in humans.

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