Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

There is a depth of wisdom in language’s flexibility, in the soma of its poetry.

In some sense, scientific inquiry is thus an effort to become inhuman. Or perhaps nonhuman. Or perhaps superhuman.

Walking the edge between humanity and nature, scientific curiosity guides the river of inquiry while also pushing against the banks to expect the unexpected.

Through the sibling emotion (or as Descartes has it, the “passion”) of generosity, curiosity and wonder can fuel the organism’s acquisition of knowledge beneficial to society as a whole.

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

The field summons us to appreciate the network architectures not only of the thinking organ but also of thought itself as well as thinkers of today and yesteryear. In this book, we heed that call.

33 It is only via this growth pattern—of multiplying links, relations, and connections—that newly curious configurations can be conceived, new architectures erected, and new affinities sewn together. Curiosity is a rogue shuttling across networks, a randomized walk, a lunging across lattices that has the capacity to upend it all.

In a word, the very essence of curious movement in conceptual and physical space. What gets lost are the networks, the relations, between ideas and between people.

Genesis begins, of course, with a story of creation and curiosity. The first woman, Eve, wants to partake of the one tree forbidden to her, representing the knowledge from which she and Adam are prohibited. Curious to know good and evil, she eats—that is, she reaches for, grasps, tugs, acquires, ingests, and consumes—a single piece of fruit from th

“intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.”