more state than trait. That is, our curiosity is highly responsive to the situation or environment we’re in. It follows that we can arrange our lives to stoke our curiosity or quash it.

Without the necessity to fend for ourselves in those first ten or twenty years, we can focus on learning about the niche into which we have been born and form our own ideas about it.

Diversive curiosity follows no particular process or method, but slides from one novel object of attention to the next.

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

B. F. Skinner, the great experimental psychologist, advised, “When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study

“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.”

Nobody is born Catholic or Protestant, Eskimo or Bedouin. Your sense of identity, of being a person, is formed by the cultural knowledge you learn, first from your parents and then from others.

What makes us so adaptable? In one word, culture—our ability to learn from others, to copy, imitate, share, and improve.

In our adult lives it generates a restless desire for new information and new experiences. Just as it made us peer into rock pools as children, as adults it makes us refresh Twitter streams.