Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

The more we know about something, the more intense our curiosity is about what we don’t know.

The naughtiness of infants is experimental, a method of data collection.

As adults, however, we have a tendency to err too far toward exploitation—we become content to fall back on the stock of knowledge and mental habits we built up when we were young, rather than adding to or revising it. We get lazy.

CURIOSITY HAS BEEN CALLED “THE KNOWLEDGE EMOTION.”

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.

But in a complex world, it’s impossible to know what might be useful in the future. It’s important, therefore, to spread our cognitive bets. Curious people take risks,

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

But in a complex world, it’s impossible to know what might be useful in the future. It’s important, therefore, to spread our cognitive bets. Curious people take risks,

Unfettered curiosity is wonderful; unchanneled curiosity is not.