
No Spoilers, Please! Why Curiosity Makes Us Patient

The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure. Brain scans reveal that curiosity begins as a little kick in the brain’s reward system: we crave to know the answer, or what happens next in the story,
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
But all storytellers, no matter who their intended audience, should beware of over-tightening their narratives. While it’s dangerous to leave readers feeling confused and abandoned, it’s just as risky to over-explain. Causes and effects should be shown rather than told; suggested rather than explained. If they’re not, curiosity will be extinguished
... See moreWill Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
not to skip forward to see how it ends, you’re not a sociopath, after all—but, rather, out of curiosity, noticing the ways in which this book fails to resemble other books, or not, realizing that “Sunday” was the last day marked in the text…Or perhaps you had read as much in a review, the one that convinced you to buy the book in the first place, t
... See moreDann McDorman • West Heart Kill: A novel
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.