To most of us, curiosity is an individual experience. Each of us knows the thrill of following where our curiosity leads us, and few of humanity’s greatest achievements would have succeeded without its animating spark. Whether it’s Marie Curie’s unlocking of the secret of radioactivity or poet Mary Oliver’s lyrical recognition of our place in the natural world, the yearning to know and understand lies at the heart of what it means to be human.
But curiosity is far more than a single-minded pursuit of knowledge or understanding, argue SFI External Professor Dani Bassett (University of Pennsylvania) and Perry Zurn (American University) in their new book, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. Rather, curiosity is the product of networks, connecting the dots in unexpected ways.
“Curiosity isn’t just this capacity to acquire [information] but is rather the capacity to connect — ideas to ideas and experiences to experiences and facts to places and people to people and people to their world and to their lives and the way they want to live them,” says Zurn. “Curiosity is connectional in a fundamental sense.”
Bassett and Zurn, who are twins, examined 2,000 years of Western history and concluded that three types of curiosity have predominated: The butterfly, who is curious about everything; the hunter, who is focused on one or two things; and the Dancer, whose curiosity is more creative and relies on the imagination.
No matter one’s individual approach to curiosity, the urge to explore is often hemmed in by limits imposed by society or institutions, Bassett adds. For example, researchers sometimes feel pressure to choose lines of inquiry that build upon a well-established body of research instead of striking out on a new path. Bassett calls this type of confining influence “the policing of curiosity.” Colleagues may discourage deeply curious questions or ideas that are viewed as too far beyond the norm, they explain. “But many big discoveries happen when you move in a completely new direction.”
Curious Minds is a thought-provoking work by two scholars whose own deep curiosity has given us a new way of seeing a familiar subject — and the world of possibility around us.
Read Curious Minds by Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett (Penguin Random House, 2023)