Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

That is, we may be able to graph how ideas slowly accrete into architectures of individual and collective knowledge.

Imagine a curiosity that is more social and praxiological than it is individual, intellectual, and acquisitional. Imagine a curiosity that aims less to know X, to find out X, or to cognize X than to make connections, build constellations, find links, and follow threads. Imagine a curiosity that is collective and interconnective, functioning within

In chapter 4, “Curiosity’s Got Style,” we ask the next logical series of questions. If curiosity is a network building activity, are there different architectures and styles? The equivalent of an Antoni Gaudí and a Frank Lloyd Wright, a Beyoncé and a Nina Simone?

“intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.”

But there are also societal logics and neural constraints that often determine which idea trees get nurtured best and celebrated most, at what times and in which places.

Traditionally, philosophy characterizes curiosity as the desire or the appetite to know something. Inspired by network theory, however, we pivot from the paradigm of curiosity as nodal acquisition to curiosity as edgework.

Scholars generally boil it down to “information-seeking” behavior or a “desire to know.” But curiosity is more than a feeling and certainly more than an act.

“The real enemy of the human race is not the fearless and irresponsible thinker, be he right or wrong,” writes educator Abraham Flexner. “The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings.”

It is arguably true that Ole Worm’s desire to know led him to walk toward the artifact and subsequently led him to pick up the artifact to bring it back to his cabinet of curiosities. It is also true that the desire to know is said to arise in the mind. But can the mind be the cause of the desire to know?