Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

Genesis begins, of course, with a story of creation and curiosity. The first woman, Eve, wants to partake of the one tree forbidden to her, representing the knowledge from which she and Adam are prohibited. Curious to know good and evil, she eats—that is, she reaches for, grasps, tugs, acquires, ingests, and consumes—a single piece of fruit from th

We take the time to wonder, “Do I dare?” And as we do, we find one simple answer: curiosity does dare. It dares “disturb the universe.”2

What better way to follow the call of curiosity and to court serendipity, though, than to weave between disciplines and ways of knowing, defying borders and boundaries as we go?

Accounts by philosophers Ilhan Inan and Lani Watson, for example, characterize curiosity as an individual motivation to find out a specific referent or to acquire certain epistemic goods, respectively.

Determined, she returns to casting her line, over and over again, until the arc of her queries weaves a tapestry: A Room of One’s Own. In this masterful piece, she puts two and two together: thinking requires the freedom to fish, or “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

The uncanny familiarity of our story stems from an uncomfortable fact: curiosity is policed everywhere.

In posing and seeking answers to these questions, scientists are often driven by distinct goals. Some scientists are most compelled by utilitarian values.

To appreciate this point, let us go back to Glanvill circa 1661. He had just published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, which pleaded for religious tolerance over persecution and freedom of thought over scholasticism. In the treatise, he questions how we can be dogmatic about religion (and the immaterial world) when we have such deep uncertainty about sc

And while the nervous system extends throughout the body, and is tuned by environmental and social factors, today’s science rightly insists that the brain—and its contribution to curiosity—is importantly unique.