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

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,

CURIOSITY HAS BEEN CALLED “THE KNOWLEDGE EMOTION.”

People tend not to be curious about things of which they are completely ignorant.

When we know nothing about a subject, we find it hard to engage our brains, either because we can’t imagine finding it interesting or because we’re intimidated by the prospect of starting to learn about something that might, by its scale or complexity, defeat us.

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

This is what being human entails. We spend our entire lives at the entrance of a cave, caught between the safety of the familiar and the yearning for novelty, the peace of home and the thrill of travel, the tonic and dominant chords.

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.

“Our comforting conviction the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

Not being satisfied is what makes curiosity so satisfying.