Diversive curiosity makes us want to know what lies on the other side of the mountain; epistemic curiosity arms us with the knowledge we need to survive when we get there.

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

In our adult lives it generates a restless desire for new information and new experiences. Just as it made us peer into rock pools as children, as adults it makes us refresh Twitter streams.

If you are high in NFC, you are probably good at solving problems for your employer, because you’re really solving them for yourself.

What makes us so adaptable? In one word, culture—our ability to learn from others, to copy, imitate, share, and improve.

Culture freed humans from the limitations of their biology; according to evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, when humans discovered culture, they achieved a momentous shift in the balance of power “between our genes and our minds.”

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.

Diversive curiosity follows no particular process or method, but slides from one novel object of attention to the next.

more state than trait. That is, our curiosity is highly responsive to the situation or environment we’re in. It follows that we can arrange our lives to stoke our curiosity or quash it.