Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It
Now, while we have long relinquished the conviction that curiosity is a sin, we have held onto a sense that curiosity lives in the soul, or at least in that part of us where we wonder, learn, doubt, and remember. Augustine’s account is, then, a direct predecessor of psychological and neuroscientific accounts of curiosity today.
Perry Zurn • Curious Minds: The Power of Connection
Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk—the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. We need both of these pro
... See moreMihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
Why would anyone want such a thing? For the American Revolution example, you might be interested in seeing all the perspectives on that topic. But more generally, you might want it out of pure curiosity. The same curiosity that might grip you if you’ve ever perused a library.
Dmitri Brereton (dkb) • To Organize The World's Information
Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known.