For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the role curiosity plays in enhancing our learning, creativity, and overall engagement.
Daphna Shohamy, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, came to the study of curiosity through an appropriately roundabout way. A few years ago she was working with Caroline Marvin, a researcher at her lab, investigating the neural basis of impulsivity. “We were thinking about all the ways in which people act impulsively,” Shohamy says, “trying to understand the intersection between impulsivity and learning — is impulsivity a problem with learning, or is it crucial to learning?” If it was the latter, they realized, they were really talking about curiosity, the subjective impulse to know.
“We tried to find research on the topic and discovered that not a lot has been done on curiosity*,” *Shohamy says. “Much of the work out there on how curiosity works looked to us more like research on motivated behavior and the role of rewards in driving behaviors.” But to Shohamy and her colleagues, curiosity seems less like a behavior and more like a trait related to creativity, personality, and consciousness. They also discovered a helpful distinction between two different types of curiosity — the utilitarian desire to learn useful information, and the drive to learn new things simply because they’re interesting.