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

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The men and women whose contracts I delivered changed my life. They showed me a whole style of storytelling I wasn’t familiar with, and I began to think that maybe I was a storyteller at heart. They set the stage for me to produce movies like Splash and Apollo 13, American Gangster, Friday Night Lights, and A Beautiful Mind. The guy went on to say he had been a legal clerk. “I just quit today. My boss was a man named Peter Knecht.” The greatest way for a parent to use books to spark curiosity and inspire a love for learning is to spend lots of time talking and listening to your child,” says Stoufer. She suggests listening carefully and taking note of their interests. You could even follow up with your child’s teacher to find out what’s coming up at school so you can explore those topics more at home together. A final devil’s advocate question – whether we’re looking at the cosmos or the Higgs Boson, isn’t curiosity-driven science too much of an expensive distraction from the really valuable, life-changing science? That question, in the period that they consider, was filtered through the idea of there being wonders in the world. By that, I mean extraordinary phenomena or oddities, often things that didn’t seem to fit within the classical scheme of the world that Aristotle and Plato had developed. It’s the kind of impulse that seems to have motivated Pliny, for example, to put together his Natural History – a huge, multi-volume work about all aspects of the natural world which in some ways is a catalogue of the weird and marvellous and completely fantastical. And it led to theological questions about why these oddities existed. Were they nature gone wrong, or were they put there by God for our own instruction?

The Adam and Eve story, she says, is a warning. “?‘You are a serf because God said you should be a serf. I’m a king because God said I should be a king. Don’t ask any questions about that.’ Stories like Adam and Eve,” Benedict says, “reflect the need of cultures and civilizations to maintain the status quo. ‘Things are the way they are because that’s the right way.’ That attitude is popular among rulers and those who control information.” And it has been from the Garden of Eden to the Obama administration. It’s how I met William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist, and also Billy Friedkin, the Oscar winner who directed it.His basic contention is that curiosity is what has driven scientific and cultural advancement, and that that this powerful impulse in humans may be under threat by the Internet and certain ill-founded educational philosophies. Ron was kind of shy, and he seemed surprised by my phone call. I don’t think he really wanted to meet me. I said, “It’ll be fun, it’ll be relaxed, let’s just do it.” The truth is that when I was meeting someone like Salk or Teller or Slim, what I hoped for was an insight, a revelation. I wanted to grasp who they were. Of course, you don’t usually get that with strangers in an hour.

The author frequently uses the analogy of puzzles versus mysteries to illustrate the difference between diversive of epistemic curiosities. Puzzles have finite answers whereas mysteries grow the more you work on them. If you want to cultivate epistemic curiosity, approach your interests as mysteries instead of puzzles, whatever that means. (It's kind of annoying how the author tritely cites the achievements of Alan Turing and [first name] Freedman in his tangents somewhat in support of curiosity, yet these cryptographers were notorious puzzle-fiends.) In an encounter like that, we’d categorize the salesperson as either “good” or “bad.” A bad salesperson might aggressively try to sell us something we didn’t want or understand, or would simply show us the TVs for sale, indifferently parroting the list of features on the card mounted beneath each. But the key ingredient in either case is curiosity—about the customer, and about the products. I met with Jonas Salk, the scientist and physician who cured polio, a man who was a childhood hero of mine. It took me more than a year to get an audience with him. I wasn’t interested in the scientific method Salk used to figure out how to develop the polio vaccine. I wanted to know what it was like to help millions of people avoid a crippling disease that shadowed the childhoods of everyone when I was growing up. And he worked in a different era. He was renowned, admired, successful—but he received no financial windfall. He cured what was then the worst disease afflicting the world, and he never made a dime from that. Can you imagine that happening today? I wanted to understand the mind-set that turns a cure like that loose in the world. Epistemic curiosity is the "good" form of curiosity (again in the opinion of the author). Epistemic curiosity is the pursuit of understanding and knowledge.You know what’s curious: throughout that entire time, no one ever called my bluff. No one said, “Hey, kid, just leave the contract on the table and get out of here. You don’t need to see Warren Beatty.” The book is divided into 3 parts. In the first part the author discusses curiosity early in life, types of curiosity, and the difference between puzzles and mysteries. The second part explores the history of curiosity and the importance of questions and knowledge. The third part describes seven ways to stay curious.⁣ The Age of Wonder takes us forward to the scientific enlightenment of the Romantic period, in the late 18th century. Eve visits the tree, and discovers that “the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.” 10