Curious summary

Curiosity is what brought humankind to the moon. Yet it’s also the force that leaves us wasting half our lives scrolling through our newsfeeds on social media. This is because not all curiosities are created equal:

Curiosity is divided into two types. The first, diversive curiosity, is little more than a craving for new input, i.e., the desire for more novelty and excitement. On the one hand, it’s what motivates our engagement in a topic in the first place. On the other hand, it can also be impulsive, superficial and difficult to resist.

It’s common knowledge that babies and small children are relentlessly curious about nearly everything. They point at things, babble and ask questions and they always want to know “why.”

Indeed, we’re all born with an innate desire to know. The instinctual knowledge that there are things we don’t know, but that other people do know, is incredibly powerful. This is the force that makes the inquiring minds of young children relentless: children between the ages of three and five ask around 300 questions per day!

As far as learning is concerned, the internet has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. Depending on how you approach it, the internet enables you to easily learn everything about complex topics, like the theory of relativity, plate tectonics or French history, or you can spend all day looking at cat videos and pointlessly arguing with strangers about them.

In truth, the educational potential of the internet has yet to be fully realized. According to a study by The Kaiser Foundation on the media habits of Americans, children now spend an average of ten hours per day on devices, which represents more than a 50-percent increase since 1999. However, the majority of this time is spent on entertainment, not on education.

It’s an undeniable fact that the internet has revolutionized our access to information. Everyone who has an internet connection can learn about even the most obscure things. But it’s also worth asking how this affects our learning, curiosity and creativity.

With regards to learning, the mere fact that information is easily and immediately accessible doesn’t mean we are better at accumulating knowledge. This is because the internet spoils us: knowing that the knowledge is always just a click away, we tend to not make the effort to store it in our memory.

How many questions do you ask per day? You could probably stand to ask a few more, as questions are what makes your mind hungry and inquiring. Indeed, every answer is preceded by a question.

Asking questions is essential to uncovering the information you need. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of skill that can be easily passed on: you have to experience the power of good questions firsthand in order to improve.

Knowledge and creativity are often perceived as two opposing poles, where the mere gathering of facts is seen as detrimental to children’s blooming creativity and curiosity. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth! In fact, it’s absolutely necessary to first accumulate a database of knowledge before any creative work can happen.

As you’ve already learned, creativity is the product of novel connections between seemingly unrelated thoughts and ideas. Consequently, the more you know, the more connections you can make.

There are two different ways in which you accumulate knowledge: you either learn a great deal about a few areas, thus making you a specialist, or you learn a few things in many areas, which makes you a generalist.

This distinction roots back to the ancient Greek story of the hedgehog and the fox. The fox has various clever strategies to evade his predators, while the hedgehog has only one tried-and-true trick – he hunkers down and uses his spikes for protection. As the Greek poet Archilochus puts it: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Since 2010, something strange happens in London each year: young people come together and listen to presentations on topics often considered tremendously uninteresting, such as bus routes, electric hand dryers and the history of supermarket self-checkout machines. It’s called the Boring Conference – and yet, the attendees all seem quite entertained!

The Boring Conference is all about the mundane and overlooked phenomena in everyday life. But these things are not intrinsically boring; the Boring Conference shows that our interest in a subject has everything to do with how we approach it. In this way, anything can be interesting.