Curious Book Summary - Curious Book explained in key points

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Name: Curious
Rating: 4.4 (116 reviews)
Author: Ian Leslie

Ian Leslie

The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

4.4 (116 ratings)

19 mins

Topics

Success

Table of Contents

Curious
Summary of 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Discover why you just can’t put down your favorite book.

While there are many things that separate human beings from animals, one of the most remarkable is that we are the only creatures on earth capable of asking why? Each and every human being is born with a strong desire to know about the world around her, both out of necessity and curiosity.

It should therefore come as no surprise that children between the ages of three and five ask around 300 questions per day!

Yet, as we grow older, we reach a point at which we are no longer interested in discovering new things. We run on autopilot, rely on our old assumptions and stop asking questions. And while this might be natural, it’s certainly not desirable.

If you want to be successful in your professional and personal life, you have to be curious. Curiosity is absolutely necessary in your studies, career and personal life if you want to be successful in any!

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why the internet is good for your brain if you’re smart, but will just make you dumber if you’re already dumb;
why Andy Warhol liked boring things; and
why most of us act as if we already know everything there is to know.

Curiosity is caused by information gaps that we want to close.

A blinking ad on a website, a bizarre circumstance of a murder mystery or an apple falling from the tree: all these pique our curiosity. But why? What do these drastically different things have in common that captures our attention?

According to psychologist George Loewenstein, curiosity is a result of information gaps. Put simply, information gaps are missing pieces to a puzzle. When we realize that there is something we don’t know, we then suddenly really want to find out what it is.

For instance, if you’re watching a thriller, there might be a murder, i.e., a piece of information. However, you’re missing some crucial information to complete the picture: who committed the murder? This is the information gap, and we continue watching with the hope that this gap will soon be closed.

Storytellers of all sorts use the principle of information gaps all the time; in fact, a good story depends on it! They create information gaps, and then close them, only to open yet another, and then another; it’s how they keep us engaged in their stories, feverishly turning page after page.

But it’s not the mere absence of information that sparks curiosity. Curiosity can’t exist in a vacuum; we must first have some knowledge about the subject. The gap exists only between something we already know and something we don’t yet know, but would like to find out.

For example, if someone tells you all about the riveting performance he saw at a classical concert, you can’t respond to this information if you know nothing about classical music. Thus, your curiosity remains uncaptured.

However, if he then tells you that this music also appeared in your favorite film and that the composer was born in the same city as you, then you might have enough relevant information to become curious.

There are two types of curiosity: diversive and epistemic.

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.

We are all born with a desire to know, but this desire fades with age if we don’t nurture it.

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!

The internet has produced a divide between the curious and the incurious.

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.

The internet stifles our curiosity and creativity by making it too easy to access information.

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.

Never stop asking questions.

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.

Make an effort to gather knowledge – it will make you more creative and curious.

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.

The modern world requires you to be both a specialist and a generalist.

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.”

Anything can be interesting with the right perspective.

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.

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What is Curious about?

Curious is all about one of the most fundamental forces for our success as well as our perception of the world around us: our curiosity. The book offers a unique look into how curiosity works, what you can do to nurture it and what sorts of behaviors stifle it.

Best quote from Curious

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. - Albert Einstein

—Ian Leslie

Who should read Curious?

Anyone who is interested in psychology
Anyone who works in a knowledge-based field
Anyone who is naturally inquisitive

About the Author

Ian Leslie works as an advertiser as well as a writer on culture and politics in The Guardian and The New Statesman. In addition, he is the author of the critically acclaimed book Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit.

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