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why do I so often learn things I don’t want to know? When I’m surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe’s political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about?

if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better.

Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments;

Curiosity is such a basic component of our natures that we are nearly oblivious to its pervasiveness in our lives.

I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills

The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance

Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown.

She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers

in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.

why we can't look away

We're compelled by horrible things, this argument goes, because it pays to scrutinise dangers that could threaten one's survival.

We crave meaning and connection, it seems, far more than cheeriness.

With the first presidential debate coming up on Wednesday, it is striking — if not surprising — how bland and predictable the candidates have been in discussing America’s role in space.

neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of why we want to bother with exploring space.

Maybe scientists should simply face reality and accept that science doesn’t play a central role in the government’s equation.

James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”After that, he was fired.His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you.

Down one floor from his office complex is Math for America, a foundation he set up to promote math teaching in public schools. Nearby, on Madison Square Park, is the National Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath, an educational center he helped finance. It opened in 2012 and has had a quarter million visitors.

Dr. Simons received his doctorate at 23; advanced code breaking for the National Security Agency at 26; led a university math department at 30; won geometry’s top prize at 37; founded Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, at 44; and began setting up charitable foundations at 56.

Self-control, curiosity, “grit” — these qualities may seem more personal than academic, but at some schools, they’re now part of the regular curriculum.

Some researchers say personality could be even more important than intelligence when it comes to students’ success in school. But critics worry that the increasing focus on qualities like grit will distract policy makers from problems with schools.

A number of researchers have been successful in improving students’ conscientiousness, Dr. Poropat said in an interview. One team, he said, found that when elementary-school students get training in “effortful control,” a trait similar to conscientiousness, “it not only improves the students’ performance at that point in their education, but also has follow-on effects a number of years afterward.” Another study found that a 16-week problem-solving training program could increase retirees’ levels of openness.

SAN FRANCISCO — Life on Mars? Today? The notion may not be so far-fetched after all.

Curiosity has now recorded a burst of methane that lasted at least two months.

for the first time, they had confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them.

Leonardo Da Vinci lived in a time of cultural transition known as the Renaissance, an era of philosophical, scientific and religious "rebirth," where the masses no longer accepted beliefs at face value and questioned the reasoning behind given theories. This new mindset gave rise to a curiosity about the origins of science and how art could demonstrate them.

"perception is the origin of all knowledge" and that "science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past."

He was the first of his kind to combine the keen eye of an artist to study the detail of his findings, and the curiosity of a scientist to approach his subjects with an open mind.

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were famous life-long tinkerers, who discovered new ways of doing things by constantly improvising, experimenting, failing, and retesting.  Above all they were voraciously inquisitive learners.

Barbara Walters, who interviewed Google founders Messrs. Page and Brin in 2004, asked if having parents who were college professors was a major factor behind their success, they instead credited their early Montessori education.  “We both went to Montessori school,” Mr. Page said, “and I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and

they learned to follow their curiosity

an approach developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Education that's rapidly gaining adherents across the country

trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress

Speakers and writers of American English have recently taken to identifying a staggering and constantly changing array of trends, events, memes, products, lifestyle choices and phenomena of nearly every kind with a single label — a thing.

It would be easy to call this a curiosity of the language and leave it at that. Linguistic trends come and go.

One could, on the other hand, consider the use of “a thing” a symptom of an entire generation’s linguistic sloth, general inarticulateness and penchant for cutesy, empty, half-ironic formulations that create a self-satisfied barrier preventing any form of genuine engagement with the world around them.

In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.

I'm always suspicious of any thinker who leads with overly broad analogizing as opposed to specific issues

What issue are you actually trying to clarify when you make these comparisons? What aspect of history or social life are you really trying to illuminate? Are you really trying to talk to other people, or are you trying to shut them down?

There is always a way to make yourself right, and win the argument. There's also a difference between curiosity and one-upmanship. I've yet to see a legitimately curious person begin their conversation with an overly broad analogy. But I've seen a lot of dogmatic ideologues wield them like clubs. 

She’d been promised that good grades and a ticket to a good college would lead to a good job, one that would guarantee her financial independence and enable her to give back to those hard-working people who had placed their faith in her.

When administrators, counselors, and teachers repeat again and again that a college degree will alleviate economic hardship, they don’t mean to suggest that there is no other point to higher education.

educators risk distracting them from the others, emphasizing the value of the fruits of their academic labor and skipping past the importance of the labor itself. The message is that intellectual curiosity plays second fiddle to financial security.

hundreds of people have offered themselves up to be interrogated via Reddit's crowdsourced question-and-answer sessions. They open a new thread on the social network and say, for example, "IamA nanny for a super-rich family in China AMA!"

Then, the assembled Redditors ask whatever they want. Questions are voted up and down, and generally speaking, the most popular ones get answered. These interviews can last for as little as an hour or go on for several days.  googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display("adIn-article3"); }); Politicians tend to play things pretty straight, but the regular people and niche celebrities tend to open up in fascinating ways. 

Over the last several years, the IamA subreddit has gone from interesting curiosity to a juggernaut of a media brand. Its syntax and abbreviations have invaded the public consciousness like Wired's aged Wired/Tired/Expired rubric. It's a common Twitter joke now to say, "I [did something commonplace], ask me anything." 

certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.

what human skills will be more valuable?

In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.

Others would say she was a modern wonder. She was genetically engineered by a Canadian company to produce milk that could be spun into spider silk.

As visitors pass through a curtain to enter the darkened exhibition space, they see a spectacularly fluffy white ornamental chicken and an aquarium full of glowing fish

But Pell does not intend the museum to be merely a cabinet of curiosities or a freak show. Visitors will not find rants that drum up fears of “Frankenfoods.”

before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.

he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.

Members of the committee agreed with their assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B. Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through the system.”