Opinion | Why Aren't We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About? - The New... - 3 views
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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?
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Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments;
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it’s good to know about your environment even if it doesn’t promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don’t expect any concrete payoff
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What’s more, curiosity doesn’t just ensure new opportunities for learning, it enhances learning itself
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subjects better remembered those appearing after trivia questions that made them curious. Curiosity causes a brain state that amplifies learning.
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This function of curiosity — to heighten memory — is the key to understanding why we’re curious about some things and not others. We feel most curious when exploration will yield the most learning.
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Suppose I ask you, “What’s the most common type of star in the Milky Way?” You’ll obviously feel no curiosity if you already know the answer. But you’ll also feel little interest if you know nothing about stars; if you learned the answer, you couldn’t connect it to other knowledge, so it would seem nearly meaningless, an isolated factoid
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We’re maximally curious when we sense that the environment offers new information in the right proportion to complement what we already know.
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Note that your brain calculates what you might learn in the short term — your long-term interests aren’t a factor
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Many websites that snare your time feature scores of stories on the front page, banking that one will strike each reader’s sweet spot of knowledge. So visit websites that use the same strategy but offer richer content, for example, JSTOR Daily, Arts & Letters Daily or ScienceDaily.
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Curiosity arises from the right balance of the familiar and the novel. Naturally, writers vary in what they assume their audience already knows and wants to know; when you find an author who tends to have your number, stick with her.