Curious

Curious is your guide to becoming more intelligent by harnessing the power of inquisitiveness and outlines the true nature of curiosity, how to keep it flourishing to become smarter, and what you might unknowingly be doing to suffocate its power.

Leslie explains that curiosity can be broken down into two basic types: diversive and epistemic. Diversive curiosity is the kind where we crave the novelty or newness of something we haven’t encountered before. It is good for getting us interested in a new topic, but often it can be superficial and impulsive, such as the need to know about a celebrity break-up.

At its worst, this is the type of curiosity that keeps us aimlessly scrolling through our Facebook newsfeed instead of getting work done. The people who make “clickbait” articles know all about this natural curiosity, hence how they can keep us clicking on new, pointless articles for hours.

The second type, epistemic curiosity, is a deeper need to know something new that requires more effort on our part. It takes work and focus to keep learning about this subject, and we can delve much deeper. We see this kind of curiosity in professional scientists and artists.

A good example of this is Charles Darwin. Discovering a strange barnacle on his journey to South America sparked his curiosity and set him on an eight-year study of this one creature. This dedication to learning is no doubt the reason that he is in our history books today.

All of this is not to say that we should only have the second type of curiosity. In fact, the author teaches that we actually need a combination of both. Diversive curiosity is good for familiarizing you with a topic, while epistemic ensures you dig deeper and become specialized in that topic.

Most of us can agree that the internet can both hinder and help learning. Never before have humans been able to look up anything, and in seconds, have everything there is to know about that subject. But even though we have access to all of this knowledge, many of us use the internet to watch videos of cats and read comments of strangers arguing. We have yet to really fully take advantage of the internet as a learning tool. A study found that children spend about ten hours a day on devices, but sadly, the majority of this time is spent on entertainment. Interestingly, the internet actually widens the intelligence gap. There is a growing cognitive polarization in the world, which is a division between the curious and the incurious. The curious spend their time on the internet learning. The incurious spend their time on entertainment and their interest in learning…