Why Curiosity is Key to Learning

Benefits of curiosity:

• crucial for learning "tacit knowledge"
• protect us from stress and burnout
• remain motivated in tough situations
• powers our creative intelligence
• interest in others improves our social skills/emotional intelligence
• best predictor of achieving goals

How to maintain curiosity?

Role models are important. In an experiment with kindergarten children behind one-way glass, they saw their parents do one of three things: 1) play with objects on a table; 2) look at the table; 3) ignore the objects as they chatted. Later on, the children whose parents touched the objects did so themselves when given the opportunity. 

Children want to talk; they just need the opportunity. Dinner table conversations also varied the amount of questions by the child. Of course, the more interest and open-ended questions resulted in a more curious and engaged child, compared to kids whose parents simply told them the "answers." Interestingly, toddlers may ask up to 26 questions per hour at home but just two per hour at school. Even worse, a researcher often observed during grade 5 lessons that two hours would pass without a single expression of active interest by students. On a surprising note, the expression of interest is directly correlated to the number of times a teacher smiles during the lesson.   

Growth Mindset

In 2016, a study in Chile with 10th graders showed that the poorest children with a growth mindset performed at well as the richest children in the sample. In other words, a growth mindset may be able to compensate for many of the built-in disadvantages of being poor. 

Even for someone whose genius seems almost "magical," Nobel-prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, made his groundbreaking discovery when he decided to just have fun and play and experiment with questions he personally was interested in. It was this renewed curious mindset that led him to watch a man in the Cornell cafeteria throw, spin and catch plates in the air. He connected that with an electron's orbit, which eventually led to his theory of quantum electrodynamics. Feynman also acknowledges all the blood, sweat and tears (and drudgery) needed to achieve his accomplishments. 



Source: The Intelligence Trap, David Robson, 2019

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