Curiosity's Gap

She sits, bouncing on the edge of the sofa, staring at the TV screen, looking over occasionally at her mother. Trying to anticipate, trying to figure it out. 

“Who’s he? What’s he doing? Why is he doing that? Mummy? Mummy! Why’s he doing that?...And who’s she? Is she his friend?” 

“Why don’t you just watch the film? And then you’ll find out!” comes the reply. 

Curiosity and the kid. 

Curiosity makes us sit up and observe. When we're curious about something, it's a lot easier to sit through a long lecture, or to read a book on something and want to finish it. 

But what’s curiosity really good for? 

Does it actually benefit us? Or is it just something specifically designed to make sure, at some point in your life, a movie will be ruined by the curious questions of a confused kid? 

A study conducted at the University of California has an answer to that, suggesting that curiosity prepares the brain for learning – not just about the subject you’re curious about, but about other information too. 

Participants in the study rated questions in terms of curiosity, and then revisited 112 of them, half of which they were strongly curious about and half of which they were uninterested in. When revisiting the questions, participants would view a question and then, 14 seconds later, view an image of a face (totally unrelated to the questions) before being shown the answer. As they were doing this, their brains were being scanned, and afterwards participants were tested on how well they recalled the answers and the faces – if you’re “curious” (sorry), you can read about the study in more detail in this article from Scientific American. 

The results showed that when someone was curious about a question, they were more likely to remember both the answer to it and the face they had seen in between. 

Why? 

The study found that in between seeing a question they were interested in and seeing the answer, a person’s brain activity increased in two regions of the midbrain that transmit dopamine – which helps regulate the feeling of reward, or pleasure. Basically, the person was anticipating the result because they were curious. 

Interestingly, when people were curious their brains also showed increased activity in the hippocampus (involved in memory creation) and the degree to which the hippocampus and the reward pathways interacted could predict a person’s ability to remember the faces they saw. 

You might have read the above and thought okay…

so how does that affect me? 

Did you ever find a subject really boring at school, but one day find something in it, some random story your teacher threw out? Maybe you were learning about the brain, but the bit that really caught your attention was something about Einstein’s brain being stolen.

What this study suggests is that if a student can find something interesting within a subject, something they’re curious about, they can prepare their brain for learning about the whole subject.

And teachers or parents just need to find that golden nugget of curiosity for their kids, tie it into everything else – maybe with a story – and voila! 

When the child gets to the end of the movie, when we finish the end of a novel or when we learn a new piece of knowledge that fits in with previous knowledge,

We get a dose of dopamine and curiosity’s gap is fulfilled. 

And what is a dose of dopamine? Now, isn’t that a curious question…