How curious are you?

I have long held that curiosity is an extremely important human trait. More important than education, for it is what drives autodidacts to teach themselves. Curiosity is an insatiable longing to learn, to discover, to understand. When underpinned by a keen sense of observation - noticing and questioning what goes on around us - curiosity leads to qualitative leaps in human living standards. Think of Louis Pasteur's or Alexander Fleming's contributions to health, or how computer science has revolutionised our lives - driven by the endless curiosity of computer scientists. And exploration - even walks around my neighbourhood are driven by curiosity - can I find a new footpath between Grabina and Staniszewice? Down at the individual, personal level, my life is punctuated by questions and answers. New subjects - the biology of cranes and buzzards being ones I've acquainted myself with in recent weeks - newly learnt facts, facts that with insight, digestion and time become understanding.

In my childhood (and indeed across the entire lives of every human than ever lived up to about the year 1990), if you wanted to know something specific, you'd have to go to the library or your own bookcase. Then along came CD-ROM encyclopedias (anyone remember Encarta?) - maybe the shortest lived reference-storage technology ever. 

And then Wikipedia showed up around 2001; the English version already had one million pages by 2006 and the Polish version hit that number by 2013. A year later, the number of smartphones overtook the number of old-school push-button mobile phones, and since then, with the Wikipedia app on my phone, I'm never without instant access to over 6.6 million articles in English plus 1.5 million articles in Polish (that's as of today).

ChatGPT makes the quizzing of online databases easier still - rather than searching with a one-word entry or short search string, I can pose a complex question and get the answer back pretty much in real time.

When 90% of the people I'm learning from (watching science and philosophy podcasts on YouTube is my main form of televisual entertainment) are younger than me, it suggests I'm a slow learner. But then the age at which one 'went digital' is important; my first contact with the internet was in the early 1990s - my children don't remember the world without it (although they do recall the squawking sound made by a 28.8kb/s dial-up modem). 

With total access to knowledge and any time, anywhere, the only remaining barrier stopping us from finding something out quickly is our own lack of curiosity. In childhood, it was waiting until the next visit to the public library, or asking a grown-up in the expectation that they might know.

My question then is - how curious are you? Can we measure our curiosity? I asked ChatGPT: 

Yes, there are several ways to measure human curiosity.

1. Self-report measures: One way is through self-report questionnaires that ask people to rate their level of interest and desire to learn about different topics. These can include measures such as the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory or the State-Trait Curiosity Inventory.

2. Behavioral measures: Another is by observing people's behavior, such as their exploration of novel stimuli or willingness to engage in new experiences. Researchers might use tasks that involve exploring unfamiliar objects or environments to assess curiosity.

3. Physiological measures: Physiological measures, such as brain activity or eye movements, can also be used to measure curiosity. Researchers might use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in response to novel stimuli or eye-tracking technology to measure attention to novel information.

While there is no one definitive way to measure curiosity, combining multiple measures can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the construct."

Thank you ChatGPT! The State-Trait Curiosity Index looks interesting. I'm led down a rabbit-hole to learn more about Epistemic Curiosity - "the desire for knowledge that motivates individuals to learn new ideas, eliminate information-gaps, and solve intellectual problems".

I also came across the idea that links curiosity and longevity... (looks worth investigating!)

One study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science found that individuals with higher levels of curiosity tended to live longer than those with lower levels of curiosity. The study followed over 1,000 older adults for five years and found that those who scored higher on measures of curiosity were more likely to still be alive at the end of the study period, even after controlling for other factors such as age, sex, and health status.

But whatever your level of curiosity, there's always consciousness lying beyond it, the purest, unfiltered experience of being aware... and how that fits in with curiosity is something I'm curious about.

This time last year:
Easter everywhere, but not in Ukraine

This time two years ago:
Climate vs weather

This time three years ago:
Seven lockdown sunsets

This time six years ago:
Easter everywhere

This time 13 years ago:
Strange days indeed (though less strange than these!)

[link to video of the blog post, courtesy of Nick Morris]