“The driving principle is really to get a mechanistic understanding of cognition at the lowest level possible…but the way to get there is through a large amount of exploration. And partly that’s because, I think at this moment, we don’t really know how the brain works.” ~ Ilya Monosov

Ilya Monosov, Ph.D. studies neuronal circuits of motivation, emotion, and learning at the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. 

That’s the short version.

But the version that emerges in this conversation about how one neuroscientist explores the world — and why — is much more nuanced and thoughtful than his position description suggests.

I asked Ilya for an interview because I was impressed by his curiosity at a multidisciplinary conference on complexity. I was in way over my head at the gathering, but I know a curious mind at work when I see it — and that was Ilya.

Still, I didn’t anticipate our conversation would take us to the importance of neuroscience and information seeking for the fate of humanity, or to how achieving an “engineer’s understanding” of the brain could be helpful for those living with mental health challenges like OCD.

Ilya invites us to rethink our too-facile understanding of the brain — and to wrestle with the implications of how we define “curiosity”.

People view curiosity as a single sort of motivation, but there are so many components to it. It’s our desire to interact with novel objects; how much we want to resolve our uncertainties; how strongly are we driven by our actual imagination of something better than what we expected.
There are so many different things that drive it — and so I think it’s really important to think about them a little bit separately in order to get to that understanding that you’re talking about.

Listen to Choose to be Curious #209: Why Neuroscience Matters, with Ilya Monosov

Learn more about Ilya Monosov’s work here: https://neuroscience.wustl.edu/people/ilya-monosov-phd/

The Zuckerman Institute hosted the Curiosity, Creativity & Complexity Conference in May 2023.

Some years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jacqueline Gottlieb, one of the organizer of the complexity conference.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Lacquer Groove” by Tiny Tiny Trio, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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