“Curiosity can be on this journey with us, and it can change flavors as we get more information and as we experience time pass.” ~ Abby Hsiung

I found myself thinking about the exquisite agony of a Hitchcock suspense when I came upon an article in Scientific American, “Why Curiosity Makes Us Patient.”

The authors assert curiosity makes us hungry for knowledge, but not necessarily in a hurry to get it. It’s a finding that runs in the face of a whole lot of curiosity theory that supposes curiosity is an urgent desire to know, now.

But here is research saying: slow down — it’s more interesting than that.

The message that hasn’t been really effectively delivered is how essential these errors are and how they improve learning. And so that not only is it the case that it’s okay to make mistakes…that you’re required to fail in order to try new things. You’re required to fail in order to get better. You can’t get the full picture by always being right.

Alison Adcock

Listen to Choose to Be Curious #253: Why Curiosity Makes Us Patient, with Abby Hsiung & Alison Adcock

Alison Adcock is director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. She studies neural mechanisms of motivation and memory. 

Abby Hsiung was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke when she did this research. She is now a  User experience researcher at Meta.

Together with Jia-Hou Poh and Scott Huetell, Abby and Alison wrote the Scientific American essay that caught my eye – and the research paper behind it. Pretty cool when this stuff makes the pages of Scientific American!

If you enjoyed this conversation, you might like these C2BC Classics: Education & Learning, with Micaela Pond; The Montessori Method, with Chandra Fernando; Why Should This Be So? with Susan Engel; and Architecting Curiosity, with Pim Schachtschabel, Monica Canfield-Lenfest & Anthony Rocco.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Turning on the Lights” by Speakeasy, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.