“If you’re going to understand curiosity, you really should understand why do people want certain things, why do they like certain things. Because once you establish if you want it, once you have an idea how much you know, then you can explain why you might be curious or not.” ~ Jacqueline Gottlieb,
Six years ago I sat down with Jacqueline Gottlieb, Ph.D., the very first neuroscientist I’d ever interviewed.
At some point she made a bold and quite tantalizing statement. “Curiosity,” she said, “is going to take neuroscience to the next frontier.”
Today we check in on that assertion. We talked about visual systems, value systems, motivation, cognition, personality psychology, stress tolerance, introversion, extroversion and why it’s a good idea for scientists to talk to one another.
I really think that the reason we have such big societies as humans is to exchange information — precisely because each individual is limited in their view of the world. By exchanging information with each other, we become much, much more powerful.
Listen to Choose to Be Curious #264 Curiosity Is Taking Neuroscience to New Frontiers, with Jacqueline Gottlieb
Jacqueline Gottlieb is a Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. She studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain’s higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. Her interest is in how the brain gathers the evidence it needs — and ignores what it doesn’t — during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity.
Check out the research we discussed today: Neural Representations of Sensory Uncertainty and Confidence Are Associated with Perceptual Curiosity and Individual differences in information demand have a low dimensional structure predicted by some curiosity traits.
Listen to my first conversation with Jackie: Neuroscience Eyes Curiosity, with Jacqueline Gottlieb, PhD
If you enjoyed this discussion, you might also like: Why Neuroscience Matters, with Ilya Monosov; James Danckert Is Curious About Boredom; A Special Alchemy: Curiosity, Empathy & Social Media, with Ben Rein, PhD; and Why Curiosity Makes Us Patient, with Abby Hsiung & Alison Adcock.
Theme music by Sean Balick; “Cicle Veroni” by Cicle Kadde, via Blue Dot Sessions.
You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
