“Honestly, what was surprising to me most in the beginning was that anyone was studying this scientifically.” ~ Dale Zhou, PhD

Today we dive into a tantalizing “kinesthetic framework for curiosity,” a way of understanding how we move between ideas and bits of information.

Researcher Dale Zhou thinks of our curiosity as our search process in specific conditions. His research shows we’ve each got our own style — and that architecture can be mapped using knowledge networks.

I think of Dale as an information artist. He helps the rest of us see more clearly the very sophisticated systems he is studying. We explore characterizing curiosity as a searching function; context, location and even mood influences on our curiosity and information seeking; the excitement of linking disparate fields of work; why having a naturalistic data set such as his 480,000+ Wikipedia users in 50 countries and in 14 languages is so cool; where the research might lead us with memory and search algorithms; and why neither of us is much of a trivia fan…

What I really like about the Wikipedia data set is that it’s very naturalistic. It respects the complexity and the richness of the behavior of seeking information.

Listen to Choose to Be Curious 279: Kinesthetic Curiosity: Our Styles of Moving Among Information & Ideas, with Dale Zhou

Learn more about Dale Zhou’s work. Dale generously shares the underlying code for his visualizations. Read the first paper establishing this “kinesthetic framework for curiosity” (2020) and the recent, bigger Wikipedia study (2024).

Listen to my conversations with Dani Bassett on knowledge networks, David Lydon-Staley on everyday curiosity, and Perry Zurn on the political nature of curiosity — and the first place I encountered the Busybody, Hunter and Dancer. And don’t miss my interview with twins Dani and Perry when they synthesize so much of this in Curious Minds: The Power of Connection.

Check out my conversation with artist Rebecca Kamen, about her show Reveal (including Dale’s work, below).

Hear more about Wikipedia and where we entrust our curiosity in my conversation with Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Step In Step Out” by Crab Shack, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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