“I actually still remember our first encounter. You gave me one of the buttons — the ‘Choose to Be Curious’ buttons — and then I realized wow! there’s even a podcast about curiosity, so this must be really an interesting topic to study…You inspired me to keep going.” ~ Matthias Gruber
Loyal listeners will recognize the name of neuroscientist Matthias Gruber, whose early research on curiosity and memory played an important role in my curiosity origin story. What I didn’t know was that I had played a little role in his story as well.
This was a wide-ranging and exciting conversation about Matthias’ ongoing efforts to understand curiosity’s role in learning and memory. There’s a lot here. You may have to listen more than once — I know I did!
We talk about his working definition of curiosity; surprising developmental differences in young adolescents’ curiosity, interest and memory; what we do with moment to moment fluctuations in curiosity and interest; building cognitive maps (spoiler alert: we’re not so different from rats); leveraging curiosity in the classroom; the intriguing role of stress tolerance in how curiosity manifests; and how wonderfully humbling it is for neuroscientists to see the real-world impact of their work.
Matthias’ curiosity #analogy slayed me. How is curiosity like a sunrise or a sunset? You’ll have to listen for all the beautiful insights, but (another spoiler alert!) the punchline it magic: “Like the sun, curiosity rises and curiosity sets.”
I wasn’t sure, as a neuroscientist, what can we offer to the teachers when we tell them about curiosity. What we heard over and over was that most teachers were aware of curiosity, but more that it’s a “fun thing to do.” What the teachers realized with these curiosity projects was that curiosity became the engine for learning.
Listen to Ep. #293: Curiosity Becomes the Engine for Learning, with Matthias Gruber
Matthias J. Gruber studies the neuroscience of motivation and its effect on memory at Cardiff University in his Motivation and Memory Lab. Currently, most of the lab’s projects focus on the neuroscience of curiosity and how curiosity affects learning in young people and adults. Check out the team’s work on exploration and spatial memory, curiosity in childhood and adolescents, and The Curious Brain evaluation.
And of course, don’t miss the 2014 paper that started it all for me: States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit.
If this piqued your curiosity about the neuroscience of curiosity, you might enjoy these C2BC Classics: Kinesthetic Curiosity: Our Styles of Moving Among Information & Ideas, with Dale Zhou; Curiosity Is Taking Neuroscience to New Frontiers, with Jacqueline Gottlieb; and Why Curiosity Makes Us Patient, with Abby Hsiung & Alison Adcock.
Theme music by Sean Balick; “A Little Powder” by Nursery, via Blue Dot Sessions.
You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
