How curiosity works

Now you're probably a curious person. I would say the very fact you do listen to this podcast with all its variety of different topics makes you one. But if you're like me, you probably haven't thought too much about your curiosity. What makes you curious? What makes you curious about certain subjects and not others? Well, today on the show we're joined by Danny Bassett from the University of Pennsylvania and we're joined by Perry Zern from the American University in Washington, DC and we're going to talk all things curiosity. And in today's show we talk about not only do we have curiosity for things we're interested in, but we also have curiosity when the immediate structure of that subject or that knowledge matches our natural style of curiosity. But we're going to talk about the three types of curiosity that we see in human beings and as you listen to this I want you to sit back and try and work out which type of curiosity are you? This is simplifying complexity. A podcast where we explore the underlying principles of complex systems that seem to defy our rational view of the world like economies, ecologies or even you or me. I'm forensic engineer Sean Brady and I'll be your host. Danny Perry welcome on the show. Thank you. We're excited to be here. Yeah thanks for having us. So today we're going to talk about complexity science and curiosity. So can you tell us a little bit about your journey? What brought you to the point where you both became interested in curiosity? So we initially began in very different disciplines and still have expertise in very different disciplines. I studied physics in college and Perry studied philosophy. And then as we move through our careers we started becoming closer and closer to one another in terms of the areas that we were excited about. So I've focused a lot on understanding human learning and how we acquire new information and what we do with that new information. And at the same time Perry was working on the philosophy of curiosity. And so we started talking to one another at that point. So this was a couple years into our graduate and postdoctoral and then faculty work and realized that our interests actually had come back to a place where they could intersect really tightly. And so that's led us to a lot of collaborative papers and a book now on curiosity. For myself I went to school for a pre-medium major. I was planning on becoming a doctor. I always did well in science and then I took my first philosophy class. And there was something about precisely the complexity of a field like philosophy and Danny was working in physics, doing a major in physics at first. And the philosophy in physics are both asking really fundamental questions about the world but in really different ways. And it's funny that at precisely the moment that as twins we were trying to differentiate ourselves we also in a sense took similar pathways or were trying to tackle some of the same big big questions. And then yeah we came around to asking this what turned out to be a really sticky really tough question about what is curiosity, how does it work, what does it look like in the brain, what have been the theories about it that we've outgrown now as a human species and where do we need to turn and that's just produced a lot of fruit for work together. And Danny, I presume it was the work on learning that brought you to curiosity. Yes it was the work on learning and then it was also a geographic effect too because I was studying how people's brains change as they learn and at the same time that my work focused on that area Perry was actually doing a visiting position at the University of Pennsylvania which is where I work. And so we spent a lot of time talking to one another at that stage and I think it was curiosity is not the same as learning they're very different processes but they're very complimentary processes. So we had enough of a shared language or shared vocabulary that we can start to ask questions at their intersection. So why are they different? You can learn a lot of things that you need to learn simply because you need to learn it and you don't have to be curious about it. You just have to be committed in a particular way and have the right resources. But what Danny and I were really interested in and really committed to as people is how do we facilitate or think about learning from a space of curiosity, right? I mean we're educators but we're also researchers and we're really passionate about pursuing research that is curiosity driven for us and not a half to and we want to be in the classroom in a way that students feel like they've never been quite so curious about a subject before. You know that's the kind of the the experience we want them to have. So I think there's so much learning that happens in a life and not enough curiosity actually. What was it from each of your disciplines that brought you to the same class with respect to curiosity? What was it specifically? I mean, came to get into the detail of it. I have no problem getting geeky on it. I think what was exciting to us is that previous theories of curiosity had mostly focused on thinking about it as motivation or a drive for humans to acquire a piece of information. So we call this the acquisition model. It's a model where we go out and we try to acquire a piece of information. And to most of the theories built around that across disciplines, all of the neuroscience was focused in that space as well. And when Perry and I talked to one another, we had a different perspective where we felt that actually one of the motivators to engage with the world or sort of act of being curious was to take two pieces of information and connect them together. So it's actually about connectivity about how this relates to that and how the two change how we think about the world, which is related to this broader network of information that exists in our minds. And once we started thinking about curiosity as this drive to connect, then we realized that that changes the mathematics. It changes the necessity of using complexity science to understand curiosity. And it also changes how we think about curiosity and its role in the social world. Why does it change the mathematics? How does moving from one model to the other? I mean, I can see from a complexity science how you're moving into a more of a networking interaction driven process. Yes, exactly. You're moving into a place where you think about knowledge not as a collection of individual units kind of like coins in a bag, but you're thinking about knowledge as an interconnected object or structure where pieces of information relate to one another. That's how we make inferences. That's how we engage in rational thought, but also in affective thought as well. And it's that relational nature that then is meaningful in helping us to understand the organization of our minds. Now, when we think about curiosity in this space, curiosity can be what drives us to find a new piece of information and connect it up here rather than somewhere else. It also helps us to understand how when you add in that connection, it changes the structure or the topology of the network itself. And that can be related to how we change our minds or flexibly adapt to a new viewpoint or perspective on the world. So in other words, curiosity is something that because it is connectional is related to everything you've learned before, informed by what you might forecast to be in the future in your learning space. And it also means mathematically we need to incorporate the network that existed before, the network as it grows with curiosity and the network that could come about in the future as well. And there's something here too for the social scientists among us. So that original theory of curiosity is this accumulation of information, of discrete pieces of information. This assumes not only that there are discrete pieces of information and they are simply accumulated, but it also presumes that the individual learner or knower is the starting point for the curiosity, is the beginning point and is the one who reaches out to gain the information. But when we understand curiosity in a social science perspective and in a social theory perspective, we have to think about the ways in which our curiosities are already formed in advance by the world that was before us. So it's not just the knowledge that we have had before, but it's the knowledge as constructed well before we landed on the scene of the world. And that's going to differ based on where it is that you are born, where it is that you spend the bulk of your time, where it is that you're educated, etc, etc. So there's really deep social implications here, social network implications. And maybe just to jump in really quickly on that note, it then makes a beautiful tie to the work in network science that arose or in the social sciences. So how we understand people as they interact with one another. So we can think practically, formally and mathematically, about curiosity in groups using this approach. So it's not just that a single human acquires a single piece of information, but it's that a human connects pieces of information and multiple humans are connected to one another in sharing their relational bits, the sort of edges in the network. So then it becomes this interdigitated multi-layer system where there's one network of information and then there's another network of people and they're constantly interacting with one another over time. It's really interesting what you're saying is it I've talked in the past a lot about expertise and the way expertise you can think of it in a similar sense. What's the driver then for curiosity in there? So if you come and you encounter this structure that already exists, I presume that's the way it works. And then you become curious as a result of that structure. What's the mechanics of that. Well, this is why we propose that curiosity is edgework or is the laying down of an edge or a relationship between nodes of information. So typically curiosity is understood as the desire for the node of information and we're shifting it to the capacity and drive to lay down the edge. So I need to connect what I have right now, what I know right now with this piece of information. When you go to look something up, what you want more than the single piece is connecting what you know to that single piece. So curiosity is edgework is one of the shifts we do. And then linking that to expertise, I think is interesting. One way that you can think about that is that you are driven to find all of the connections that do exist in that space that you are working in. So it's not that you need all the individual pieces of information. You do need that, but you also need to understand how they relate to one another in order to have expertise in a field. And the reason is that if you don't understand their relationships, you can't make inferences or engage in arguments or know what to pull out of your memory to help you solve a problem. So the understanding the interconnections between the pieces of information and as many of them as you can is necessary for all the functions that are associated with expertise. And from a curiosity perspective, I presume them that what you encounter in the network when you first, of that information when you first meet it. Presumably that has a major impact on the sort of the journey you go on then in terms of following those paths through to understand the edges and all that. Yeah, I think so. And we also talk about this in the book. We think that it's possible that different kinds of knowledge, different sectors of knowledge, have different structures. So if I go back to some of the early courses that I took in mathematics in college, for example, I remember being struck with how ordered the information was and how ordered the relationships were between the ideas and the kinds of problems that one could solve and how they all related to one another just felt so organized, so ordered. So what we would call regular in mathematics that everything was related in such an organized fashion that you can almost see it as crystalline. So there could be something about that more crystalline or lattice like a regular structure of mathematics that draws one person toward that area. And that person says, I love it when nodes connect in this particular way. They connect in this very regular lattice like structure. That is motivating to me. That feels rewarding to me. That's the kind of knowledge that I want to build and to understand. Whereas for other people, it may be that the kind of structure in a different knowledge sector has longer distance connections, has more loops in it or cavities or holes or you can think about a lace like pattern or something like that where there's a lot of irregularities. And in fact, for some people, the irregularity in the knowledge structure may be fascinating to them. They like the novelty of not knowing exactly how the next piece of information is going to connect. So I do think that there can be individual differences in our preferences for the kind of knowledge structures that we find exciting. And that could help explain why some of us are drawn to some fields and others to other fields. But maybe also to different pedagogies in the same field. So I remember Danny and I were homeschooled and our mom who were very grateful to taught us many things or allowed us to teach ourselves many things. But one of the things was math and I remember distinctly when a particular publishing company wasn't working for one or the other of us. I don't even remember the specifics of it, but I remember that our mom switched us in the curriculum. So it was like, you know what, let's try a different pedagogy here. Let's try someone who teaches math and it from a different angle and then it worked or it didn't. And she would try a third one. So even in math, even in the crystalline structure, right, there are ways of teaching it that resonate with a learner and that don't resonate with a learner. And that's tough for professors. That realization is super tough because we're just one person up here, you know, trying to, how does this change for us? We're still really grappling with it. How does this theory change education? How does this theory change the workplace? How does this theory change anywhere where people need to learn things? If we realize how differently structured the networks of knowledge are in the world, but also how different people really can pick up something if it's structured one way or not another way. What do we do about that? That's pretty mind-blowing and it's incredible. I mean, I've never thought of that in the sense of, yeah, you're curious about something because of the structure of the information and not just the information, but the structure of the knowledge in there. I mean, is there any sort of groups of people that we can say there's people who like this sort of structure, I know you talked about two there, Danny, but have we met any progress in understanding that this type of structure seems to appeal to people who like this and there's five or three groups or something like that? Have you been able to get anything around that? Yes, definitely. And in fact, the groups that we've been studying, we have sort of three groups that we've been studying. And they come from a very long history, in fact, and so actually I want to see Perry, if you can talk a little bit about the history of the three types we study and then I can circle back and tell you about how we're studying them in the real world today. Yeah, so I was curious, as I was studying curiosity, to track not only the definitions of curiosity across Western intellectual history, but the descriptions of curiosity. So when people talked about other curious people, what words did they use, what adjectives, what behaviors did they describe to those people. And so as I started tracking, especially these behaviors or these practices of curious people, three major not only, but three major ways in which curious people were talked about were first number one as busy bodies or people interested in all kinds of information and all kinds of stories. Number two hunters, which were people very, very focused in on wanting to know everything about something in particular, you know, they were really they wanted to go deep. And then the third characterization was as a dancer, someone who danced with ideas. And here you would get descriptions of people whose curiosity made their thoughts leap from one place to another place to another place, but not in the way the busy body is just everywhere, but rather in this kind of creative artistic connection. And of one idea to an unexpected second place. So the busy body, the hunter and the dancer were the three types that kept surfacing again across Western intellectual history. And these aren't the only ones that you could call there, but they are big ones. And of course, there are other places you could look besides Western intellectual history for such topologies, but it's a place to start. So and then, you know, as I was talking to Danny about this, and it's like, we can do something with these. Yes. Exactly. So just before we get there, you know what I'm going to ask you for? Have you got historical examples of people who fit into those three categories just for the list? They're to really get their head around those concepts. Yeah, you know, I think there's somebody in kind of the annals of Roman history who couldn't help himself from opening any letter that came whenever it came. And whenever he heard something in the village, like had to go out and see what was happening. So someone who's constantly checking the news, essentially, and someone who likes to talk to everyone else rather than do their own work. Or as one example for the busy body, as far as the dancer, you know, Frederick Nietzsche describes himself this way. And if you read Nietzsche's writing, you can hear and you can see the dancer, the creator there. As far as the hunter, gosh, you know, we've chatted about this before, but it seems to me that the hunter is sort of the paradigmatic, serious scientist or scholar that developed that expertise, right? Get really deep into one thing in particular. So there's a lot of examples one could pull there. Okay, Danny, go for it. How did you do? So at this point, we collaborated with David Lydon Staley, who is a communication scientist at Penn. And what he did is that he ran a study where he had people browse Wikipedia on their laptops for 15 minutes a day for 21 days. And they agreed to be part of this study where we downloaded an app onto their computer that would track the Wikipedia pages that they went to. And timestamp when they were at this page and when they moved to this page and etc. So we can watch them walk through this information landscape over a very long period of time. And what we were able to do with that data is to say, what kind of steps does each person take? Are they flitting about like the busy body? Are they really tracking along one direction, semantically, like the hunter? Or are they doing something a little bit more creative like the dancer? And what we were able to show is that there is a full continuum from people who are very busy body like to people who are very hunter like. Quantitatively what we did is that we took each Wikipedia page they went to as they stepped from one to the next. And we quantified the semantic similarity between those two pages. If the two pages are very similar semantically, that means they're taking a short step. And if the pages are very different, then that means they're taking a long step. In this way we were able to basically map out the networks they were traversing. And were those networks highly regular, very dense, were they elongated in one particular direction, were they loopy with lots of holes in them, more like the lace work that we talked about earlier. And we were able to show that people very along this continuum, we see bitty, stay bodies and we see hunters. And that suggests to us that the kinds of curiosity that people show today are very similar to those that they have shown for the last 2000 years, which is pretty neat. And goes against some people's thoughts that some people worry that in the information age, our curiosity has changed, it's different, it's worse. It's not as good. It's a little bit narrow, it's highly influenced. But what we actually see is that these characteristic patterns are very consistent. So that's neat. Since then, we do have a paper that was just accepted last week. So a study that's going to come out momentarily in the scientific journals that studies the same kinds of curiosity in millions of users of the wiki mobile app across 50 different countries. So it's a global study where we can see these individuals browsing in these very distinct ways, geographically in a highly distributed way. And can you talk about what you find there? But do you have to wait until it comes out? Yeah, no, we found a couple things. Maybe one that is of interest here is that the people who browse more like hunters tended to browse pages in STEM fields. So in science, technology, engineering, and medicine, whereas people who browse more like busy bodies tended to browse in the culture pages, in the humanities pages, in some entertainment pages, history and geography. It was really interesting that there was a separation between the style of movement in the landscape of knowledge and the kind of knowledge that they were acquiring. Wow, that's fascinating. And I use fundamentally saying that with curiosity, there's this whole personal preference. So you'll have a personal style of curiosity. And then certain fields seem to lend themselves or their information is structured in a certain way that sort of matches and sort of facilitates that style of curiosity. And then we get attracted to those fields. So does that sort of mean that not only, for example, if you really, you know, you go into physics like you did, then, then part of it is you're interested in physics. And another part of it is you're interested in how the world of physics knowledge is structured dealt with presented on all those things. Yes, that's what we think is going on, that it's a combination of being interested in the subject matter or the pieces of information, and it's an interest in the way that they are connected in that field both. It might be also interesting to think about each field, well, many fields sort of have multiple lenses or analytics within them. So in philosophy, for example, there is a more logically scientifically oriented and organized style of philosophy. And then there is a more literary style. And the same way that there's political scientists and political theorists or experimental scientists and then theoretical scientists. So there's also within each field the kind of ways that the thinking is done there that can lend itself one way or the other and that often parses the field. And sometimes there's, you know, little battles and skirmishes around those lines, you know. And for you, your move from sort of moving from medicine to philosophy, do you see this this personally in that? Yeah, you know, I think that I was drawn to philosophy. I was, you know, all my pre-med classes were full one semester, actually my first semester that I got into college. And so they thirst through me and a bunch of gen eds and philosophy was one of them. And there was something creative about it for me. And that's partly because of the professor and professors there and the style of philosophy they were doing, but I like creating ideas. So there was something about having to learn facts, lots and lots and lots of facts. First before I get to be creative in a field that just kind of doesn't buy soul when I realized I could start creating right now. And philosophy, let's be create right now and still does. And so it's for me, it was the space for creativity that was immediately available that I think lent itself to who I am. And do you reckon that's why you both work together and there's a power from the fact you twins, but do you both creatively think in a similar way? Do you both have the same style of curiosity or is it different and is it complementing me? It's obviously complementary of it's different. Yeah, I think we definitely do have some very similar ways of thinking and that we value we value creating certainly idea. I mean, I think to me, that's what scientific research is. Is it finding new ways ways to ask new questions or new ways of asking old questions or building out a new space of knowledge that puts together things that haven't been put together before. That's kind of what discovery is I think it's I mean, we don't think of discovery always as creating, but I think fundamentally we are creating new ideas as we discover. So I do think that that is related. I think we're both drawn to that kind of thinking. I also think that the sort of curiosity we each have is partly driven by what we, you know, maybe we're born with maybe or maybe faced or learned very early in our lives, but I also think that it is can be structured and constrained or guided in specific direction. So the fact that I have been in in physics and neuroscience for many years, I think has definitely guided a kind of curiosity that may differ a little bit in some meaningful ways from the kind of curiosity that Perry has that's guided again by the kinds of scholars, the ways of thought, the texts that are grappled with. So I think what's interesting maybe taking us as a small example is that these kinds of curiosity may be partly just constitutive of who we are and partly framed by our experiences. Perry, how are you thoughts on that? Now I'm just curious about you. So what's your curiosity like? Yeah, my curiosity I reckon, ooh, it's definitely quite weird. So I'm an engineer by training. And so definitely would have earlier in my life, the hunter would have been the thing, but then I've always been this dancer and busy buddy sort of thing as well. I'm interested in loads of different things. I love these leaps. I'm really interested in failure on why things fail, why systems fail, particularly in engineering and socio-technical systems. I suppose maybe the leap for me was when I discovered complexity science suddenly I discovered, oh, this is the missing link in understanding why these systems fail because of that point out, a very Newtonian view of the way systems work because of the engineering training and where that worked. I was trying to deal with the fact that well, humans seem to make them these irrational decisions, even engineers who we think were above this sort of thing, we were doing the same thing. But then when you look at complexity and you go, yeah, but you got all these local interactions that people are dealing with in the system and when you start to bring those into place and look at how individuals are awarded and penalized about stuff. And then you can see why they made decisions that were quite rational today and at the time, but it's only when you pull back with the benefit of hindsight, you go, well, that was a little bit irrational. So I love complexity science from that point of view. And then weirdly, from a curiosity point of view, I could never quite find the books. I read a lot of books on complexity science, but I could never quite find the one I wanted when I was going and talking to people about complexity science. And I started this podcast to say, well, let's take these real world ideas that people are grappling with and people are dealing with and just put them in the framework of complexity science, which most people on the show do anyway. But sort of show that there's this different way of thinking about the world and it's all about systems and it all applies and all these different feels that appear quite different. And what I really like about talking to you is that you take in physics and you take in philosophy, but once you get to that sort of system view with how are people curious about those fields, you get this incredible overlap, which is very, very cool. It makes me actually wonder whether there's an intersection between curiosity and failure. And curiosity fail, I think is an interesting question. Another interesting question is, is in the curious practice of building knowledge, is there something that can make the knowledge you're building fail in a sense that it crumbles or changes or has to reconfigure completely. What are your thoughts on that? Well, the different ways in which the network could fail, I mean, it could be that there are just aren't enough nodes and edges. There isn't enough extension to the knowledge network, or to function within the needs of the knower or the social system that needs that knowledge. And that's what it means to fail is simply that there isn't extensive enough knowledge of a thing. And certainly this could explain early failures in scientific discovery, like we're going to try this, we're going to try this, but because we don't actually know enough pieces. Our system is failing, but there are other things, you know, there are just simple. Valences to the knowledge like we might know all the pieces, but it's how we connect them or in what arrangement they've been placed with one another where they're tilting, you know, I don't know how that is mathematically discussed, but for me, I think how the knowledge is connected, but also how it's shaped or tilted or slanted or skewed such that suddenly, you see something you couldn't have seen before. And it works, right? It works as a frame for the thing you're trying to understand. Yeah, so that's at least two forms of possible failure, at least of knowledge systems. One of the things we see as well, and I mean, this is sort of slightly to the side of what you're both talking about, but one thing we see is that particularly in the engineering disciplines would begin to be engineering failures, you get huge rigidity to the knowledge. There's the accepted way of doing it, and then what we see is post failure that all the warning signs were there that the knowledge was inadequate that reality was screaming at you that you'd missed something or you'd gone beyond the current expertise and then people seem to ignore that because they say, well, it's not relevant because I've never had to think about it before and I've never seen it before. not relevant. So we see this really. quite interesting expertise by us. I'm not sure how that fits in with curiosity, but there's definitely a maybe a lack of curiosity about some of those warning signs is one of the interesting things. And I think when you do forensics like I do, those warning signs are fascinating and how they were missed is fascinating in the knowledge structure. That's what I get very interested in. This reminds me of some conversations we've had before about how curiosity is, we call it edgework and that includes both laying down edges, so discovering the relationship between information and breaking edges or separating nodes and realizing that these two things that we've linked together really shouldn't be linked that easily. Maybe they're a little bit more tenuous or maybe there's something in the middle or maybe the whole thing needs to be taken apart. So in fact, having value, placing value both on relations and on breaking things that may have been useful in the past and aren't useful anymore or we're just wrong to begin with is important for building a constantly evolving network structure. So what you're describing I think is when people go through and have this expertise and don't question the assumptions or the relationships or the interactions or the current structure as much as they should or as much as would be helpful. And it's actually something that I've loved about talking to Perry because I feel like there's certainly an area in philosophy where what is really fun is to take an idea like curiosity and break it all up into pieces and say everything we thought before might not be true or what really is curiosity or I was talking to a colleague the other day and she was like what really is cognition? This is one of the most famous cognitive scientists in the field. I'm like this is a really good question. What are these huge, huge ideas? And let's question the assumptions that we've brought to this study and let's question how we think it works and what if it worked a different way? So having that flexibility I think is pretty key. One of the ways I like to formulate this is that curiosity has to be thought of as generative and degenerative and both kind of muscles of the curious organism need to be flexed on a regular basis just as we have this whole long history of curiosity being associated with accumulation and with getting getting getting getting. It's so easy to just shift that into the connective gear and say well it's just building connections and generating and generating more connections you know but really it's as much like every time you're making a connection almost every time you're probably breaking another one. That's part of what it means to be arranging information and so thinking about the breaks the degeneration of nodes and the edges between the nodes degenerate over time as do the nodes themselves. So there's also something about knowledge networks that isn't just building material upon material kind of atomic way but rather is this especially if we think of it historically or sociologically yeah I mean it's got its own time limit time stamp on it and these ideas they lose root and they haven't science they haven't philosophy it's not always because of something we figured us smart folks figured out you know it's more like the world changed and suddenly we didn't need that idea or we needed something else more or something like that. What does this mean for education and I really like that concept of going the difference in learning and ed curiosity and so much of education must be about just learning just pouring in ideas and filling it up but one of the take away is for you with respect to how should we be thinking differently about education and getting students curious whether it's that's skill or university. One of the biggest things for me I think the challenges right now facing education is neurodiversity and literally the ways in which we know that our brains not only work differently I mean that sounds like a platitude in a sense but it's so richly real that brains work differently and sure there's a range of ways in which brains work that sort of work with the pedagogies we have and the frameworks we have and the practices we have like sitting at a desk and da da da for hours and hours but then there are so so many more variations and so much more there and again our pedagogies and our educational structures just do not have the flexibility required to meet those needs which means that we're training less than half the people we can train so yeah there's a question of equity here and then a much larger question of flexibility what does it mean not to just demand flexibility of learners why does it mean to start inviting educators to get a lot more flexible about how they're thinking and how they're doing it but Danny I know you've thought about this with your STEM courses yeah I have definitely thought about this in STEM courses but I kind of also wanted to just think about what organizations are going to be flexible enough to allow spaces for people to think differently and I actually think that companies or institutions or workplaces have a lot of capacity to see different sorts of curious people in their employees and to say oh this set of employees really works their minds work this way this other set of employees their mind works this way and you have a little bit more flexibility of aligning the work with the person then you do when you're teaching and you have the set of students that you have in the classroom and you have the mind of the teacher that's their mind whereas I think in companies spaces or in organizations there may be more flexibility to allow each person to be engaging in that work in these different stylistic ways that's interesting any study education system does it favor the hunter the busy buddies the dancers I mean I presume it favors the hunter is that reasonable that much more structured approach yes absolutely and I get so frustrated because I also teach in honors programs and what we tell honors students is we say surprise us take a risk be creative you know but we save that for the honor students and then all of the other classes it's do it this way do it this way do it this way meet the bar so it's both the kind of standard education is catering to hunters but also trying to build hunters but it's also that there's some kind of hierarchy here such that you know more elite levels of education start to then invite we assume you're good at being a hunter now we'll invite you to be a dancer that kind of prerequisite should not exist because presumably you're ruling out the great dancers potentially you're preventing the great dancers getting to that level yeah getting the greatness have you done any workers journey worked on it had the three of these styles in direct so for example just come back to your concept Danny of a company you know if you get the right mix of dancers busy buddies and hunters and you cater to them and allowed onto first that must make for an incredibly powerful creative potential yeah I think that it would because you could have the benefit the strengths of each and then the synergies between them and in fact I also think that this sort of makes me go back to single individuals and wondering for people who do grow up with educational privileges is it the case that they are encouraged in all three sorts of curiosities maybe in different classes or for different assessments and so by the time they've finished they're able to engage in all three and kind of carefully and intentionally move between them in a way that's useful for problem solving if you think about solving a problem and I think about this in science a lot I often want to be more busy body like at the beginning because I want to open up my mind I want to imagine any solution could be possible or any field could be relevant or any method or any math or I want to be really open minded and then as I think I've found something that could be useful I want to engage more hunter-like curiosity to seek more deeply in that one space and then towards the end of a scientific project when I have a discovery then I really want to engage more of the dancer like curiosity to say how does this discovery relate to previous discoveries how does it relate to a problem that's over here in this other field how does it change how we think about this theory that was developed last year it is connected but it's this kind of intentional leaping that's more like the dancer when I'm facing a scientific problem I feel like I moved through all three and I think I've been trained to do that even though I didn't realize that that's what I was being trained to do but I also think it could be true in other educational environments depending on the flexibility and freedom that the students are being given to engage in all three instead of just focusing in on the hunter it's interesting as you're talking there I was very much before this in the mindset of oh we have people who are hunters and we have people who are dancers and I presume you definitely see if people favor areas to different degrees but that's quite a profound thing you say that fundamentally we do have this ability to train ourselves in these different areas of curiosity and if we can do that then not only we put in groups of creative people together but we're putting together people of different approaches to curiosity but you're also allowing them to flex those different curiosity muscles which makes for a powerful competition yes that's what I think is how we really are going to be effective and solve problems or just be curious for no reason and no utility I think it's that movement between them that is really exciting so that's actually where I'm keen for more of the science to go is to understand how people move between different curiosity styles what makes them to decide that it's time to move or use this one versus that one and how is that trained in us yeah I'm so curious too I agree also as far as it is. in the humanities fields. I mean, the three styles are equally important. And I think Danny's talking about in the conceptualization of a project, but I think also for us, we get to do a little bit more experimental writing when we're writing our theories in the humanities. And for a good writer too, you need to be able to do all of these. You need to be able to pull widely residences that will create an opening for lots of different people to come into a piece. And then you have to have a specificity that just like nails the thing you're trying to say. You know, a really good writer can just say it in the smallest, most powerful way, the just sticks. And then you also need some kind of like element of surprise so that the reader, as the reading, they think they sort of know where we're going, but there are moments where they just pull them over. It's just like, I didn't expect that. Turn of phrase, I didn't expect that turn of idea. Really good writing also employs all three styles on the page. - That's interesting, isn't it? Especially when you go to the concept of just how creative the writing process is in terms of, makes you start to organize your thoughts and in and of itself. I mean, that's quite powerful to sort of say, you can be a better writer if you're able to master those different types of curiosity and move between them. And just to finish what's next for you both in terms of curiosity. - Or irreplaceably curious about most of the things we're involved in right now separately, where the sort of people who just accumulate project upon project upon project every time we talk, we think that we might be like learning how to do less and but actually we're buried under more things than we were before. And that just continues. But we also have like high aspirations for working together on another book project. The second book project that we're really hoping to get underway is one where we're going to work through, again, the philosophy and the neuroscience of how thoughts move. So I've talked a little bit of how people move through a landscape of knowledge. And what we're interested in is how thoughts, not just people, but thoughts, move through a landscape of memories, of fantasies, of imagination, of information. And there's some really interesting work right now in neuroscience demonstrating that people make in their minds cognitive maps, so maps of knowledge in the same way that they're making maps of the physical world. It's just like we have maps in our minds of where the roadways are and where the stop signs are and how everything is interconnected physically so it allows us to navigate our physical world. We also are building cognitive maps and understanding the relations or roads on that cognitive map and how to navigate it. And in fact, it's the same piece of the brain that's doing both. So it's almost as if we have this physical interdigitation of space and knowledge, I guess. Yeah, space and knowledge are interdigitated in this way in the brain. And that has a lot of, I think, ramifications for how we think about not just sort of spontaneous, thought or regular thought, but also rational thought and creative thought. Danny Perry, thank you very much. Vin and the show has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thanks for listening to Simplifying Complexity. When we look at the key concepts of complexity science with expert minds from across the world, concepts like emergence, self-organization, adaptation, networks, scaling, tipping points, and much more. This podcast was produced by Brady Hewitt and Wevelyn Creative. To make sure you don't miss an episode, be sure to subscribe to or follow the show in your podcast app. I'm Sean Brady, and I'll see you in our next episode. 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