219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity

0:00:00.8 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. And if you're a regular Mindscape listener, I think that it's not too much of a stretch for me to guess that you probably would consider yourself a curious person. Curious about the world, curious about how things work and so on. And if that's true, you've come to the right episode of Mindscape because we're going to get meta on the concept of curiosity by talking about curiosity itself, by being curious about curiosity. What it is, how it works, the different kinds of curiosity that motivate us and the different purposes to which we can put our own curiosity. We also are doing a little bit of an experiment. We do this occasionally. We've done this a couple times, but we're going to have more than one guest today. Dani Bassett is a physicist/engineer/neuroscientist, complexity theorist, if you like, at the University of Pennsylvania. And Perry Zurn is a philosopher at American University who has previously written about curiosity in a book called Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry. And the punchline is that Perry and Dani are twins. So they have been talking about this stuff with each other for many, many years now.

0:01:15.7 SC: And they share some of their thoughts with us from these two different interdisciplinary perspectives. They have a new book out called Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. And that subtitle is the secret here to their angle because they're trying to say that we think of curiosity maybe naively as here I am, there is some information or some mystery or some puzzle out there, I would like to go get it, right? I would like to go learn it. It's an individualistic kind of thing. But they want to emphasize the connection part of curiosity. You become more connected to the world and you put different pieces of information together when you're curious. You draw connections between different pieces of information. So it's a very fun conversation for someone like me. We push all the buttons I enjoy. We talk about networks in the brain and how those fit together to make us curious. We talk about political aspects of curiosity. What are you curious about? How is that impacted by society and hierarchy, everywhere? Are there places that curiosity shouldn't go? Are there good things that are unanticipated that come out of curiosity?

0:02:29.1 SC: So if I've done my job with the intro here, you are now curious to learn more. So let's go.

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0:02:52.0 SC: Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:52.0 Perry Zurn: Thanks for having us.

0:02:55.6 Dani Bassett: Thanks for having us.

0:02:55.8 SC: So this is an experiment. I have done it a couple of times before, having two people at once on the podcast, but it's different formats every time. So what I figured I would do here in this case, I will ask you targeted questions right at the start so that the audience can hear your voices and therefore know what your voices are going forward. But then after that, I'll just let you chime in to whatever questions you want. So for Perry, first, you've written a book about curiosity. And curiosity is a word that just comes with a positive valence, right? We think of curiosity as a good thing. It would be more daring to write a book that said curiosity is bad. You just shouldn't have it. [laughter] But maybe one of the themes in your book, correct me if I'm wrong, is that even though we give lip service to valorizing curiosity and saying it's good, we don't always follow through. We don't always institutionally or societally nurture people's curious impulses. Is that right?

0:03:52.3 PZ: Yeah, I would definitely say that curiosity... I think curiosity can be used for good or for ill. And I addressed that a little bit in my earlier book called Curiosity and Power. And what I'm interested in there is thinking about how structures of power, structures of value in social settings and social institutions inform what practices of curiosity get celebrated and lifted up and which ones don't. So I do think there's an inequality that can arise in how curiosity gets accessed and practiced. In Curious Minds, we not only redefine what curiosity is, but we talk about how that curiosity, that capacity to richly connect ideas and people can be supported not only from a brain network structure perspective, but also from an educational and a social perspective. So we're really excited to think about a new vantage point on curiosity as connectional, as linking ideas and experiences and people. And then how do we support that, again, from a neural perspective as much as a social perspective.

0:05:00.9 SC: I mean, do you think that there are kinds of curiosity that are bad or are you just uniformly pro-curiosity?

0:05:09.3 PZ: Yeah, I think that there are formations or shapes of curiosity that are not particularly helpful. So the kind of curiosity that drove a colonial approach to knowledge in which one can come in from the outside, one can assess how people live or how people move and just take that objectively and in some cases fetishize that difference. That's a problematic curiosity. But that's a structure of curiosity. That curiosity is making connections in the way that we redefine curiosity, but it's doing so in shapes that really alienate a particular group of people. So the formations, I think, of curiosity can be troubling, although the curiosity itself, which is the linking, isn't necessarily.

0:05:54.2 SC: So just so the audience then can get an impression of the different way that a physicist/bio-engineer, I don't know, is that right, Dani? How do we describe what you do for a living?

0:06:04.1 DB: Yeah, I guess I work at the intersection between physics and neuroscience frequently, which in some cases is called bioengineering.

0:06:11.4 SC: Okay. Who wants any of these disciplinary boundaries to exist? That's what we're trying to get rid of here. But I just... Different than philosophy, at least in where you're located on campus. So to Dani then, I think that Perry already mentioned it, but right there in the subtitle of your book, the word connections or connecting is very prominent. And that's the other theme that is impossible to miss in your book, that rather than thinking of curiosity just as getting more information or the desire to get more information, you really emphasize the desire to connect existing information or people or ideas in different ways.

0:06:48.0 DB: Yes, exactly. And I think that that's an interesting counterpoint to previous accounts of curiosity, which have traditionally emphasized or foregrounded the acquisitional nature of curiosity that we go out, we acquire pieces of information. And I think that when you focus on curiosity as acquisitional, then you can think of our process as going out and collecting pieces of information and then bringing them back home and putting them in a container of some kind. And the question is, what does that kind of information afford you? Well, if it's independent pieces of information, then you can pull out each piece and you can look at it and you can admire it and you can put it in a cabinet of curiosities if you want to. But if you want to do anything with it, it's very difficult because it's as if you have a big pile of sand, right? But once you think about curiosity as focusing on the connections between pieces of information, then what you're doing is that you're building a structure of knowledge that you can use in the future. It has a new affordance, more affordance than a pile of sand.

0:07:58.4 DB: And to illustrate this idea, I want to pull up a passage from John Dewey where he says that knowledge is such a network of interconnections that any past experience will offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problems presented in a new experience. And so what he's calling out is that, number one, knowledge is a network of interconnections. Number two, knowledge allows you to go back into the past and to appreciate what you have seen to work there and then also go forward, connect forward in time to change or alter or inform your decisions about the future. And so the connective nature of knowledge in a single time slice, but also towards the past and towards the future, gives knowledge a function. It gives it an affordance that you don't have if you think about it as independent pieces of information.

0:08:56.5 SC: Right. And so we see very clearly where the whole network idea comes in, which is something that you, Dani, have been studying in the brain for quite a while. Networks are everywhere. It's like a new buzzword, right? People love networks these days. Is there a philosophical side to the network aspect of things, the fact that knowledge is just not a list of facts, but a list of connected facts and connected in a certain very specific way?

0:09:22.0 PZ: Yeah. One of the things that I was able to do is go back through the history of philosophy and the history of Western intellectual thought and think about how it is that people have described curiosity over time and looked for this word connection. Connection, link, relation, proximity, right? There's a number of words that I looked for to say, is there actually an implicit account, a connectional account or an implicit network account of curiosity in the history of philosophy? And indeed there is. And what was interesting is how rich the connections were. So it was not only the connections between ideas and experiences and sensations, but also the connection between oneself and one's past self, oneself and one's environment or surroundings, oneself and other people, right? There was just like so many connections actually being described as an essential component of what curiosity is in philosophy, but that narrative hasn't been called before until this book.

0:10:21.2 SC: Well, when we talk about networks, to the person on the street, there's a bunch of dots connected by lines, that's kind of a network, social network or whatever, but there's a lot more depth to what the professionals think about when they think about networks. So what are the concepts we should instantly have in our minds when someone says, look, we have a network in front of us?

0:10:42.1 DB: Yeah, so usually you think about the pieces of a network, so independent units, so an idea for example, we would call it a node in the network and then two ideas would be connected by an edge. And so those are two pieces of jargon that are worth keeping in mind. And then the pattern of edges between nodes can be very simple and rectangular the way a scaffold looks on the side of a building that's being redone or they can be very, very random and unstructured in a way that is difficult to describe. And so what network science allows us to do is to re-describe those patterns in a way that is mathematically rigorous and also provides us with statistical assessments that allow us to say this network is different than that network. And the reason that that becomes important is that when we're thinking about curiosity as something that allows us to build knowledge networks, each of us may be building very, very differently and have structures in our minds that are quite different. Some of the structures in our minds might look like a scaffold on the side of the building and then other structures in our minds might look very haphazard. And network science provides us with the mathematics to distinguish between the two and to describe the continuum between the two.

0:12:17.3 SC: So we should be thinking then about, I guess, different topologies. Is that the word that we use to describe networks? We've had Steven Strogatz and other people, Neil Johnson on the podcast, talking about small world, random networks, grids, are those the things that we should be visualizing in our minds?

0:12:35.0 DB: Yes, absolutely. So topology is definitely the word. And the way that we think about topology is that it's the shape of the network and it's a shape of a connected pattern, not the shape of a volume. But we still think about it as a shape. So yes, those are the different sorts of structures, some of the different sorts of structures that we can have in our minds that connect pieces of information together.

0:12:55.7 SC: And Perry, I don't want to put words in your mouth. Are you literally plotting little networks when you go into the history of philosophy? Are you actually looking at ideas connecting or people connecting, et cetera?

0:13:05.4 PZ: That's a wonderful question. I think in some cases, yes, we're definitely doing that. When philosophers are doing a careful reading of a particular concept, we're tracking where it goes and what relationship it has between thinkers and how it changes and morphs in itself and what words or concepts or problems in the world it gets connected to or disconnected to. So I think there might be an implicit network method within this historical practice.

0:13:33.3 SC: Good. And just to put it all together then, the reason why networks and connections keep coming up here is what? I want to say curiosity is about filling up our network, changing our network. Does the shape of a network itself imply a lack of something that curiosity is then nudging us to fulfill?

0:13:54.6 DB: Yeah. So it's interesting. There is a theory of curiosity in psychology that suggests that curiosity is the drive to fill an information gap. So as we are building these networks in our minds, we might see cavities in the network or holes in the network or what may be called gaps in more common parlance. And so we may notice those gaps and we may want to fill them, almost like finding a puzzle piece that fits into the spot that we know there's something missing. But then there's the question of what shapes we are building and that I think drives an interesting question of are there some shapes that provide us with cognitive affordances and others that are maybe less useful to us? So it's possible, we think and we argue in the book, to create knowledge structures that are rigid, that are connected with a particular topology that doesn't allow for you to add anything more or to reshape or change the structure of your knowledge when presented with a new piece of information. So there's the argument that we may seek to build networks in our minds that are space filling to some degree, but not to such a degree that they can't change.

0:15:21.7 DB: So there could be this consistent trade off in our minds between filling in the holes and leaving some gaps to enable flexibility. So we probably have all had this experience where we are presented with a new piece of information, whether it be about a person or a political idea or even an emotion. And we're stopped in our tracks and we think, "Oh, I need to rethink everything I thought about this area or this person or this political endeavor." And so that capacity to notice that there's something that requires a reshaping of the knowledge we have in our minds is something that's really important for us to track and move in this ever changing world. And it's really only supported by building networks that have holes in them, enough gaps that they can be flexible.

0:16:16.1 PZ: There's a really interesting resonance for this in philosophy as well. Early on, we have the famous Socrates and he's well known not because he ever had answers or that he was looking for answers to fill information gaps. He was famous for his questions, which precisely undid the connections and made bigger and bigger and bigger gaps. He said his goal was to bring all of us into aporia, which is a Greek word that simply means I don't know where I am anymore. And I don't actually know what I think. I thought I knew what I think, but I don't know what I think about this thing. And so I think that maybe this early sense ancient practice of philosophy was to reignite, in a sense that flexibility that Dani's talking about with more gaps in our knowledge network structures to loosen and to create more flexibility in what we think about the world.

0:17:10.8 SC: Well, I think that's a great example because of course, as we know, Socrates got the death penalty. He was not uniformly applauded by his audience. And that's what I was going to ask. I mean, don't we have this feeling, especially in our modern polarized era, that a lot of people don't want to change their minds about things? They're satisfied with their view of the world. And when they get data or information that doesn't fit in, they have strategies for ignoring it or for compartmentalizing it.

0:17:39.0 PZ: I think there is definitely a tendency in this increasingly polarized world to resist the chances that are always offered us to reassess what it is that we know. I think that there's such a defensiveness and an insistence that I already know. And I'm on the right side of things. And I think that limits not only, obviously, our ability to get along with one another and build a political society that makes any sense, but it also limits our capacity to grow just as knowers and beers in the world together. And so I think it is important to recover a greater sense of flexibility in the ways that we build and rebuild and unbuild our knowledge networks.

0:18:24.0 DB: Yeah, and maybe just thinking through even further how the networks that we build could support that flexibility. One way that we've just been discussing is allowing there to be enough gaps, enough disconnected pieces, enough spaces in our minds that we could reconfigure things. So that's one way is just to leave a lot of spaces in the topology. A second way to be flexible is to actually break connections that we laid down earlier. And so actually, throughout much of the book, we focus on the building of knowledge and the laying down of connections. But at the very end of the book, we also underscore the importance of breaking connections that are no longer useful to us in our existing knowledge structures and in the way we interact with the world. So I want to highlight the fact that there are at least two approaches to this mental flexibility. One is leaving gaps in the topology, and the other one is breaking connections that we've had in the past.

0:19:26.2 SC: Do you have any good examples of the latter of the breaking of connections? It sounds like something that is difficult to intentionally do.

0:19:33.1 PZ: One example might just be returning to any political resistance movement. So the civil rights movement, for example. If there is a set of connections that we call white supremacy, for example, or some kind of white people in general are better for this and this and this and this, you need to break each of those connections. And the insistence of the civil rights movement is let's break those, right? Those associations of whiteness with power, with privilege, with greater education, greater intelligence, greater capacity to lead, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think any political resistance movement is doing that specific breaking of connections.

0:20:12.8 SC: So for example, there's an implicit connection in the mind of many people between whiteness and being a mermaid or being a hobbit. [laughter] And these don't necessarily need to be there. When you break them, people get upset, but maybe it's just part of the growing process.

0:20:26.9 PZ: Yeah. Or a scientist or a philosopher.

0:20:30.0 SC: Or a scientist or a philosopher.

0:20:32.3 PZ: Actually. And all of our fields suffer from some of these implicit connections or biases.

0:20:36.6 SC: Well, I don't know if they do this in philosophy, but scientists are very preoccupied with the question of what people think scientists look like. And so at Fermilab, they did an experiment where they had a bunch of school kids come in and draw cartoon images of scientists and then meet a bunch of scientists at Fermilab and also draw it afterward. And of course, before they were all pictures of Albert Einstein. And then afterward, they were much more diverse because that little bit of exposure to the information changed their minds.

0:21:06.2 PZ: That's amazing.

0:21:07.4 DB: That's a great study.

0:21:07.6 SC: You should do it with philosophers too. I don't know what the answers would look like though. But okay, let me just... The network, the topology stuff is great. And I think it's a very good angle or lens to look at curiosity with. But maybe I should also just give you both an opportunity to give the sales pitch for curiosity. The fact that it is... What is the major part of the sales pitch? Is it a normative one? That curiosity is something that is just a good that we should strive for? Or is there a more practical thing like curiosity is good for us? It makes us happier or better people?

0:21:42.0 PZ: I think one of the sales pitches is that curiosity is more complicated than we realized and that it shows up in more diverse ways than we expect. So one of the things that we press throughout the book is that curiosity has different styles, different ways of moving or different ways of making connections. So we talk about three styles in particular, the busy body, the hunter and the dancer. The busy body connects things quite loosely, is interested in all sorts of things. The hunter focuses more on something specific and makes tighter connections, more local connections. And then the dancer is someone who is more creative and imaginative in the connections they make when they're curious. And so what's interesting here for us is not that these are the end all be all of the styles of curiosity, but simply to turn our attention to styles of curiosity to say, you know what, the way that you think curiosity shows up or might mark you or not mark you is very limited right now. And we need a lot more attention to diversifying the shapes that curiosity makes in networks. And I think that the network angle is really helpful for that.

0:22:47.5 DB: Just to follow up on that, I think that a little bit of background on what we would commonly think of as a curious person is useful. So often, particularly in a classroom situation, we think of curious kids as the ones who will raise their hand frequently or who sit in the front row or who verbalize a lot of questions, right? But we can also all probably think of people in our lives that are very curious people, but who wouldn't be the one who sits in the front row, who wouldn't raise their hand, who wouldn't verbalize questions. Maybe they're very curious in their minds. Maybe they're a little bit shy. Maybe they're more introverted. Maybe they are curious by reading a lot of books instead of engaging in their curiosity in more social settings. So it is definitely true that we have in our minds this idea of what a curious person is, but we also have in the background of our minds, counter examples. And I think that the disconnect between those two is important. And that disconnect is something that our book is trying to fill to say that the reason that we have these counter examples in our minds is because there are many different ways to be curious, but how can we systematize that? How can we quantify it? How can we categorize styles of curiosity? How can we talk about what they do for us? All of that requires the network formulation and that mathematical language.

0:24:16.8 SC: And I like the idea of the different styles of curiosity because in some sense, there's an infinite number of things I don't know. So if I'm trying to learn more things, I have to choose some kind of strategy, right? Is that roughly how I should think about these different styles?

0:24:30.1 PZ: Yeah, I think the styles are definitely strategies that each of us can access. But I also think it might be that some of us tend in general to rely on one of the styles for most of our inquiry. So it does give us more of a personality angle on curiosity. And invites more of a let's get all hands in a more diverse group or team together who uses primarily different styles of curiosity. But then, yes, we also think that they're accessible to anyone and we can practice each style and be able to use it when we need it most.

0:25:04.2 DB: And I think that we can individually practice each style, but then also collectives of humans can practice the different styles together. I want to talk a little bit about how a single human can use these three, but then also Perry, maybe I'll turn it over to you to talk about collectives that might walk through these styles as they change society. So for an individual person, I'll say that first of all, when I am reading for personal pleasure, I think I'm much more of a busybody. I read pretty randomly for the one the books that are next to my bed are, I did... There's no through line. And that's fine. I like it that way. But when I engage in a research project, I think that I move through the different styles of curiosity.

0:25:45.7 DB: So at the very beginning of a research project in science, I will go to different conferences, sit in on symposia that may have nothing to do with my current area of research, read pretty eclectically across research articles. And then eventually I'll come up with an idea and I'll think, oh, maybe that's what I should focus on. And then I become much more hunter like and seek new pieces of information along a trail. And that may include doing experiments. It may include doing computational experiments. It may be developing theory. And then at the end of a research project, after I've discovered something or my team has discovered something, then we, I think, engage much more in the dancer like curiosity where we connect up one that what we have found to other areas of inquiry around it and say, this is how it could change how we think about that theory or it underscores this evidence over here or it could be used in society in this way. So I think the research process itself encourages us to move through these different styles sequentially. But Perry, maybe you can say just a couple words about the way that collectives can do this too, not just single individuals.

0:27:00.2 PZ: Yeah. So some of my work has been to analyze social justice movements or political resistance movements and to ask what role curiosity might have in those movements. In general, curiosity hasn't been thought as an important component of social justice movements or political resistance. It's been thought instead that resistors come in with the answers. They've already assessed this is what needs to change. This is the problem. And you don't need a whole lot of curiosity with that. You just have to convince people that you're right about that. But I think that's a sure sighted way of approaching the issue. I think that... Again, I'll return to the civil rights movement and say, for example, much of the early work of the civil rights movement involved gathering data about segregation, saying, where does it show up? How does it show up? Where are the stories? Again, where is the data? About housing, about education, about job and employment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

0:27:57.0 PZ: So gathering all that information, asking all of those questions, that's busy budding in a sense is broad investigation. But then it moves to saying, you know what, this is what we need to focus on. Okay, here are the specific policies that need to be changed, the specific people that need to be spoken with. So there's a much more... There's a hundering focus here to what questions must now be asked. And then I do think that regularly throughout civil rights movement, there are these moments of deep imagination about what kind of world it is that we'd want to create. That could be as simple as MLK's, I Have a Dream speech, but there's certainly many other examples. And that's the dancer move. The dancer curiosity has to also be a heartbeat of political resistance movements, because you don't always know when you get started, what kind of world you really want to make. So I just think that all styles, all three styles are also at work in this in this social milieu.

0:28:56.4 SC: I really like the idea of just a political movement being a learning process in some sense. That's very much not how it usually comes across, as you said, right? Like the existence of a political movement in my mind more or less presumes we know what the goals are, maybe we know what the strategies are. But you're you're giving a different slant to how we might think about that.

0:29:18.6 PZ: Yeah, and I think it's more true to life, really.

0:29:21.1 SC: But it's not explicit, I guess, like maybe things would be better if political movements explicitly acknowledged we have things to learn, right?

0:29:29.9 PZ: Sure, sure. Yeah.

0:29:32.5 SC: [laughter] And it sounds like you're not valorizing any of the three kinds of curiosity over the others. But maybe implicitly or explicitly, some people do, right? I think Plutarch, you mentioned as someone who basically back in the day said not in these words, but don't be a busybody, be a hunter, be focused on your one area. And I guess we maybe all agree that that attitude lingers on in modern day academia.

0:30:03.8 PZ: Absolutely. Yeah, we've certainly had these sorts of experiences, focus, stop being so interdisciplinary and pulling your projects from all over the place, settle down. When are you going to settle down?

0:30:14.8 SC: I just retweeted a quote from William James. I think it was William James. Oh, my goodness, I'm going to forget who it was. But anyway, one of his colleagues told him... Uprated him for writing a paper that was not in his area. And he says, "I am not a donkey. I do not have a field."

[laughter]

0:30:33.8 DB: I love that. Wow.

0:30:35.3 SC: That was a great comeback. Yes. But presumably, if that attitude exists, there must be some reason for it. Is there some reason to be more hunter like? Even if we're skipping around from place to place at the start, like Dani said, at some point, you got to roll up your sleeves and focus. And that's the hunter curiosity.

0:31:00.1 DB: Yeah, I sometimes wonder if it has to do with legibility. So because we are human and we live in a social world, our work is more legible to others if it uses the particular jargon of a field and the methods that are valued in that field and tackles questions that are already known to exist in that field. As soon as we connect to this history of a field, then our work becomes more legible. It has a clear audience. We can communicate it clearly to that audience. That audience understands us. And so there's something... There is a social benefit, I think to being more hunter like. I think what's challenging when you become... When you illustrate this more busybody like approach or the dancer like approach is that people are... You may be using different terms than what a field typically uses. You may pull in a method from philosophy and have it speak to something in science. And so people don't know how to even evaluate it. And so that it requires a lot more effort from the reader or the listener or the audience to understand and assess. And yeah, so I feel like communication and legibility are factors that I think push us towards the more hunter like approach. But I don't know, Perry, what do you think?

0:32:30.2 PZ: I think it's about what we value. Right? And I think that there could be ways of valuing sharing stories, more of a storytelling culture and sharing stories in a way that allows us to care for one another and to connect with one another that would value the busybody more, for example. Or we could have a culture that was much more interested in developing new ideas than in maintaining what it is and how it is that we've approached certain questions. So I think the current academic preference for hunting is reflective of a particular academic culture, but also a larger sort of, especially Western culture. And I do think there are other academic enclaves in other parts of the world that do function differently and value, for example, a more storytelling based approach to research that might really lift up something like the busybody.

0:33:25.4 SC: I will just own my embarrassment. I just looked up. I think Max Weber, who had the donkey quote, not William James. I don't know why my brain would have confused those two people. They don't have a lot to do with each other. But okay, so, yeah, there are choices that we make in academia or whatever to valorize certain kinds of curiosity. They're not... I think what you're saying is they're not built in, like there's sort of a maybe not a conscious choice, but a choice we could have made differently. There's also people who are just anti curiosity, either out loud or quietly. And I guess Augustine, St. Augustine is the example that you brought up of someone who's just like, oh, I have all this curiosity. It's terrible. God must be very mad at me.

[laughter]

0:34:09.5 PZ: Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of that in the history of Western thought.

0:34:13.6 SC: So how do we steel man that? What is the argument for not being curious? What is the... There has to be, again, some reason why people would think something like that.

0:34:23.1 PZ: Well, in that case, I think one of the reasons for the very long tradition of being against curiosity in the Western intellectual tradition is that curiosity was conceived as a very self-directed individual interest practice and one that didn't take into account that God might want you to know something different. So it's really that it comes from us, the curiosity comes from us and serves us, that it felt selfish and proud in an old way. And that's part of why it was dismissed in favor of wonder, for example, because wonder is much more capable of a reverence in knowing. And so that was prized instead. But then there's a really interesting moment where early modern science starts, where the two of them flip and wonder becomes the thing that's less supported because it's associated with simple thoughts and not a really careful, attentive, educated, erudite approach to things, which would require curiosity. That's weird why things like that flip.

0:35:32.9 SC: Well, it's very interesting to me because the dichotomy I've always thought about myself is not curiosity versus wonder, but awe versus wonder. And I come down on the other side, I come down the pro wonder side, awe seems to be A-W-E, more like just standing silently contemplating this amazing thing, whereas wonder is more like I wonder why? Wonder has a connotation of curiosity to me a little bit. Maybe that's just because the English words don't map on exactly to the concepts we're talking about.

0:36:05.8 PZ: Yeah, it really depends on the moment we're discussing in the history, what the term wonder... What connotations the term wonder had. And I think it's interesting to ask today what connotations the term wonder has, and why isn't wonder, for example, as everywhere, as ubiquitous as curiosity is, why isn't wonder in all of our higher education vision statements? Why not? What does that say about the configuration of our approach to knowledge these days?

0:36:36.9 SC: Well, it does seem like just with the current zeitgeist, coming out anti-curiosity would not be very popular. But I think you do make the case that that's the lip service, but there are certain types of curiosity which are discouraged or either explicitly discouraged or frowned upon in some way. Is it easy to draw or possible to draw a line between okay, curiosity and naughty curiosity that we should try to resist?

0:37:05.0 PZ: Dani, it looks like you are ready for that question.

[laughter]

0:37:10.6 DB: Well, actually, I was thinking about your construction of the spectacle curiosity. So I was nodding because I had that piece in mind.

0:37:20.1 PZ: Yeah, so in my other work, I talk about, again, formations of curiosity that are troubling and the spectacle erasure formation is something I talk about. This is a hyphenated term. This approach to people or subjects where you spectacularize, you celebrate or lift up in some way, hey, this is a weird, interesting curio of some kind. But even in that lifting up, you're essentially erasing the meaning and the context of that object or that person or that culture. So that's certainly one of the more troubling formations, I think, of curiosity that have been around for a long time.

0:37:56.0 SC: So curiosity as almost dehumanizing or something like a way of treating a person or an idea or a culture as an object of curiosity, but nevertheless an object rather than a subject.

0:38:12.4 PZ: Yeah, exactly.

0:38:13.7 SC: See, I've taken philosophy classes, you can't get this stuff past me.

[laughter]

0:38:17.3 SC: Yeah, that does make perfect sense. But there's also, I guess, what I was aiming at, that seems like a perfectly legitimate worry about curiosity, but there are people out there banning books and not letting people explore different things. There's also a sort of... I don't want to just dismiss it out of hand, but there's also a human resistance to being curious too far in some sense or about things that you shouldn't know about.

0:38:50.5 PZ: Yeah, and I think this returns us in some sense to our conversation about network flexibility or how networks get stuck. I think part of the book banning process is a network getting stuck and unable to flexibly respond to how knowledge is changing and is changing often in response to marginalized groups of folks who are gaining some foothold and voice. That's one of the ways I would approach that.

0:39:18.0 SC: Well, I like that because I wanted to move... I wanted to go a little bit in more detail on Dani's side about what's happening literally in the brain because we have networks of ideas and that sounds a little abstract, but the brain is literally a network of neurons talking to each other, right? 86 billion of them. And there's structure there. And I guess one of the very cool things that I think I learned for the first time from one of your talks is that not only do the neurons group together within the brain, like there's a whole bunch of neurons working together on the same problem, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, an individual neuron over the lifetime of a person might switch groups. It might be used for one purpose early on and then be used for a totally different purpose later on. Is that right?

0:40:04.7 DB: Yes. Yes. So there's absolutely a flexibility in the function that particular neural units might perform over time. And that flexibility is useful. It is predictive of how much somebody will learn over time. It's also correlated with how cognitively flexible we are. So how easy it is for us to change from one kind of cognitive process to another kind of cognitive process. So cognitive flexibility, you can think of as how easy is it to switch from doing math homework to talking to my grandmother. So these are wildly different cognitive processes. Some people find that transition really difficult. Other people find it easier. And that degree of ease is called cognitive flexibility. So that cognitive flexibility is supported by a neural flexibility, which is how independent neural units in the brain change which other neural units they're communicating with and why, what they're communicating. Yeah. So that neural flexibility is really key, I think, to understanding how we change and learn over time.

0:41:22.8 SC: There's now these obvious hypothesis that our neural flexibility goes away as we get older. Is that something that the data could speak to?

0:41:30.5 DB: That's a really interesting question. We have studied neural flexibility in young adults and childhood life scales, but not at the older age range. So that's something that's an interesting open question is whether in very late life neural flexibility is altered. We don't know. But I think what's interesting is that there is a suggestion that while there may be a change in both neural and cognitive flexibility in late life, there may also be a strengthening of other kinds of cognitive functions and, by extension, other kinds of curiosity that may be present in late life in comparison to early life. And that's something that I think we're really excited to dig into more deeply in the future.

0:42:21.6 SC: And the ideas that we're learning and are curious about, as you point out, they have a network structure of their own, and our brains have a network structure. Are they analogous, mirrored, or are they just both there doing separate things?

0:42:36.3 DB: Well, they're similar in their topology in the sense that both the network structure of the ideas and the network structure of the brain, they both have a small world organization. They're not perfectly rectangular or triangular. They're also not perfectly random. They have interesting intermediate structures. So that's definitely the case. The other important correspondence is that there are particular pieces of the brain that are coding for the network relations in the world around us. So there's this piece of the brain called the hippocampal-entorhinal system. It's a mouthful. Which when we are presented with information, will code what the pieces of information are and then also which pieces are connected and by how distant they're connected. So it codes connection versus non-connection and it codes the distance of the connection. And this hippocampal-entorhinal system creates these cognitive maps or conceptual maps. And they're network maps. They're maps of our world in this connective pattern. So there is an explicit piece of the brain that's actually helping us to understand the network organization of our world.

0:43:54.9 SC: The brain is very smart. I'm always impressed with the idea of the brain, what it can do. And just to drive that home, I love the example that I think I heard you give once, maybe even in the book I forget, but when you're talking to somebody and you're trying to explain to them a bunch of ideas, the linear nature of time means that the ideas are going to come in some order. But what you want is to give a whole network of ideas that are connected to each other in some way. And there is some cooperation between the giver of the information and the receiver of the information to basically reconstruct that network even though the actual transmission is just linear.

0:44:33.3 DB: Yes, exactly. Yeah. So when we communicate, we communicate in a line. I can only say one word in front of the next and same with you. But what we're actually trying to communicate to one another are whole structures of knowledge. And the question is, how do we do that? What pieces of the brain are important for that?

0:44:49.6 SC: Right. We're all in society, right? We live in a society, as someone famously once said. And this is, I guess, where Perry's work comes in more. It feeds back what we choose to learn and be curious about. We just talked a little bit about how a political movement can be learning, but also what we want to learn is affected by the politics, but affected by what society is telling us, right?

0:45:14.1 PZ: Absolutely. And this is part of... This is what... One of the angles is really interesting for me is to think about what kind of knowledge networks we gain simply by being raised in a particular family in a particular location, in particular social structure and culture, et cetera, et cetera. And we just imbibe versus the kind of knowledge structures that we are actively building on a day in and day out basis. And what might be the relationship between the two? I think you might, at first, think that the network structures of knowledge that we imbibe from our surroundings have all of these biases. And maybe I can resist those by building my own knowledge network. But I don't think it's quite that simple. And certainly what we know from the environment's effect on our own brain function, even when I am leading my own inquiry, I can bring in and practice and further certain biases as well. But it is interesting that the one is active and the other is more passive. And I think learning happens in both ways.

0:46:20.7 SC: And on the active side, society is impacting us just by being around us and being where we live. But sometimes it actively polices our curiosity and tells us not to go there. And we already mentioned the book burning. But are there more like subtle microaggression nudges kind of ways in which being curious about certain things is discouraged by the people around us?

0:46:44.7 PZ: Sure. I think maybe not so subtle is, for example, the work to suspend critical race theory or learning racial histories of the US. The very, very long fights to try to get LGBT history into K through 12 schools. These are policy level arguments about what people should and shouldn't know or should and shouldn't be curious about. But I think on an everyday level, sure, there's clearly certain things that are valued and you may be celebrated for being curious about those things. And then there are other things that are peripheral in some sense. It could be because of a relationship to a marginalized group. It could be for other reasons that you might be really curious about, but no one else is really that curious about. And you might be therefore discouraged or at least not like celebrated for the fact that you're curious about that thing. And it's interesting to think about the history of science, I think, in this respect, because certainly there have been questions that have driven certain scientists and philosophers as well. But to say, I really want to know this and their surrounding culture at the time.

0:47:48.6 PZ: That's a really ridiculous question. What are you wasting your time on? And they don't get funding, that's a structure that supports or doesn't support certain kinds of questions and curiosities. Where is the funding? Where are the collaborators? Where are the publishers? Lots of older folks a couple hundred years ago couldn't get their pieces published, even if they're groundbreaking philosophy or science. So I think it's all around us, the policing of curiosity.

0:48:18.9 DB: I think it also happens even at the undergraduate level too. So when kids are younger... Well, and in classrooms as well. But the example I wanted to bring up is of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who's an indigenous scholar of Botany, and she recounts going to undergraduate for an undergraduate degree in Botany and saying that what she wanted to do was to understand why goldenrod and asters when they exist in a field together are so beautiful. And her professors were like, that's not a question that we ask in this field. [laughter] And she continued to follow that and did a lot of work at the intersection of understanding plants, our perception of plants, our valuation of plants, and how that's different among cultures and how a wonderful career has inspired so many people across the world. But again, it was started by a question that was dismissed out of hand as a relevant question.

0:49:23.7 SC: But this gets us into very tricky territory. And I say that in a very sincere way that I don't know how to think about these things because the other side of the political spectrum is using very similar rhetoric to say that their ideas are being shut down by the intolerant people on the other side. All they want to do is say that maybe white people are smarter than black people and they don't get to do that without being criticized. And are there substantive lines to be drawn between what it's worth being curious about and not, or should we just say that everybody should be curious about everything, but we should just be ready to accept whatever it is that we learn?

0:50:03.7 PZ: Yeah, I think for us, we're committed to thinking about supporting curiosities that create more support for more diverse ways of thinking about the world, especially in response to histories that have excluded those knowledges. And that attachment to histories is really important because then we can talk about things like the enslavement of African people in the US, right? We can talk about the genocide of indigenous people in the US. We can talk about the laws that have been long standing that have penalized and criminalized LGBT life. So I think in relationship to history and the lives that have not been able to live, first of all, and that deserve to have more of a place in our schemas of belonging and of knowing, that's the kind of curiosity that we want to support.

0:51:00.7 SC: I guess one worry is that the lens of curiosity doesn't distinguish between ideas that maybe have been discredited and ideas that maybe have been suppressed for political reasons, right? And I want to be pro-curiosity. I'm very pro-free speech, if some crazy campus group wants to have some crazy speaker on campus and they're not forcing me to go, I'm very much in favor of letting them go. But I don't want to respect it either. I don't want to say like that should be taught in a classroom or something like that. So do we need... I guess, maybe the question is, do we need more than just a pro-curiosity attitude to help us distinguish which ideas are worth delving into and which we've moved beyond by now?

0:51:48.0 PZ: Yeah, something I argue in my first book on curiosity, Curiosity and Power, is that curiosity needs companions. So this is my answer to that question. Curiosity needs companions. It needs to be alongside of other values and investments that guide our inquiries together.

0:52:02.0 DB: Yeah, and I think going back to an earlier part of our conversation, we need a curiosity that is not objectifying when what we're curious about is not an object, right? So I think that ensuring that we are curious and acknowledge and respect the subjectivity of those around us is really key. And in a sense, our focus in the book on curiosity as connection and that we push that connection to me, not just between ideas but also between people requires or brings in an ethics of interaction between humans that is central to what curiosity for us is doing and can do.

0:52:48.4 SC: I had Paul Bloom on the podcast a while back. I don't know if you know his work. He wrote a book... He's a psychologist, he wrote a book against empathy. And I'm a pro-empathy kind of guy. So we disagreed, but his attitude, his argument, if I can try to repeat it and I'll hear what you have to say about it, is he contrasts, roughly speaking, empathy to rationality. He says, when we're judging people, whether we're on a jury in a court or we're trying to set up society, empathy sounds good, but it's a lot more easy to be empathetic to people like us than to be empathetic with people very, very different. So he prefers that we just aim to be objective and rational. Whereas my argument was, well, just like empathy isn't always easy, rationality isn't always easy either. And if you think you're being rational but not thinking about how other people would view the problem, you can fool yourself into thinking that your rationality is a little bit better than it is. I'm not sure where I'm going with that, but it sounds like you want to couple curiosity with empathy in an interesting way.

0:53:53.3 DB: Yeah, absolutely. I think that when you are... I think that maybe a counter I would have to empathy is easier to have toward people who are like us, is that we need to be more curious about the experiences and beliefs of people who are not like us so that we can also have empathy for them. I would not say therefore let's remove empathy. I would say no, we need empathy for lots of different kinds of experiences, but that requires a curiosity of how those individuals got to that place and why they think that way, et cetera.

0:54:27.1 PZ: Yeah, I was just going to say that the contrast between empathy and rationality there is one I don't particularly buy because I think that rationality has been shown repeatedly to have inbuilt biases. Rationality is simply, if I have a number of assumptions and a set of information, I can make sense of that logically from the beginning to the end, but maybe the information that you have is biased. Maybe the relationships between the data have been constructed in a biased way. Well, you can be as rational as you want on walking that network and can still be making a bad move or misunderstanding the situation. I don't see rationality as something that gets us out of whatever the problems of empathy or subjectivity would be.

0:55:15.0 SC: Okay, I think I get that. I hope I did a good job of repeating Paul Bloom's argument rather than caricaturing it, but that was a useful response. As we're winding up, let's give some actionable take home messages to our listeners out there. I guess before we do that, was there a worry among your publishers or your faculties that what you were writing was really just a self-help book or a raw, raw learning new things is fun book that you have to climb uphill against that kind of resistance?

0:55:47.6 PZ: No, I think the book itself is so richly written and so steeped with our own research, but also with so much scholarship and literatures of centuries. No one was worried that it's a light fluff thing. [laughter] I don't think that you can read it. In that sense, I don't think you can read it easily. I think the book itself demands that you take it slow. There's going to be a lot of stuff you're unfamiliar with no matter what angle you're coming at the book from. We're hoping that that's exciting, Dani.

0:56:17.8 DB: Yeah, absolutely. I think what we are offering is a conceptual change related to our experience as humans. It's not a self-help book. It's a question of how do we even make sense of the way that we think and the way that we think with one another. I think that is a very different style or genre.

0:56:44.4 SC: Well, the demandingness of the book raises its own interesting question, which is curiosity seems so easy, but satisfying one's curiosity can often be hard. There's an effort involved. And I know that personally, sometimes I just don't have it in me. I just want something easy and fluffy. There is an interplay between what we want to learn and the effort we're willing to put into it, which I come across because my own book that just came out has a lot of equations in it. It asks the reader to sit through the equations and I have to convince them it's worth the effort.

0:57:18.6 PZ: Dani, this reminds me of your stories of effortful walks and mentors.

0:57:25.9 SC: What's that?

0:57:26.8 DB: Oh, yeah. [laughter] I think that books are... Your book and our book, when readers come with us on that journey, it's as if they're walking with us and they're walking through the ideas. It's as if they're walking through a network. The question is, each of us are... What kinds of walks do we like to take and with whom? Are we willing to take the hard walks or do we want the gentler walks? The answer is maybe we want both, but I vividly remember our grandmother taking us hiking when we were probably three or four. And she loved this path that felt as a three or four-year-old as if it was straight up. It was so steep. Maybe it was like, I don't know, 100 yards. I don't know how long it was, but we would beg for a snack break halfway up because it was that strenuous. And we loved hiking with her, but I remember feeling that that was so challenging and feeling so relieved that we were allowed to have a snack break. And we would pack very carefully before this hike because of the strenuousness.

0:58:38.6 DB: Anyway, it makes me think more generally about the kind of mentors that we have in our lives, whether scholarly mentors or personal mentors that may show us paths of mind, that may show us different styles of curiosity, that may take more or less effort from us. And as we expose ourselves to those different influences, we can choose which is the style of curiosity that I want to model myself after, which is the path I really want to take with you as an author of the book. I love the fact that we have choices among our friends and colleagues.

0:59:15.6 SC: Well, this goes to the advice question. I know that giving advice is often a weird and useless thing, but we've all been advisors to students, right? It's one thing to say, you've given examples, and I've seen examples in my own work of bad advice being given to students because they were curious about some question. They were told, no, that's not the kind of question that we answer. That's not interesting. That's not academic. It's not intellectual, scholarly, whatever. But I'd like to still think that some questions aren't as good as some other questions. I guess part of the advice question, how do we decide between the right directions to let our curiosity go in and where we're just being a little bit self-indulgent?

[laughter]

1:00:01.9 DB: That's interesting. It reminds me of this class that I'm teaching right now to undergraduates at Penn and it's on... What I'm trying to do is to say that when we ask questions, we are engaging in a movement of the mind. And the question for the student is, what mental movement is that? Is it a slide? Is it a step? Are you flying with imagination? And in describing the kind of movement you're making with your mind, you can then say, is that movement useful for this research project that we're on right now? And sometimes the answer might be yes, and sometimes the answer might be no. But at least understanding the mental movement and putting words to it can help both the mentor and the student, I think, evaluate the utility.

1:00:49.4 PZ: And it's really important too, if you decide that the movement is not particularly useful for the project at hand to not immediately then say it's value-less. We do really want to encourage in ourselves and in our students to practice some curiosities that are not... Is clear what the cash out is. And it's often those things that end up being the most insightful, most exciting projects eventually, but they just need their own time.

1:01:16.9 SC: Maybe the best thing an advisor can do is to not crush the spirit of the student they're trying to advise. Or to put it in a more constructive way, which I think you did in the book, maybe it was with reference to young kids, but I think graduate students also works or maybe even colleagues, different people are going to be curious in different ways and acknowledging what that is and helping them develop that is more your job than helping them change into a different kind of researcher.

1:01:47.8 PZ: Exactly. Yes.

1:01:48.5 SC: Any advice on how to do that before we go?

[laughter]

1:01:52.5 DB: Just to be a little bit more curious about them. So I think channeling a little bit of social curiosity is important, trying to understand where it is their mind is moving and how.

1:02:00.8 SC: That makes perfect sense. So Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:02:06.9 DB: Thank you.

1:02:08.9 PZ: Thanks for having us.

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