Get Curious

Why did “curiosity kill the cat”?

Curious? It didn’t. The phrase started out in Shakespearean times as “care killed the cat”, meaning excessive fretting and worry is actually what finished off the feline.

Today we might argue that the mutation “curiosity killed the cat”, i.e. don’t poke your nose into other people’s affairs, gives curiosity a bad name.

After all, casting our worries aside and embracing exploration of the unknown is sometimes the best way to move forward. Curiosity starts at the end of our comfort zone, and it’s never killed any cats.

Curiosity is innate. Watch it in action by going on a walk with a young child. They will never stick to the path. They’ll zig-zag from the path to the grass and back before going to have a look at what’s over the other side, trying to balance on the low wall that runs alongside the path, picking up a handful of pointy sticks and stopping to observe a funny-shaped leaf or a cool bug.

Adults trail behind them, desperately clinging to the path and barking instructions to steer them back on-course: “come back to the path… don’t run over there… get down from that wall… put that bug down.” It’s starting to sound a lot more like “care killed the cat” after all.

What part of adulthood made us shift our mission from “explore everything” to “stick to the path most trodden”? And is it really a route to happiness and success?

It’s time to stop fearing curiosity and to start indulging it.

Why should we be curious?

The structures we put in place in our daily lives (rules, routines, deadlines) are enemies of curiosity. As we shift from curious children to accepting adults we forget to question things and to find different ways of working. And yet those who do, thrive.

Albert Einstein explained “I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious.” And a University of California study shows Einstein’s curiosity may indeed have been his secret weapon.

They proved that curiosity fuels our ability to learn and retain new knowledge. The team measured brain activity whilst random facts were read to participants. They found that when participants were highly curious about a fact, they were almost one third more likely to recall it.

Where recall was higher, the researchers also saw greater activity in the areas of the brain that release dopamine. In short, we get a kick out of curiosity and our brain uses it to more effectively absorb new information.

Curiosity isn’t just about enthusiastically burying our heads in books. It’s also a catalyst for building relationships. Todd Kashdan, author of The Art of Insubordination, ran a study where strangers asked each other personal questions, and those who appeared more curious about the exchange received higher “attractiveness” and “closeness” ratings than their counterparts. A very different story from the curious cat with a reputation of poking its nose into other people’s business.

Unsurprisingly, curiosity’s powerful effect on strangers is only magnified when we show curiosity in our daily interactions at work. A Harvard Business Review study found that curiosity helps groups not only to get along and communicate more openly but also to make fewer errors in their decisions and to foster a greater culture of innovation with less conflict and healthy levels of intellectual friction.

Kashdan explains that greater curiosity can also make people more open to hearing others’ opinions, even if they differ from their own. Perhaps election strategists are missing a trick — successfully piquing voters’ curiosity might be the key to changing their minds.

This is all very well if we’ve retained abundant levels of curiosity from childhood, but what do we do if we feel our curiosity fading? How do we get it back?

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Regain long-lost curiosity

If you’ve read up until this point because you want to know how to get your long-lost curiosity back… you’re curious about something! And according to Dr Abigail Hsiung you’ve also been more patient than other readers, thanks to your curiosity. Her study explains that the more curious we are, the more we’re willing to wait for the “aha!” moment we crave.

Luckily the wait is almost over. Read on to rediscover your inner set of “why?” questions and reignite that little spark of curiosity.

Discover what you don’t know

Write a list of twenty questions you don’t know the answer to — on topics you know lots or absolutely nothing about. Then take a moment to star any of them that intrigue you.

See what themes emerge for you — can any be connected into broader topics that you’d like to learn more about? Maybe there are some you’re itching to explore right away.

Make it personal

We’re bombarded with so much information day-to-day, it’s impossible to absorb it all. Our brain’s natural filter is “what’s relevant to me?”

So if we know we want to get curious about a topic, we need to remind our brains that this topic will in some way affect our lives. Make the link explicit, and watch yourself pay greater attention and retain the information for longer.

Research by cognitive scientist Rachit Dubey shows that reminding people how useful the new information will be to them will boost their curiosity when it’s lagging. A good tip to have in your back pocket if you’ve ever given a talk to an audience glued to their phones.

Have a “magic 8 ball moment”

Sometimes as adults, we suppress our curiosity because we are worried we will ask “stupid questions”. Part of growing up is realising it’s not appropriate to interrupt your boss repeatedly with “Why? But why?” or interrupting a friend mid-sentence with “why is the sky blue?”

Remember the magic 8 ball? Shake it, and it will answer any question you have…

In the age of the internet, the magic 8 ball has been replaced by its far more effective distant cousin: generative AI. Take five minutes to use ChatGPT or equivalent as a metaphorical magic 8 ball and ask it whatever stupid questions you desire. Most importantly, get curious about the answers by lending a critical eye — are they right? Is there another point of view here? What’s missing?

It can be tempting to label such moments as procrastination, when in fact they’re keeping our curiosity alive and filling us with positive emotions.

Curious cats aren’t just killing it at work, they’re also happier, living life to the full. Whether it’s staring at a funny-shaped leaf on a walk or asking yourself about the colour of the sky, take a moment today to get curious.

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