Curiosity, it's in your fabric.

Hello greetings,

I’m gonna start this off by asking you a question. “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” Who said this?

In the marketing world, it is very common and I am sure you have come across this before but nevertheless, a quite well known phenomenon to actually sell something is to first create a problem and then sell the solution to the problem.

Here is me creating a problem for your life, okay but not really, I am not gonna make your life harder than it already might be.

But here it is the problem - Interests, the human drive to learn and know things, knowledge, being intrigued by the innumerable amount of topics, subjects, the whole ball game. And as you would have guessed the solution is me channeling my inner spazz and rambler to give you guys more insight on these. :)

Across the last couple of months and honestly 20 years of my life, I mean after my brain developed and I started understanding and realising what was going on in life, I started developing interests and growing fonder of learning and acquiring knowledge of the most random things, how music was progressed from the first note to the last, how the sounds were arranged together in a track for it to feel all over my body, reading articles about philosophers like Plato, Alan watts etc, reading fun-loving novels by John Green, why and how paintings, drawings evoked a feeling inside me, why staring at and reading into art was a fun experience, how I resonated with authors and poets that didn’t even know how I was feeling but put it down so beautifully and in a well-versed manner and the works, you get it.

I’m sure at least a few people viewing this would agree with the next statement I make or at least mildly believe it, why are humans so curious? Why are we so curious? Why do we strive to learn things? 3AM at night why does my brain want to understand how doors close and open? How is cheese made..

Well, on a serious level it has to do with evolution!! Yes, I’m talking about my homeboy Darwin’s theory of evolution kinda, how we went from monkeys to whatever was in between to the final homo sapien.

Evolution rewarded our ancestors for curiosity. Those who were curious were more likely to learn about new places to get food, new dangers, new ideas for farming, new ways to use a tool, all sorts of learnable things.

When hard times came, the curious were more likely to survive. So they became our ancestors, not those who died.

So yes, you might not believe it but you do have some hope, you can learn things, it’s pretty much confirmed.

But yes, we are all born with curiosity in fact an MRI scan of the human brain shows that we exhibit two main kinds of curiosity -

1. Perceptual Curiosity - This is what we feel when we see something that surprises or puzzles us or doesn’t match up with something we thought we knew. It is that itch in your brain when you are for example amongst a group of people talking about something you don’t know much about.
   

2. Epistemic Curiosity - This is our love of knowledge, our desire to learn new things. Also my personal favourite if I had to choose from these two hahah.

In fact in a study done in a lab by Matthias Gruber, shows that curiosity activates the same area of the brain that is commonly associated with a reward, in simpler terms, the same feeling that is evoked when you receive a paycheque, or that blueberry cheesecake that you were eyeing at the cafe, is evoked when you are curious about something and move towards imbibing more knowledge about it!

Moving on, another proven outcome of this study was that humans tend to learn better when their curiosity is sparked. Now that we have confirmed that curiosity is in our fabric, and it definitely plays a major factor in learning effectively, why don't you comment below, message me or ask yourself, what makes you curious? Don't you think, curiosity kills the cat, but awakens the human?

I’d like to conclude this short entry with a quote by Astrophysicist Mario Livio “Curiosity is the best remedy for fear,”

Also, if you’re still wondering who said “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”

It was Albert Einstein.