Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

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This book introduced me to the concept of NFC (Need for Cognition), which is one I recognize and cherish in myself. Just a few weeks ago, as I was skimming through my day with my different interests (diversive-me), I suddenly felt the unsatisfied feeling of not biting deep enough. I was popcorning my day away. And then, I delved into a lecture. Mmmm. Barbara Benedict is a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and a scholar of the eighteenth century who spent years studying the attitude about curiosity during that period, as scientific inquiry sought to overtake religion as the way we understand the world.

Turn puzzles into mysteries. Mystery vs puzzle. A puzzle haa a clear solution but mystery can sustain long term curiosity. But then he began his long focus on baby studies. Many of the studies themselves were fine, even enjoyable, but by the time he got to attachment theory, I felt like, "Come on already." At that point, I was still feeling relatively positive. That was until his anti tech rhetoric ruined the entire book for me. I still enjoy that he wrote about curiosity, and I would certainly read another book about curiosity from a different author, but it's unlikely I would ever read another book by this author. Labrador retrievers are charmingly curious. Porpoises are playfully, mischievously curious. A two-year-old going through the kitchen cabinets is exuberantly curious—and delighted at the noisy entertainment value of her curiosity. Every person who types a query into Google’s search engine and presses ENTER is curious about something—and that happens 4 million times a minute, every minute of every day. 5Monstrous births, for example. If there were births of deformed horses or cattle, or of course people, they were seen as portents that happened because God was trying to tell us something, or warn us in the same way that strange weather or comets were seen as warnings. It’s interesting how that concept evolved into seeing them as natural phenomena as well – that they didn’t represent God’s hand but did nevertheless represent a deviation from natural laws. While some educational theorists have argued that filling children with facts stifles creativity (it's the basic message of TED Talks' most popular video, by Sir Ken Robinson), neuroscience has demonstrated that true creativity depends on being able to make novel associations among many different facts and concepts, and that a knowledge-based education is critical for that. I never made a movie about F. Lee Bailey, of course, although his life is certainly rich enough for one. I didn’t even make a movie about lawyers until twenty years later, when I did Liar Liar, with Jim Carrey, about what happens to a lawyer who is forced to tell nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours straight.

Curiosity is recursive. It builds upon itself. If you want to become a more curious person, you need to start somewhere, slowly, and recognize that the more curiosities you pursue, the more curious you will become over time. I met with him on Friday at 3 p.m. He hired me at 3:15. And I started work at Warner Bros. the next Monday. The problem for this tradition of magic is that all of the stuff in it which was of any value – ideas of occult forces that fed into, for example, Newton’s conception of gravity or early studies of magnetism – eventually became assimilated into science. What was left was the folk traditions that have always existed, that really are pure superstition. So if you talk about the occult now, it is clearly discredited. Any value in that kind of thinking had long since transferred itself onto science, and we’re just left with the residue. But there’s a continuity between those early ideas about magic which goes through Rosicrucianism and eventually comes out in Mormonism in the United States. Do you remember when you were young and put everything you touched in your mouth? Endlessly annoyed the living hell out of every adult within earshot with a barrage of ‘but whys’? And flat out just refused to accept, ‘because I said so”, as a suitable or worthy response. Well Ian Leslie, the author of Curious - The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, is hoping you have not left that precocious and inquisitive little bugger behind. I was curious about who was on the lot and who was working with whom. This was during the time when I made myself meet someone new in show business every single day. I liked to shout down from my window at the people walking by—Howard Koch, who cowrote Casablanca; Michael Eisner, who would become CEO of Disney; and Barry Diller, who was CEO of Paramount and Michael Eisner’s boss.You can see some of that in T-Rex’s book choices. She’s got quite the collection. And this is the thing about books. It’s like leaping across lily pads. You might find one you like and from there you discover another and then maybe something in that leads you to one that’s a bit different. A journey of discovery without even setting foot outside your house. There’s just so much to learn and it’s all made so accessible by the clear, punchy writing and stunning artwork that we’re very much spoiled by when it comes to children’s books. Though I should add - not yet accessible enough in a world where not every child owns a book or has access to a library. Imagine if they did - imagine the great equalisers that books could one day be. Transporting us to other places I went right to the telephone, dialed 411, 2 and asked for the main number at Warner Bros.—I still remember it, 954-6000. 3 His basic contention is that curiosity is what has driven scientific and cultural advancement, and that that this powerful impulse in humans may be under threat by the Internet and certain ill-founded educational philosophies.