Brilliant Twins Delve Into Curiosity
I must acknowledge straightaway that I was bowled over by this book. As someone who likes to describe myself as “curious”, I thought I knew what curiosity meant. And more significantly, what it felt like. Reading this book was to shift that.
About Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett
To begin with, a brief note about the authors. They are twins. Perry Zurn is a Professor of Philosophy at the American University while Dani S. Bassett is a Professor at the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. And just to make this more daunting, Bassett teaches physics and astronomy, neurology and psychiatry besides engineering. The book, as they put it, is “the product of one upbringing seen through the eyes of two genders.”
The work straddles not just gender, but also disciplines. One’s a humanist scholar, the other a scientist. But that would be merely scratching the surface of their deep interdisciplinary learnings, with each complementing the other while also provoking new directions in thought. They were raised with nine other siblings, all of whom were homeschooled.
Permitted from childhood to pursue any topic that caught their fancy, they were accustomed to having their minds lead the way. “Surrounded by more than a thousand books,” the kids were encouraged to determine what they wanted to learn each day. And to then figure out how they would learn the subject of interest.
Led by their mother, they were granted the autonomy to explore anything at all. There was “epistemic freedom,” no doubt, but a curiously illiberal outlook when constructing gender roles. Girls were expected to morph into wives and mothers, boys were urged to master trades and become breadwinners.
Of course, the twins were not going to buy into that narrow vision. Why would they? The very curiosity that drove their learning would also fuel their dissent.
Limits of Curiosity
When studying an abstract quality like curiosity, you realize soon enough that to remain curious is a privilege. After all, curiosity is also curtailed by your socioeconomic standing, your caste, race, gender and so on. Like any thrust for freedom, “curiosity is policed everywhere.”
But even in the best colleges, as the author put it, curiosity is confined in other ways: “[Scholars] are hired most often when their work falls into a prespecified space: that of a department, a siloed discipline, or a reductively stipulated history or methodology of thought.”
One of the broader ways in which curiosity might be stifled stems from its very definition or conception. People assume “curiosity” – like the single word that represents it – is a unitary idea. As if there were only one way to be curious. “What people have perhaps too often forgotten is the manyness of curiosity: its multiple manifestations, its plethora of practices, and its kindred kinds in many bodies.”
The Brain On Curiosity
It usually starts with discomfort. An irritation maybe, a bother. Like a fly buzzing around your ear, even as you try to swat it away, to shut down the whirring wings, but it keeps popping back into your consciousness. You might distract yourself with a thousand things – household chores, your kids’ homework, unpaid bills – but the insect refuses to still itself.
Then your mind starts collecting bits and pieces, eventually stitching them into a whole – a novel, a PhD thesis, a journal paper, a piano composition. “This is your brain on curiosity,” the authors affirm.
Virginia Woolf described this eloquently, when sitting by a river and pondering about “women and fiction.” As Woolf put it, in the distinct, visual manner that characterized her writing: “Thought – to call it by a prouder name than it deserved – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither, among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line.”
Curiosity is indeed akin to fishing. It requires a similar abidance with sameness and boredom, a frustrated or dreamy waiting for thoughts to coalesce into a pattern. But as Perry and Dani put it, patience is not a sufficient quality to propel it. One also has to tolerate other “curtailments.”
Woolf herself was trespassing into terrains that were designated, in her times, for scholarly males. She was quickly accosted by the campus police. When she next tried to enter a library, she was asked to return with a male escort. She sprung then on what was peculiar about women’s fiction. In A Room of One’s Own, she writes: “[A] woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
The Connections of Curiosity
Though curiosity might be sparked off inside individual minds, it is rarely disconnected from a web of surrounding forces. Moreover, it’s rarely a single idea that occurs at a point in time. “Curiosity comes in waves – mutating, agglomerating, washing ashore, and washing back out again.” Discarding its usual treatment as a phenomenon that occurs in certain singular minds, the authors propose a “network account of curiosity.” It entails more than just googling something or flipping open an encyclopedia or asking a question: “Curiosity connects. And it does so within the connective tissues of brain and body, system and society.”
Situating curiosity inside a sociocultural sphere or community, rather than just in a brain (or soul, as earlier posited by figures like St. Augustine), we also need to understand its connections to power and privilege, to culture and politics. As the authors write, “To really understand curiosity, after all, it matters not simply with what and how one learns but with whom and where as well.”
Burrowing into the science of curiosity, as much as into the curiosity of scientists, Zurn and Bassett, suggest we need to move beyond the neural underpinnings of the state. While it is enchanting to understand which brain parts are lit up, such knowledge merely fills informational gaps. The larger question of what we do with such knowing, given the interconnected web we all inhabit, to drive social justice goals or enhance beauty might be necessary follow-ons.
If curiosity is a network, we need to attend to its various nodes, including those who are deliberately or circumstantially disconnected from its reaches.
Styles of Curiosity
If curiosity is a broader network phenomenon, each of us might also have different approaches to knowledge or “styles of curiosity.” In large part, they identify three broad styles:
The Busybody: Collects bits and chunks of information, before eventually weaving it together into a coherent whole.
The Hunter: Dives deeply into one topic inside a domain.
The Dancer: Makes imaginative leaps, sort of akin to the leap Einstein made while imagining himself riding a light beam into outer space.
It’s possible that each of us might use any of the above styles or a combination of the above, or move through different styles according to the phase of the creative project.
But how, the authors ask, do we morph the educational system to cater to different approaches towards learning? Are we force-fitting children into one particular style, which might not appeal to their innate preference?
Walking With Curiosity
Since I am a habituated or even addicted walker, the links between walking and curiosity are all the more appealing. After all, walking and thinking have always been closely associated. Just as “walking is a way of thinking,” the opposite, they suggest, is also true: “thinking is a way of walking.”
They investigate the nature of four types of walks:
– The philosophical walk
– The spiritual walk
– The environmental walk
– The political walk
As the authors observe, the way we move through space can mirror the manner in which we move through conceptual spaces. “The feet of a walker appear curious as they explore the available terrain to circumnavigate the most awing vistas. The mind of a human appears curious as it explores the available knowledge to isolate the most engaging thoughts.”
The best reads dispel long-held assumptions, and for those of you who are curious about curiosity, this work will urge you to question your own templates and leanings. Inspire you to embark on your personal searches differently, while also sparking new flights. Not just of whim and fancy. Even of new approaches to mundane problems that confront you every day. Or just uplift your walks.
References
Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, The MIT Press, 2022