![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fullfocus.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/learning.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCuriosity starts early. Children throw cups from highchairs over and over, testing gravity and their parents. They repeat the same noises and ask the same questions, exploring sound and language. When everything is new, there are countless experiments to run. The answers are awe-inspiring: sunsets, gravity, hula hoops, and bugs.<\/p>\n
As more and more questions are answered, our curiosity can subside or it can evolve. Philosophy, scientific innovation, and progress are the natural results of adult curiosity. Cultivating this curiosity is important in life, love, and success. Here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n
Applying knowledge in innovative ways is essential to discovery and progress. Curiosity helps us to build that knowledge, making it available for novel interpretations and applications. How? The neural circuits of curiosity prime the brain\u2019s learning circuits, creating stronger activation and increasing our ability to learn.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In a 2009 research paper published in Psychological Science, Dr.Colin F. Camerer and team presented curiosity as \u201cThe Wick in the Candle of Learning.\u201d In the study<\/a>, subjects were given trivia questions to read out loud and instructed to guess the correct answer. They were also told to rate their level of curiosity.<\/p>\n Functional MRI showed increased activity in the caudate regions of the brain, associated with reward anticipation, in parallel with participants\u2019 curiosity levels. When correct answers were revealed, the learning circuits in participants' brains were activated more strongly if they had guessed incorrectly.<\/p>\n Based on these findings, Camerer and his team hypothesized that \u201ccuriosity would be associated with memory enhancement for new information.\u201d Indeed, a follow-up study revealed that participants were better able to remember the answers to trivia questions if they had been curious about them beforehand.<\/p>\n Five years later, Dr. Charan Ranganath dug deeper<\/a> into the relationship between curiosity and learning. Repeating a similar protocol as the 2009 study, Ranganath\u2019s team also flashed photographs of faces during periods of high and low curiosity arousal. Curiosity not only helped participants to remember trivia, they were also better able to remember the photos if their curiosity had been piqued.<\/p>\n You probably already know that being genuinely interested in other people is an important precursor to building robust interpersonal relationships, but you may not know that scientists have delved into this very topic.<\/p>\n Likening curiosity to an interest in learning new things (exploration) and the ability to become absorbed in tasks (absorption), social scientists asked<\/a> 90 students to complete researcher-designed Curiosity Exploration Inventories based on these two attributes. Then they gave each student forty-five minutes to talk to a participating stranger of the opposite sex. Half the couples were prompted to have an intimate talk, while the other half were set-up for small talk.<\/p>\n Curiosity mattered. When set up for intimacy, both groups experienced intimacy. When prompted to spend forty-five minute engaged in small talk, however, only those participants who had exhibited high curiosity and their partners felt a close connection. Curious people, even in low-intimacy situations, tended to engage in playful and probing interactions with their partners, prompting a greater feeling of intimacy and building more meaningful interpersonal relationships.<\/p>\n\t\tCuriosity feeds relationships<\/h3>\n