Curious people have a superpower that makes them different. As Albert Einstein rightly said, there is no need for a great talent to stand out; be passionately curious.
This inner force, with an always attentive eye, interested in small details and focused on the great challenges, is what sets us apart from the rest of people.
- Stephen Hawking defined curiosity as the desire to never give up: it is looking at the stars.
- Not the feet.
- Not what binds us to the ground and shapes the ordinary.
- What we take for granted.
Thomas Hobbes, for his part, described this skill as the “convocation of the mind” and Victor Hugo as a form of bravery.
We could offer countless explanations of what curiosity is, however, there is one that contains the true essence, and it is the one that reminds us that curiosity is the basis of learning and human progress.
Its effect, its first impulse in the child, is fundamental to favor its psychological development and its daily spark, an engine that allows us to maintain madness for knowledge.
“Boredom is cured by curiosity, isn’t curiosity cured by anything?. – Dorothy Parker-
How are curious people different? For starters, a defining feature is its ability to ask questions that hadn’t been asked before. An example: the laws of movement and the concept of gravity were not defined simply because an apple fell on someone’s head.
Isaac Newton was a physicist, astronomer, philosopher, mathematician, inventor and even alchemist, his passion for knowledge was limitless, making it difficult to satisfy his curiosity.
Another indefatigable curious was Charles Darwin, one of his habits was writing thousands of letters to specialists around the world. The motive? To learn, for experts to answer their endless questions about plants, insects, human behavior, expressions and emotions.
These two examples shape what scientists define as “thirst for knowledge. “This is a type of motivation very developed in some people, defined by the following processes.
In the psychology of learning, we understand that curiosity is basically a kind of motivation based on reward.
The feeling of discovering something unexpected, finding the answer to a question and the experience of solving a riddle, challenge or doubt that persists for a long time is what moves the curious.
This was the same conclusion as that of a study conducted at the University of California and published in the journal Cell. Matthias Gruber and his colleagues have shown that the brains of very curious people work differently.
The dopamine system, for example, has a higher intensity and greater connection.
This shows that the brain of a curious child or adult is very pleased to learn in itself that results from an exciting research process, in which obstacles have arisen that have been overcome.
Reward centers and the hippocampus are two areas with a lot of activity in this type of profile.
Donald W. Winnicott, a renowned pediatrician who became a renowned psychoanalyst, wrote on the subject in the 1950s and 1960s, according to him, when human beings lose curiosity, his vital impulse disappears, with his creativity, his spontaneity and, in essence, his happiness.
Why did this happen? According to Winnicott, in his experience at the time, there are people who create a false self, are frustrated personalities, beings trapped in the routine of their work, countless unresolved problems, untreated traumas and, in essence, an apathy that separates them. of the enlightened and authentic self that is hidden.
If a person is not satisfied with their own life, their potential loses their brilliance, motivation disappears, as does mood and, of course, curiosity.
We are all creative, we all hide many resources in us, yet our work, our studies and even the way our society is conceived weaken the curious mind.
Why can the curious, in some cases, be dangerous?to be able to challenge the established, to confront the conventional, what is evident and what, for many, is better to “not touch”.
However, the image improves as we open our senses and experiment, we must seek our taste of life, the one that arouses our interest and passion, our desire to become a child again and have fun discovering and feeling excited again.
We live in a world where any question or question can be written in an online search engine. However, the answers you get when exploring reality tend to be much higher value.
Curiosity is fostered by researching, traveling, meeting new people, applying critical and divergent thinking and a more awake and, above all, motivated look.
We have to look at the stars, as Stephen Hawking said, we can cure our boredom by being curious, as the great writer Dorothy Parker said.