The mechanics of curiosity

• Joyous exploration: I view challenging situations as an opportunity to grow and learn.
• Deprivation sensitivity: I like to try to solve problems that puzzle me.
• Stress tolerance: The smallest doubt can stop me from seeking out new experiences.
• Social curiosity: Social curiosity: I like to learn about the habits of others. I like finding out why people behave the way they do.
• Thrill-seeking: The anxiety of doing something new makes me feel excited and alive. Risk-taking is exciting to me.

1. The Fascinated – they score high on all dimensions of curiosity, particularly joyous exploration.
2. Problem Solvers – score high on deprivation sensitivity, and are midrange for other dimensions.
3. Empathizers – score high on social curiosity, midrange on other dimensions and much lower on stress tolerance and thrill-seeking.
4. Avoiders – score low on all dimensions, particularly stress tolerance.

The bodily symptoms of this strange appearance point to three dimensions:

• Sensory: The marvelous things take hold of our senses - we stare and widen our eyes.
• Cognitive: We are perplexed because we don't have a past experience to understand them. It leads to a suspension of breath, similar to when we are startled.
• Spiritual: We look upwards in veneration, which makes our heart swell.

At the mild end of this emotion, we talk about things being marvelous. More intense emotions might be described as astonishing. The extreme of this experiences is met with expressions of awe.

Encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.

When we are curious, we view tough situations more creatively. Studies have found that curiosity is associated with less defensive reactions to stress and less aggressive reactions to provocation.

Curiosity encourages members of a group to put themselves in one another’s shoes and take an interest in one another’s ideas rather than focus only on their own perspective.

Thus, conflicts are less heated, and groups achieve better results.

This is a pleasurable state associated with an anticipation of reward.

That’s our level of knowledge. That’s what drives all scientific research. It drives many artworks. It drives education and other things like that.

Most psychological traits, and curiosity is no exception, have a genetic component to them.

The fact that some people are much more curious than others largely has to do with their genetics. But, as in all cases, genetics is never the whole story.

Playfulness is the lesser-known and under-appreciated antidote to unhappiness, boredom, and stuckness of life.

Playfulness outcompetes worry and anxiety.

Most people find it hard to worry less, so the way out is to find something playful to do, a distraction or a hobby, or get into mindfulness meditation.

From an evolutionary perspective, there’s good reason to keep looking, to be curious. Information helps us make better choices and adapt to a changing environment.

Scientists who study the mechanics of curiosity are finding that it is, at its core, a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time. Like the links on a Wikipedia page, curiosity builds upon itself, every question leading to the next. And as with a journey down the Wikipedia wormhole, where you start dictates where you might end up.

Curiosity is less about what you don’t know than about what you already do.

• A high AC: you have obtained your information through focused and objective research and would be open to changing your position if presented with sufficient evidence.
• A low AC: you reactively believe whatever comes across your news feed and hold onto your beliefs in a dogmatic and tribal manner.

Pessimism is defined as the anticipation of good or bad things to happen in the future, while optimism is generally considered the opposite. Optimism can be defined as the individual difference variable reflecting the extent of which we hold positive expectancies for the upcoming event.

The ways in which we think affects our health, well-being and success, even though the situations are the same.

• A positive impact on many aspects of physical and mental health.
• Provides motivation to work harder.
• Greater career success in life.

Things and people that are potentially threatening command attention. Our survival instincts form our fascination with the stories of true crime.

Upon hearing an incident of danger or disaster, our brain's part called the amygdala, that is responsible for emotions, memory and survival tactics is stimulated. It signals our frontal cortex region of the brain to evaluate and interpret the data, invoking the ‘fight or flight’ response.

As humans, we want to know the psychology of the bad people, who are also supposedly just as human as we are.

This creates a curiosity to know more about the deranged, criminal mind, and the other aspects of the scenario, like solving a jig-saw puzzle.

Meditation helps to counter our tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Other studies have found that mindfulness meditation can reduce mind-wandering and improve attention.

Larger randomized controlled trials are still needed to understand how meditation might work with other treatments to help people manage attention-deficit disorders.

Long-term, consistent meditation mindfulness changes our ability to handle stress in a better, more sustainable way.

• Practicing meditation reduces the inflammatory response in people exposed to psychological stressors.
  
• Mindfulness practices help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it.