Why are we curious about curiosity?

There is a well-researched substance that is so dense that just one sugar-cube sized lump of it would weigh equivalent to one billion (1,000,000,000) elephants. Are you curious to know what it is? You would be a strange sort of human being if your curiosity had not been piqued by a fact like that, for that matter you be a strange sort of worm too because according to a new review curiosity is experienced by almost all living thing; of course, that depends on how you define curiosity.

Arriving at a definition of curiosity that satisfies everyone has been a problem for psychologists and biologists. This in itself is curious because philosophers have never been retiring in putting forward their thoughts on the subject; William Arthur Ward said that “curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning”, Thomas Hobbes said that “curiosity is the lust of the mind“, Albert Einstein said “curiosity has its own reason for existing”, William Samuel Johnson said, “curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last”, and Steven Wright said “curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect”.

The researchers noted that curiosity is intrinsically motivated, as opposed to "information seeking", and used a working definition of curiosity as "a drive state for information".

Notwithstanding this wealth of thought on the topic in a new study researchers decided to review the existing literature to see if they could arrive at a satisfactory definition of curiosity on the basis that if you can define something properly then you also understand it.

The researchers noted that curiosity is intrinsically motivated, as opposed to “information seeking”, and used a working definition of curiosity as “a drive state for information”. The researchers say that when the search for information becomes active then that is curiosity and by this definition even round worms do experience curiosity.

Although they are reasonably happy with that definition the researchers say that whether curiosity is always beneficial is still open to debate. In educational psychology the idea is that the function of curiosity is to facilitate learning it is also possible that curiosity can lead to pursuing stimuli that aren’t particularly useful and put the curious individual at increased risk. In all then, defying evolutionary theory, it appears that curiosity has been selected for even though it is not always productive. Maybe “fortune favours the brave” is somehow an explanation of the evolutionary forces at work here.

Just in case your curiosity is burning you up re that incredibly dense substance we mentioned to begin, the stuff we are talking of is “neutron star matter”. A “neutron star” is a type of star that results from the collapse of a massive star after a supernova. These neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars in the universe with a radius of only 11 kilometres and they are composed almost entirely of neutrons, which stops them from being able to collapse any further because two neutrons can’t occupy the same space. Neutron stars are denser than our sun by a factor of 100,000,000,000,000.

So now that we’ve satisfied your curiosity, despite many psychologists spending many hours on the topic, it appears we still don’t have a completely settled and agreed definition and use for this ubiquitous state; which is curious really.