The Wonders of Curiosity

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Health is a combination of the absence of illness and the presence of psychological and physical well-being. It includes engagement in intellectual activities with the goal of self-discovery and personal growth.
Constant curiosity is an essential part of a meaningful life, as well as crucial to psychological resilience in an ever-changing world.

A portrait of curiosity

Curious people stand out due to their relentless pursuit of knowledge and drive to explore. They typically favor complex activities that stimulate personal growth by requiring vigor and stretching. However, they don’t feel any need for structure and cognitive closure. On the contrary, they confidently handle uncertainty and crises. As masters of their environment, they are truly resilient.

The benefits of curiosity

The Cold War sparked a change in the political and economic world order that still persists today. To describe the new reality, the U.S. military coined the acronym “VUCA,” standing for a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. In such an interconnected, dynamic world where so much is in question, we must constantly navigate uncertainty on our path to a meaningful life.

Curious people value growth over safety, complexity over simplicity, autonomy over obedience, and openness over closure. Thus, rather than paralyzing them, a VUCA world invigorates them to thrive.

Curiosity augments psychological well-being through satisfaction and other positive emotions. The bravery required of people who pursue roads less traveled amplifies the enjoyment of learning, ultimately boosting achievement as well as cognitive health through the promotion of neuroplasticity.

Learning leads to humility by making people aware of their own limits. It also brings about empathy via a chain reaction: The more a person learns, the more diversity will exist in his/her life, and the more he/she will acknowledge and thus challenge biases.

Therefore, curious people endeavor to develop to their full potential by living meaningfully.

The downside of curiosity

Whereas genuine curiosity can promote warmth and attraction in social interactions, curious people sometimes come across as selfish.
Highly curious people are more interested in making a good impression by emphasizing accomplishments and intellectual strengths rather than building lasting relationships. Above all, they seek to extract new knowledge from social interactions.
Thus, the average person prefers conversation of lower intensity and might be inclined to reveal less personal information, particularly in the early stages of a relationship.

The challenge for curious people is to develop active listening skills and learn to take an interest in others to build lasting relationships.

The practice of curiosity

Meeting cognitive needs is essential to a whole, meaningful life.
Every discovery starts with curiosity, disembogued in observation. To achieve innovation, it is vital to see the world with wonder and embrace the unknown by asking questions. But impatient curiosity is meritless. To delve into the inner quiddity of something, we must observe what others may be missing. To achieve complete awareness without prejudice, look at everything as though you have never seen it before. Like an eagle, you should be able to fly over the whole forest and experience it holistically, whereas the frog experiences only the pond, but knows it in depth.
Consequently, neuroscientists attest that curiosity-led learning recruits the brain’s reward system, enhancing the experience of gaining new knowledge.

Thus, you need to expose yourself to the world with an open mind. Explore, stretch, and challenge yourself. Learn, fail, create meaning, and grow.

Broaden your perspective and practice curiosity with the following tips:

• List of fears

Create a list of things or activities you tend to avoid due to fear. Rank the items from 1 (minimal distress) to 10 (severe distress). Each category should contain, on average, 3 to 5 items. After that, deliberately pursue them.

• List of blind-spots

Create a list of your blind-spots. Of what themes/issues do you have limited working knowledge? Research these themes through a wide variety of intellectual and international media, from TED talks to Netflix documentaries and Art House films, books, online classes, or niche magazines.

To increase your mental performance and health neuroscientists advise people to learn languages as well as skills like playing an instrument. But certain complex games like chess and the commitment to learn something new on general are also beneficial.

• Be diverse

Connect with people from varied backgrounds on- or offline through interest groups, leisure activities, or networking. Alternatively, read biographies of people in other industries, countries, etc. to broaden your perspective.

• Learn to reframe

Try to be more holistic by digging deeper than your first thoughts and impressions. In his famous book about lateral thinking, Edward de Bono introduced the exercise of six thinking hats. He stated that in order to gain a better understanding of things, we should judge them on different premises: the big picture, facts and information, feelings and emotions, the negative, the positive, and the new.

• Cartesian thinking

Alternatively you can use the rules of cartesian logic and doubt to examine questions from different angles and perspectives to think deeper.
Learn to doubt yourself and question your assumptions by only accepting the information that you know is true, breaking down these truths into smaller units by asking questions about the involved problems and making list about further problems.
Ask yourself what would happen or what would not happen if a certain event takes place as well as what would or wouldn’t happen if the event doesn’t take place.

• Seeing instead of looking

In an ever-changing world, we sometimes have only a second to judge. Unfortunately, this truth often robs us of the opportunity to explore, learn, and grow. The best way to practice seeing instead of just looking is to explore art. Instead of judging works based on your taste, develop your visual ability and open-mindedness by looking at art without judging it—by asking questions and looking more closely to learn to truly see.

A meaningful, healthy life of personal growth doesn’t lie in hedonistic pleasure and pursuits.
It is challenging. It requires commitment. It means that we expose ourselves to the world to fully experience it, be influenced by it and leave our mark.

If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life. To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. The next step is to transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don’t like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did before, or something we enjoy doing but don’t do often enough because it seems too much trouble. There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don’t become actually interesting until we devote attention to them.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Marie Curie

References:

• Bradesen,D. (2017). The End of Alzheimer’s. New York: Vermillion
• Amen, D. (2018). Memory Rescue. Tyndale: Carol Stream