E24: 7 Domains of Curiosity

I could say on my tombstone . . . I guess I hope that someone says, "She was curious," because curiosity, which is according to Merriam Webster's Dictionary the desire to know, is one of the character strengths that we consider important in being human. And today we're going to talk about the 7 Domains of Curiosity and the good, bad, and ugly of curiosity.

The amazing book called "Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification of the Sanities" by Seligman and Peterson, very famous book on character strengths and virtues. They characterize the following character strengths:

1. Wisdom and knowledge
2. Courage
3. Humanity
4. Justice
5. Temperance
6. Transcendence

Six major character strengths. But under that first one, which is wisdom and knowledge, come these subsets, which include:

1. Creativity
2. Curiosity
3. Open-mindedness
4. Love of learning
5. Perspective

I think curiosity fits right into this character strength because it's taking an interest in ongoing experience for its own sake, finding objects and topics fascinating, and leading to exploring and discovering. And to be curious, you have to have an open mind. You have to have love of learning. You have to have a little bit of perspective. You have to be a little bit creative. And this is number one in the wisdom and knowledge character strength.

Clearly, I'm a curious person, and I think curiosity is important. So let's talk a little bit about curiosity and what it is and what it isn't.

The Intellectual Domain of Curiosity

And before we go deep down into the physical domain, let's separate curiosity from what might be considered novelty-seeking behavior. There's curiosity where you want to know more. So curiosity is often what we might consider a cognitive behavior, whereas novelty-seeking, meaning bungee jumping or going on adventure, vacations, or having sex with a lot of different people, all that kind of novelty-seeking may be part of curiosity, but that's considered a physical experience.

And in psychology, novelty-seeking is a personality trait that's associated with activity that responds to a novel stimulation. And it can include impulsive behavior, extravagance in an approach to doing some things, and of course, it's also associated with the need for dopamine.

People know that dopamine is the reward hormone in our brain, and people who have this personality style, or you might call it a disorder if it goes too far, of novelty-seeking seem to be a little low on dopamine. And they do a lot of behaviors to create novel situations so they get this little burst of adrenaline, this little jolt of dopamine.

Curiosity, again, is more of a cognitive thing. It's your brain knowing. It might subsequently lead to seeking external behaviors like, "Wow, I read about this recipe and I really want to taste it," or, "I read about this and I really want to go there." Curiosity is cognitive, and it's an intellectual experience.

The Physical Domain of Curiosity

Let's talk a little bit about the physical domain. Curiosity, we think of kids being born and being curious, and in fact, they certainly are curious because they will seek to understand everything in their environment. They stick things in their mouth to see what it tastes like. Their understanding of their world is so limited, so they are very usually curious about things because they know nothing, little kids, and they might want to know more. You can't really say that they're exactly curious. They're just trying to understand their environment.

People who study curiosity say, "Well, is it a social behavior? Is it a brain behavior? Is it an evolutionary behavior?" And in fact, it's all of those things. As we stood up and wandered the world, we saw lots of brand new things that we tried to understand. That may have risen to curiosity. Certainly, you might think your dog is curious, and you might think chimpanzees and gorillas are curious. But no animals are quite as curious as humans are.

We do know a lot about the neurology of curiosity by studying our incredibly wonderful friends the mice and the rats. You can actually breed them for impulse control, or lack thereof, and you can breed them for curiosity, meaning are they willing to go out and try new things? Are they willing to try to hunt and explore? And very anxious and depressed mice and rats tend to not go out.

In fact, curiosity is often very suppressed in people who are anxious and depressed, whereas people who are feeling pretty good and pretty positive are willing to try and go learn new things.

So learning new things is usually a sign of a healthy brain, and it involves the entire part of the brain, the visual, the auditory, the olfactory. All the parts of the brain gets kind of stimulated when you go out to try to understand something new.

Also, curiosity seems to enhance memory because you're curious about new things. So new things are things that you might want to know about. And because curiosity is associated with a little bit of a dopamine rush, when you learn something new, you might go, "Wow, that's really cool," or, "Wow, I'm glad I learned that." That sense of wow was that little dopamine rush in your brain that's rewarding and then reinforces the memory of what you just learned. So you're much more likely to remember something if you were curious about it and found it on your own than if you were just told something.

That's really important information we start talking about schooling and how you begin to remember things that you learn and how you foster curiosity. But if you learn something through your own curious exploration and you get that little dopamine rush, you are more likely to remember it than if you were just told something.

There's arousal theory, meaning when you learn something new, you get a little bit more aroused, you're a little bit more focused on it, and that releases dopamine. Again, this reward system that makes you more curious.

So whether kids are really curious or whether they're just trying to understand their environment, I think that there's some conflict about whether children are truly curious and what we phrase curiosity as in adults. But they do have an innate interest in exploring their world unless they're really anxious or unless they're really depressed.

An important hormone . . . we've talked about dopamine in the brain. Cortisol, which is our stress hormone, is also known for stress regulation. However, cortisol may be associated with curious or exploratory behavior because a little bump in cortisol helps you remember things and it's probably good for you, and it supports the optimal arousal. So a little bump in your stress hormone because you said, "Wow, that's really interesting," is very supportive of curiosity and very supportive of the future of your curious behavior.

However, if there's a lot of stress and a high level, of course, of cortisol, that tends to foster back off, back away, retire, get small, fight or flight, that kind of behavior. So a little bump in cortisol is good for your curiosity and a little bit of curiosity is good for your little bit of cortisol, but a lot can get in the way.

So we've got brain hormones involved in curiosity, we've got evolutionary theories about curiosity in human beings, we've got social theories about curiosity, and we've got the concept that curiosity is a fundamental character strength. So there we go. We've talked about some physical stuff.

At this point, we should just briefly bring in the fact that there are some diseases that actually are associated with apathy. So it turns out that neurodegenerative diseases, and that includes Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, are often associated with lack of curiosity and apathy. People who are quite sick cognitively and I think people who've been experiencing long COVID symptoms, people who got really exhausted and fatigued from their COVID experience, their COVID-19 illness, also lose their sense of driving curiosity. They become apathetic.

So in general, curiosity is a sign of a healthy brain, and a brain that isn't healthy can develop atrophy and apathy. And so curiosity can be a predictor of health, and lots of curiosity or a decline in curiosity can be a potential predictor for illnesses and neurocognitive decline.

The Emotional Domain of Curiosity

Before we go to the emotional domain and the good, bad, and the ugly of curiosity, I need to bring in my most favorite millennial and my producer, Chloé. She makes the "7 Domains of Women" podcasts sound wonderful. She's going to help me explain some concepts of curiosity that's kind of in the bad domain.

 

Dr. Jones: So, Chloé, are you there? Are you going to join me?

Chloé: I am going to join you, but I don't think I'm capable of explaining it to you. We can discuss it together.

Dr. Jones: Let's discuss it together. So I want to talk about morbid curiosity. Morbid curiosity is the kind of curiosity that can be seen where people are focused on objects of death, or violence, or some other event that may cause harm physically or emotionally. And so you just get focused on bad stuff.

We talked a little bit about a term, which is brand new. It's only been around a couple years now. 2018 was the first time we heard it, called doomscrolling. Tell me a little bit about doomscrolling. I know you never do this. I'll explain it's not good for your brain. It's not good for you. But tell me about it, Chloé.

Chloé: Well, from what I understand, doomscrolling is when you . . . it's just like what you explained. It's when you see something, you see news, or you read about events that are just so harmful or toxic, but you still read it. It's almost kind of like a train wreck. It's so bad, but you can't look away.

Dr. Jones: You can't look away.

Chloé: And it's so bad for your mental health. But, Kirtly, I do it all the time.

Dr. Jones: Well, the name came up in 2018, and I think they know it has to do with people who have an iPad. It has to do with the touch screen. If you didn't have a touch screen, you couldn't doomscroll. It's scrolling down on your phone or on your iPad.

Chloé: Going and going.

Dr. Jones: Right. So it came with the touch screen, but we have known about the fact that people are probably inappropriately, but understandably completely focused on things which are hard, violent, angry.

Chloé: I would classify it as just toxic.

Dr. Jones: Toxic.

Chloé: It makes you angry when you read it. It makes you sad. It makes you feel like you hate the world, that the world hates you. I don't know. It's curiosity or it's something, but you just keep scrolling and scrolling. And the more you scroll, the angrier you get. And before you know it, you're an hour in and you hate the world.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. So doomscrolling is the active spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news. And it turns out that the nature of our search engines is that they know what we watch, and they give us more of it.

Chloé: How scary is that?

Dr. Jones: Yeah. So I try to really focus on apple pie.

Chloé: Or cats. Show me more videos of cats.

Dr. Jones: Yes. So if I always click on every apple pie recipe, I get more apple pie recipes. If I always scroll on to COVID deaths, or political dysfunction, or you name it, fires in the west . . . I've been unfortunately focused on fires in the west . . . then what I will get on my scrollable machine . . .

Chloé: Are all those.

Dr. Jones: Well, it turns out it is a natural thing to actually have morbid curiosity. And so somebody looked at sort of choosing the negative, choosing the behavioral demonstration of morbid curiosity where they took people and offered them neutral things, happy things, or things that portrayed death, violence, or harm. And they gave them an option. People aren't necessarily depressed, they're not necessarily morbid personalities, but they gave them some option about what they wanted to watch, and it turns out that a significantly increased number of people wanted to watch morbid things.

There are lots and lots of trials. This isn't just one study. We tend to look at things that are scary, maybe because we think we can control them by looking at them or maybe we feel like if we look at them, then it won't catch us blindsided.

Chloé: I think that's what it is. I had the same discussion with my mom the other day and she's like, "Why is there no good news?" Obviously, my career is in communications. So I have this theory. Whenever I write or when I produce a good piece of content that's happy, people don't really click on it.

Dr. Jones: Oh, no.

Chloé: But a piece that's terrifying, like, "Hey, warning," it gets so much click-throughs. I think people when they see news that is scary, that is sad, they want to click on it. It's almost kind of like a "when you know it, you feel better" sort of a thing. I don't need to know about cats. Cats can wait.

Dr. Jones: Well, there's some survival benefit to this.

Chloé: There is. Definitely.

Dr. Jones: I was addicted and my son was subsequently addicted to the Grimms' Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, which was normally when something awful happened to somebody. So many fairy tales are kind of happy, happy kids, they do happy things, but there are lots of these Germanic fairytales where kids get lost in the woods, where they get eaten by a wolf, "Hansel and Gretel," and "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Cinderella."

Chloé: "The Three Little Pigs."

Dr. Jones: Three Little Pigs. Exactly. Did he want to hear the happy ones? No. He always wanted to hear the ones where the kids are nearly dying. He wanted to hear them over and over.

So it turns out that we naturally turned to things that have people deliberately subject themselves to negative images, and to have even a kid who wants to hear the hard things over and over . . . And this is at bedtime. I thought, "Oh, no. He's going to have nightmares. These are the thoughts he's going to bed with." But for him, there was usually a wrap-up at the end. So at the end, the hunter gets the wolf and digs the kid out, and Hansel and Gretel, they actually don't get cooked in the stove. They survive.

Chloé: Hearing you say that kind of confirms for me my own feeling about why I doomscroll. What leads me into it is curiosity, but I think what keeps me going is the hopes that maybe this will get better.

Dr. Jones: Right.

Chloé: Hopefully, as you scroll, it won't be so doomsday, but maybe like, "Oh, it'll be a brighter day tomorrow." But that's almost never the case, because real life isn't how those fairytale books are. The more you read about war, the more trouble you find and the more cracks you find, and then the more depressed you get. It's just this toxic circle that originated from your curiosity and your hopes that maybe it'll get better. But unfortunately, that's just not the case most often.

Dr. Jones: I was always raised on the saying that bad news makes good press. There's a natural negativity bias. People have this negativity bias, meaning people are more curious about negative information. So in consuming information, negative events have a larger impact on one's mental wellbeing, the good ones.

So when I actually seek out journalistic media that have good news, that will be my choice to read. But when I read these wonderful articles of people doing and achieving good things and succeeding, do I remember them compared to when I read "The New York Times" about something awful happening? It's difficult to remember the good things because we are wired to remember the bad things.

There's an individual regular state of contentment. It turns out that potential threats provoke one's attention, and so we are hard wired to see the negative because we need to know what might harm us so that we can do something about it. And I think this is evolutionarily sound, but we live in a time where we get fed bad news all day every day.

Chloé: Unfortunately.

Dr. Jones: There are some data though that said that the compulsion to getting oneself totally into negative news allows people to be wired for and screened for and anticipate danger, and the media gives them more. Their news feed gives them more. People can have a worsening mood and mental health problems because they get more and more anxious.

And they actually did some brain studies looking at the inferior frontal gyrus, which is a part of the brain that's important to information processing and integrating new information into beliefs and reality. So if you're told that someone is bad, bad, bad, or if you're told that a vaccination is bad, bad, bad, then you tend to stick this into your brain as true. And so it's an easy way for fake news or wrong news, if it's bad enough, to be integrated in our brain as true news. And that's pretty difficult.

Once again, I'm a curious person, but if I spend a lot of my time on negative news, it makes my heart heavy.

Chloé: It does, doesn't it?

Dr. Jones: I get a little anxious.

Chloé: It makes your day not so great.

Dr. Jones: Right. So a study looking at psychology by psychology researchers found that people who watch 3 minutes of negative news in the morning were 27% more likely to have had experienced a bad day 6 to 8 hours later. People who watched solutions-focused news . . . and I get a magazine that is nationally and internationally known as being solution-focused, this particular news corporation.

Chloé: I like that a lot, solution-focused.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. So that's what this particular news organization is. The group who watched solutions-focused stories had a good day 88% of the time. So I don't want to stick my head in the ground. I want to know things, but I want to know . . . I don't want someone to tell me how awful the world is. I want someone to tell me that these are solutions that are working. I'm curious about bad things, but I want to be informed about how things can be better.

Chloé: I think, too, a part of what we call doomscrolling or what I kind of roll into it . . . It's not so much the articles themselves, but it's the comments from keyboard warriors . . .

Dr. Jones: Exactly.

Chloé: . . . who hide behind a keyboard and will say whatever they want to say because they're hiding behind their keyboard, not knowing that what they say might impact somebody else.

Dr. Jones: Oh, I never read the comments. Ever, ever, ever.

Chloé: Good for you.

Dr. Jones: Never. I've got my own comments in my head. I can let my own comments . . .

Chloé: Oh, I think that's just a lovely thing that you can do, if you can do it, is just to read the articles and not read the comments. I think for me that's where the real harm is. Maybe they don't really agree with it themselves, but in that moment they're like, "Oh, yeah. I feel like I'm so brave I can type this up and I can not really think about what it might do to somebody else."

Dr. Jones: Oh, I don't like that. I don't even like the talking heads. These are professional analysts who tell me what I'm supposed to think about something. It's like, "Just give me the facts, give me some potential solutions, and I'll decide what I think is the . . ." What we call the emotional valence. What's the emotional valence? What is the emotional content, or the threat content?

Chloé: That's right. "Let me figure that out."

Dr. Jones: "Let me figure this one out." Yeah, I'll figure that out and then I'll go have a piece of cake, which I think . . . yeah, I tend to treat my malaise with pizza.

The Financial Domain of Curiosity

 

So let's just jump to the financial domain, because I think that with access to the internet, curiosity and engaging and knowing is free. So part of the difficulty and the really great thing about the internet and being curious is I have this little black box of knowledge in my hand, and it's called my phone. So I'm looking at this animal that's walking through my backyard and I wonder what their reproductive life history is. I can look it up at my breakfast table while I'm watching this animal or this bird, and it's free. Well, my phone isn't free and my internet connection isn't free. But my curiosity is free.

It turns out that novelty-seeking experiences are very expensive. I want a faster bike, I want to go on this mountain climb to the middle of nowhere, I want to go do this, that. But being curious about things is pretty cheap. And that's the amazing thing about the internet if you can control how far and how deep you can go down into something. Do you think about that?

Chloé: Yeah, I do. But when you say that, I think about countries where the government censors people's curiosity essentially. How we know so much now is because of the internet. A big chunk of it is because of the internet, and it's the fact that like you said, we can look things up at the tip of our fingers.

For some countries that the government censors the internet, it's harder to be curious. You can only be curious about topics that they want you to be curious about and you're fed information that they want you to know.

I'm thankful that we live in America where curiosity is free, but at the same time it's almost too free that I can just look anything up that I want to. And I'm like, "Oh, no. Too much information."

Dr. Jones: Well, I wonder if these countries that do the censorship would censor the reproductive behavior of deer. I was watching this reproductive behavior in my backyard with this very young buck, who was going after a doe. This was during rutting season. He was kind of young and he didn't have very big antlers. And she just ignored him. Every time he would come up close, she would just walk away. I was thinking, "Huh, I wonder what the reproductive success is of this young buck compared to the guy with the big antlers that I've seen walking around."

But it has to do with sex. And if they censor anything that has to do with reproduction or sex, then I won't get to find out. I'm a reproductive biologist. I study reproduction, and I'm curious. I want to know about those butterflies that really like my lavender. Why do they like lavender? I don't know, but I want to find out about it.

Chloé: You know what? Even here in America where curiosity, as we say, is free, but then there are entities where you have to pay for their information. I mean, that makes sense.

Dr. Jones: Well, when I think about high quality information, they're spending a lot of time studying. They should probably charge for it. I mean, it's their time. Sometimes when things are free, somebody is paying for it. And then I worry that the people are paying for it are the people who are getting the outcome out there that they want. In other words, someone is backing this particular perspective with their money.

I was thinking about this news feed that I subscribe to and it has no advertisements, and it's expensive. It's expensive because nobody owns them and no one pays them to have a point of view. Their philosophy is outcomes-based, but there aren't any advertisements. They're pretty unbiased and I like it that way. But it's expensive. It's not free.

Chloé: Well, our show is free.

Dr. Jones: That is so cool.

Chloé: Our show is free.

Dr. Jones: That's cool.

The Social Domain of Curiosity

 

Dr. Jones: Well, I want to talk a little about the social domain because is there some data to say that you can foster curiosity either in a family or in a school. And there are certainly some behaviors that can squelch curiosity. So anxiety kids who are bullied and in a social situation that is not supportive, kids can be anxious enough that they shut down and they aren't curious anymore.

You're kind of a curious person. Do you think your family helped you be curious about stuff, or this is just you?

Chloé: I think it's both. I think we kind of fostered curiosity in each other and together. That's kind of the kitchen talks. When you have dinner, you talk about things that you learned that day. It's definitely different than the curiosity that I had in school.

Dr. Jones: Tell me about that.

Chloé: Well, I think in school it's more about what the instructor tells you. While I was in school, my curiosity was really fueled by what I was being taught. But now that I'm outside of the classroom, I think my topic of curiosity and what I want to learn about are my choices and my decisions to make. It's not being taught to me, but it's something that I sought out myself.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. From the time I was little, I went to a bunch of different school systems because we moved a lot, but I would say that . . . I went to a school system in Australia for junior high and early high school. So I would say that the system at the time in Australia, and maybe it's changed, was very rote learning. It was very you go to class, you sit down, the girls on one side, the boys on the other side, and you learned repetitive things, and you learned things from books.

That was significantly different from the system in California. And then the system in Colorado when I came back, the biology classes were very experiential. We did stuff and you could be curious about something and watch it happen. And it wasn't so much dogmatic, "You have to learn this and this." Particularly in STEM, which was math and science and biology, they allowed you to explore a little bit more either with your own book reports, or your own biological findings, or science fairs, or things. It allowed you to explore more.

And I came from a family that valued earth sciences. My dad was a geologist, an earth scientist. So we were out in the bush a fair bit and always something cool and new and different. That's the thing about being out in nature. It's different and there are lots of things to be curious about if you have a family that fosters it, if that's where you're going to get it, or if your school system is that way.

I would say that there are many school systems around the world, some which really favor rote learning, you have to learn X, Y, and Z for the test, and others which allow you a little bit more space to be curious about what you're curious about.

 

So I think there are social environments that can enhance kids' ability to be curious. If you had the question in your head and you find out, you're more likely to remember it, and you're more likely to take the next deeper dive into that domain.

If you're being driven to perform in a certain way for a test because it's a high stakes test, I think that squelches curiosity. Because it's a high stakes test, you have to learn for the test. And it's not necessarily something that will allow kids, young adults, to go deeper into any particular domain because their curiosity is pruned by the necessity of a certain volume of stuff for this exam.

The Environmental Domain of Curiosity

Well, there are some environments, as we just talked about. So the environmental domain, there are some environments that foster curiosity more than others. Certainly, we use curiosity to explain our world. And when our world is the same every day, so we do the same things every day, it can be enormously reassuring to have the same things every day, but it doesn't necessarily foster the need to understand, the need to know that can foster curiosity.

So certainly, some environments, and this is me . . . now, remember, I'm a biologist and a biophile. I love the natural world and I love earth sciences. So for me, you could bet that it's the natural world that will spark my curiosity, like, "Why did those needles turn up and the other ones turned down? Why is that leaf that purple color instead of green? I don't get that."

So there are some environments where things are novel that allow your curiosity to take you places, whereas environments which are the same . . . But of course, now that we have access to the internet, the whole world is out there in your little black box of knowledge in your hand. You can go so far. You can be a Curious George from your armchair.

The Spiritual Domain of Curiosity

As I think about wrapping it up in the spiritual domain, there are people who are quite curious about different spiritual practices and religious dogma, and they might experience different religious rituals and might choose to take drugs to have a different kind of spiritual experience.

But for me, just very briefly, I would say that curiosity for me leads to a spiritual experience in that this is the only world I will ever know, and it is my responsibility and it's my joy to try to understand it for the little bit of time that I'm going to be on this planet as a sentient person. It's my gift to be able to understand it a little bit better.

So for some people, being curious about different spiritual or religious practices is something that they enjoy diving into. But for me, my curiosity about the world is a spiritual experience in and of itself.

So everyone is going to be a little different about this in how they bring their curiosity to their spiritual life. For me, this is the only world I'll ever know and I need to know it better.

We're going to finish up here with a little haiku on the 7 Domains of Curiosity.

 

Curiosity
It paints my world with color
See with open mind

 

Thanks for joining us, and I hope you all are happily curious about the world around you. And joining us on the 7 Domains . . . join us again, or come back and see and listen to any of our podcasts or the other podcasts on The Scope.