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Hello, and welcome to the Rest Is Science. I am Michael Stevens.
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And I am Hannah Fry. And I have here an envelope for you, Michael. It says for Michael on it.
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Oh, my gosh. It does.
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Are you. Do you want. Do you want to see what's inside?
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I want. Yeah, please.
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Are you interested?
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I'm. Yeah.
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Are you intrigued?
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I don't know. Maybe. I'm not.
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No.
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Do it. Open it.
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I'll tell you a bit more about it. Inside is a piece of card, and you're very much gonna want. You're very. As the episode progresses, you're gonna. You're gonna want this card more and more. Okay?
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Oh, okay. So you're not gonna open it?
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Oh, I'm not gonna open it. Do you think I'm a fool? I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna give in to you straight away, Michael.
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Right. But I really want to know what's in there.
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This is. This is what you call a hook and tease, okay? And that is. That's what this episode is.
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I'm hooked. I'm being teased.
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And here is what this information is about. What is it about? Sealed envelopes, locked boxes, clickbait. All of the things that make us desperately want to know the answer. This, Michael, is an episode about curiosity. Ooh.
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Curious.
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This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
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Our bodies are incredible machines, worrying away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.
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In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back to the moon and back.
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That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London underground into a suitcase.
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By the age of 50, you have copied almost 6 trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes. And over time, those mistakes can accumulate, and that collection of errors can lead to cancer.
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But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors. And by finding them, They've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer. 40.
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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience this episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify this episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google Account, Google Health App Internet and Google Health Premium subscription. Features subject to change Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy. All right, let me start off. Let me start off by telling you about this amazing psychology experiment. My favourite psychology experiments are the ones which involve electrocuting people, particularly when people essentially volunteer to get electrocuted themselves. So this is 2016, it's 54 students and I mean, look, they've signed up for a psychology experiment, so let's not pretend they didn't see something coming. But they are led into a room and there is a bowl of joke pens on the desk and they're told, look, some of these will shock you and some of them won't. If you tell people exactly which pension will shock you and which, which ones are safe, they don't touch them, they don't go anywhere near them. They're like, that's fine, I can accept. I'm not going to touch any of the black pens or whatever it might be. However, if you just tell them that, look, some of these pens will shock you and some of them won't. No further instructions. Then they get involved. They like, they want to find out. They're sort of curious to find out the answer. Five times as often, by the way, if you don't give them that information, if you leave an information gap, then five times as often they will go in there and they will fiddle with these pens and get electrocuted.
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Well, I was going to say, we know that people will shock themselves knowingly if they're bored enough. It's just something to do. But you say that they're five times more likely to get shocked if you leave it mysterious. What will shock them?
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Just a little information gap that they want closing. They're not bored, by the way. They can do plenty of other things. They're just, I just want to know, just want to know which ones, which one's going to electrocute me? I want to know how sharp the electrical shock is going to be. And there is something weird about this, right, because there's no prize here. You know, there's no dare, there's no like expectation. They're just electrocuting themselves purely to discover whether they'd be electrocuted.
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Yeah, there's, there's, it's not a game they can't win. It's not about finding the electric ones. They just do it for themselves.
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Right. So the researchers called this particular phenomenon, they called it the Pandora effect. You know, the idea that like, okay, you're given an instruction, don't open the box. And it's sort of a similar draw to touch these pens. But here's the thing that I think is a real puzzle in all of this, because our curiosity is quite often this force that is strong enough to beat self preservation. The drive to not want to be shocked or not want to be hurt pales into comparison to, to our drive to want to find out, to want to. Our curiosity to find out an answer. And I think that's kind of interesting, right, because I was at my daughter's sports day today and they have all of these signs up right around the school. One of this giant sign that just says curiosity. And I think there's something interesting in that, right, like that this is something that we prize in our children, that you kind of like, you give it to toddlers as like a banner, a badge of honor. Right. Be as curious as possible. I mean, you and I talk about it all the time. It's like a really. And yet maybe it isn't, you know, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's the thing that will end up getting you shocked. That's, that's where I'm going with this.
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So, yeah, we've, we've talked about curiosity a lot. We often talk about it as a species defining trait, though it's a bit paradoxical because it can lead to some bad outcomes. Why would evolution prefer it?
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And also, I should add, right, like this, this idea, the way you and I talk about it, the way they put banners up about it in school as though it's this incredibly positive trait that absolutely was not always the case. For a very, very long time, curiosity was considered really a horrendous sin.
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Oh, when are we talking? Because curiosity is something humans have had forever and yet our social and cultural attitude towards it has changed, you say?
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Yeah. So for about 1500 years it was considered a vice, not, not a virtue at all. And a proper named one, by the way. So St. Augustine who was writing about four. Side note. Basically personally road tested every sin just to decide which ones were really bad. And he said that curiosity was lust of the eyes. Right. One of the three lusts at the root of all sin. That's what he wrote. It was like, it's not good. He called it a disease. Michael. I mean, people really were not happy about this. Aquinas, he was the same. He called it curiositas and said that it was a vice as opposed to studio sitas, which is studying, but only the kind that God signs off on. So, like, asking questions about the world around you is not considered a good thing. I mean, look, if you look at ancient literature, you can see that over and over again. The moral of the story is that curiosity is bad. Right. So Pandora's box, you know, she really wanted to know what was in the box. It didn't turn out that well for her. Eve's apple. She really wanted to know what the apple tasted like. There's also Lot, Lot's win wife who turned around for a quick look of Sodom and then was instantly turned into a pillar of salt. I mean, over and over again in these stories, the sort of, the fable. I mean, partly the accused is a woman. It's almost always, are you silly, curious.
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Always those women.
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But definitely the center these stories is like, do not be curious. You know, like, you'll never lead anywhere good.
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Yeah. Don't ask questions. I think it seems very connected to the notion of the sacred. Some things just are the way they are. Don't try the apple. Just, just accept it.
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Just accept it. And I think that there was elements of sort of population control that were going on around that. You know, especially with Christianity, with the kind of rise of the Christian church, this idea that you can sort of the Scripture, the Bible is the ultimate truth.
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Yeah.
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And don't ask questions about it too much because actually that's just not, not going to lead anywhere good. So in the 1500s, you started getting these little, little academies popping up where scholars really wanted to ask these kind of questions. There's one called the Academy of Secrets. And then the Inquisition just shut it down because they were like, no, if you know too much, then you get to decide what is known. And that's, that's not a good thing. And the turn to curiosity possibly being a good thing actually only happens in about 15, 1600s when it just flips from, from being a vice to a virtue. And actually the turn happens with the, the advent of the telescope and the microscope. Oh.
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Because all your notes on this. Like, I am just learning so much and this is so interesting to me. So, yeah, the telescope and the microscope, they show us that they're, they're. There is not just hidden knowledge, but hidden stuff that can be learned about. There's more to see.
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Yeah, there's more to see. And suddenly everybody is like, oh, okay, and what about this? And what about this? And what about this? I mean, then you get the era of enlightenment, then you get the scientific revolution, then you get, you know, this massive explosion in discovery and curiosity and all that that goes on to give us the proof, by the way, that curiosity wasn't valued before is the word itself. So basically it barely existed before about 1640, right. Almost didn't exist at all. And it comes from the Latin curio sitas from cura, which means care, which is the same, same root as cure, curator and manicure. So, okay, when you are being curious and getting your nails done, it's basically the same urge, right? Same caring for something. You're car something, but you literally, I mean, you almost don't see this word at all before that point. And then it appears hundreds of times a decade. But you know, by 1700 it's used really commonly and that's it. You know, before that moment in time, we just didn't permit curiosity. In fact, you know, the. I told my daughter, my nine year old daughter, I was gonna do an episode on curiosity and she said, oh, curiosity killed the cat. No, actually the original line from 1598 was care killed the cat.
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Are you serious?
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Mm.
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1598. Care killed the cat.
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1598. Yeah. They only switched in about 1900. What does that mean though?
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Care killed the cat. What's the lesson that they're trying to convey? Killing it with kindness, that sometimes kindness can lead you astray into danger.
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So it was about excessive anxiety. Yeah.
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Yeah. It looks like you can also find the line in Much Ado about nothing. What courage, man. What Thou care killed a cat. Thou has metal enough in thee to kill care.
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So, so here's the thing, right? This is this word that we, we said was a sin for 1500 years. And then in the end we'd sort of naming a Mars rover over it. That's like, what's going on with those two things, by the way?
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Now we're, we're putting up big banners that extol curiosity in schools. We want kids to be curious as
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though it's a really positive thing.
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Yeah.
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Wow.
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So it wasn't even really a concept that was discussed it wasn't a virtue. The closest thing was care, by which we meant excessive worry and anxiety over someone or something which could kill a
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cat, which I would say is not a positive thing.
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Even, even in 1998, Ebenezer Brewer included a definition that said care killed the cat. It is said that a cat has nine lives, yet care killed the. Would wear them all out.
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I want to show you that, I want to show you just how powerful, right, this, like, curiosity can be. Because at some point in the Next, let's say 20 minutes or so, I'm going to open up a little hole in your memory that you're going to be physically unable to leave alone, okay? You're going to know the moment. You're going to know the moment when it arrives in terms of what is going on, when we feel curious, when we have that drive to push the button to, you know, turn over the pen, whatever it might be, sail across the ocean. There are all of these different theories about it. And I think the cleanest theory, you know, the first time people really sort of got hands on this is it was George lowenstein in the 90s, right? This is a kind of how late we were like, what is this? Because before then it was all like, oh, it's the pleasure of learning. It's, you know, you're just enjoying learning. And that's, that's all there is to it. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. There is this drive that you have that is more than just sitting down and reading a textbook. It's where you really want to know the answer. And he says that it is an information gap, essentially. It's the distance between what you know and what you've just realized that you don't know. And that just realized bit is really key. But the way to think about it is to think about a missing tooth, right? So you know precisely where it should be. So this isn't just like some vague information all over the place. You know, I don't know very much about 16th century French poetry, but I, I don't really, I'm not sort of driven to find out more, right? It's like the missing tooth is a really good analogy because you know exactly where this information slots in and your, your tongue will not under any circumstances leave it alone, right? So you're poking at it because you feel the gap, right? You sort of have the deprivation. And that's the thing about curiosity is that it's not a wish. It's not like, oh, that would be nice. It's More like a deprivation. It's more like your brain is missing something and it needs to know.
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That's a really good way to put it because, yeah, I also don't want to or desire to learn about 16th century French poetry, but I could be made to where suddenly, if I feel that it's a deprivation, I feel like it's a missing hole in my teeth, then I will look it out because I need it for some new reason.
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Exactly right. I'm going to show you a couple of examples of that in a second, of how this works. But the thing is, if you put people in brain scanners and then you make them curious, you put them in this state of deprivation, essentially where they really want to know, then the same part of your reward circuit inside your brain lights up that you would see if they were a fruit machine or if you said, would you like a bacon sandwich? Or if you get a text back from somebody that you're really flirtatiously pursuing, it's like, is your dopamine, essentially? And what that does is it means that curiosity is a very specific form of motivation. The prize is dopamine in the end. But you shouldn't mistake the dopamine for pleasure. There's a difference between wanting and liking. Those run on separate systems in your brain, and we know this. Actually there's some Parkinson's patients who were put on drugs that would boost their dopamine so that they had like kind of endless motivation but no sort of satisfaction, as it were. And what they became, they would sometimes slide into, you know, compulsive gambling or shopping or eating or whatever it was, but they weren't enjoying any of it. They were just driven to just do more and more and more and more and more of it. And that's the bit that your curiosity is doing. It's driven to find it.
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Right. And then you can sate your curiosity. But these people taking these drugs couldn't sate it. They just.
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Exactly.
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I think that explains a lot of the behavior we're seeing in old folks homes nowadays where they're just throwing caution to the wind. Gambling. A lot of STDs are spreading like never before. Have you heard about all of this?
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No.
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They might be on medications that are helping their Parkinson's and yet are making them wild, Uninhibited teenagers who need to pursue these things, these, these delicious lifestyle treats, but they can't. They can't be satisfied.
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I mean, they can't be satisfied, but it's not so good. But aside from that knock yourselves out, guys. I think that's great.
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Keep it up.
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That's great. Maybe use protection, but nonetheless, you know, I think it's great. I think it's great. Right, so here's the other thing about this. When you have created this gap in somebody's mind, when you created that, that sort of deprivation, you put them in this curious state and actually what ends up happening is that you remember the thing that you learn better. So your hippocampus is essentially primed. It's like, okay, I really want to know this. And I'm really going to. I'm going to hang on to the answer that comes in. Curiosity is like this real attention, spotlight that you're like, I'm really focused. I care a lot about what the, what the answer is going to be. But there is this shape, you know, kind of as we said with 16th century poetry, that if you know nothing about subjects at all, you're not going to have an itch. If you know everything about subjects, you're not going to have an itch at all. If you. This is the Lowenstein work. You get this, this peak right in the middle where you know just enough to know exactly where the information is missing, which is not coincidentally where the whole like, oh, you're never going to believe what happened next. 10 weird things that psychologists want you to know. Right?
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Yeah.
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It's like there's just enough in that that you're like, okay, fill the holes for me.
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I got to fill it. Right. That's why it's such a great clickbait.
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Yeah.
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You open up that hole and then it's curiosity that is causes us need to fill it. I need to click. I need to figure this out. Oh, they say number one is really mind blowing. What is number one? I can't just leave me hanging with this like unfinished promise.
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Right. And that phrasing just there is different to. There's something interesting in this film because it's not specific enough. You'll enjoy this. It's nowhere near specific enough. Whereas number one is mind blowing. Is quite literally a sort of what's in the box, Right. What's in the envelope? It's like, it's one of those. It's like, I want to know what is inside that particular thing. Okay, so, so here, if you want to make somebody maximally curious, right? Here's. Here's your. Here's your. Your three steps and retain the information afterwards. Okay. So the first is that you need to open up a gap where they nearly know the answer, but they don't know. So, for you, I would like you to name all seven dwarfs. Right. I'll start you off. You've got Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, and Sneezy. What are the other two?
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Say those first five again.
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Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, and Cutie Patootie.
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No, I know, I know. Bashful's one of them.
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You're not allowed to look it up.
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I'm not looking it up.
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Give me some. Give me some wrong guesses. Cutie, Patootie.
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Okay, say the five again.
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Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy.
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Oh, I was gonna say Sneezy, but you've already listed that one, so it's Bashful.
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And. Tell you what, we'll come back to this later. Sticky. No, no, not sticky. Not cute. Patootie.
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Isn't it like a. It's like not even an adjective. It's like. Well, doc is one.
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You know what? I think we should come back to this later because I've got the answers written in the envelope.
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Ah, I see. Yeah. You've made this difficult. You've made me want. You've made me driven to get the answer.
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I have tried to. I've tried to. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk. What if your immune system could learn to recognize cancer cells?
- [21:29]
A
That's immunotherapy. One type is CAR T cell therapy. T cells are your body's watchmen. And doctors can now extract these and reprogram them to spot cancer.
- [21:39]
B
They've started showing this real promise in treating cancers of the blood like leukemia, because unlike most cancers, blood cancer ce they float around separately. And that makes it easier for CAR T cells to seek them out and destroy them.
- [21:52]
A
And now Cancer Research UK funded scientists are designing CAR T cells that can tackle solid tumors too, making them tougher so they can survive a more crowded and hostile cancer environment.
- [22:03]
B
Now, these approaches are experimental, but they do start to show where treatment might go next. And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the uk. I mean, this shows you how far research can take us.
- [22:18]
A
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for for it ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required compatibility and availability various 18.
- [22:54]
B
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A
being retained and the wrong answers help. Can you tell me more about why they help?
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B
I think that. So. So this is. This is Lowenstein again, by the way. He did this in 1992, and he asked people, which US state reaches further east or furthest East. Sorry, do you want to make a guess?
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Yeah. It's Maine.
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B
Incorrect.
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Oh, really? Maine is the closest to Africa, but the furthest. Reaching the furthest east. It's curious. I mean, I really want to look at a map. I really need to get this information. Because if it's. If it's not Maine, what could it be? Because I've always heard and seen, if you look at a globe, Maine is definitely closer to Africa because of the way we're actually a bit, you know, tilted.
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B
Agree. But agree that is true.
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Is there some weird thing where it's actually Alaska because it crosses the date line? Yeah, okay.
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B
Yes, exactly. It stretches so far west that it kind of essentially wraps around. I mean, Sarah Palin, who said, I can see Russia from my window.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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It's because it goes so far west that it ends up crossing the day line and ending up.
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Right, Right. So part. There's part of Alaska that's actually just extremely east according to our system of longitude.
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B
Exactly. So Lowenstein, he asked people this question, and he found that people who were told that their guess was wrong ended up both being far more curious, but also remembered the answer for longer than people who just guessed and then left it.
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Well, you know what I mean? That's a case in point right there. If I had just thought to myself, oh, the answer is Maine. I know this, then I wouldn't have thought about it again. But because you told me I was wrong, I became much more aware of a hole in my knowledge, and it's there. And I even have a good sense of the shape of that hole now. And I go, wait a second. And I didn't let us move on until I got it right.
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B
Right, right. Totally. So, but this is the thing. I think that when you are. When you are learning, it feels like wrong answers are just, you know, delaying your progress. But actually, wrong answers are making you feel the shape of the gap and driving you to want to find the right answer. As long as it is done in a way that is not too hard, not too easy if you get it exactly the right level. It's like where you get the best possible learning. Like, you need to struggle a little bit because that is where your brain is kind of forcing open these gaps.
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A
This reminds me of, I think Derek Mueller's doctoral thesis was on this method of teaching, and he incorporated it into his YouTube videos where he was like, people have more fun when things are pretty, like, easy. They say they enjoy a video, but they learn more if you present wrong answers as wrong Answers. And that's why he did so many of these interviews on the street where he was like, hey, if the Earth was a. Was a basketball and the moon was a tennis ball, how far apart would they be? And he showed people getting it wrong, and it made you go, oh, my gosh, just tell me the answer. And people would say they were frustrated by the video, but when you tested them later, they remembered the correct answer better if you had shown them all the wrong guesses.
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B
I bet they watched longer as well. I bet.
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And they probably watched longer because they. They need to wait around for this answer. They can't just think, oh, I'm sure I know this. It's probably. I don't know about that far. Next.
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B
Here's the thing, right? So, I mean, despite the fact that this was very unfashionable for a very long time, you know, the idea of curiosity, it is in all of us. It arrives incredibly early. This, like, insatiable need to fill in the gaps, no information. This really gorgeous study using. Using babies who are 11 months old. And what they do is they get. They get a ball, and they basically show the babies a magic trick. So they have, like, a kind of a hidden lever which makes it look like this passes through a wall, okay? And then they give the baby an opportunity to play with this ball and other balls. The baby always chooses the magic ball. You know what I said? Always. As though Nothing is ever 100% the baby.
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We gotta make room for the babies that are like, nah, magic ball, big deal.
- [29:31]
B
Give me the block. Okay? So, but what they do with the ball is they take the magic ball and they start hitting it against tables, against walls, against chairs, whatever it might be. And if you. If you change the magic trick that you show the babies and you show them where a ball floats in the air, okay? Then the babies go to gravitate towards the ball. Gravitate. And then they pick it up and they drop it. So it's like they're testing their models of physics, essentially. I mean, certainly, you know, you wouldn't read like that inside of a baby brain. But that's what they're doing. Yeah, that's what they're doing. They're like, here is this gap. Gap in what I thought I knew about how balls worked. And my drive is to try and fill in that gap by running experiments. Essentially, they're sort of motivated to learn. And I think this is it, right? It's again, this. This Goldilocks effect. Because if the scene is too chaotic, if the magic trick is too elaborate. They don't care if it's too simple, if it's too easy, they don't care. But this sweet spot in the middle of where they can feel what the gap is and they believe that they can fill it. It's like they know the exact shape of this gap, then off they go. They're just like extremely excited by it.
- [30:47]
A
Wow. I'm sorry. I was literally trying to think of Dwarves names. Because I can't stop.
- [30:59]
B
It's annoying, isn't it?
- [31:00]
A
I feel like I should know.
- [31:02]
B
Isn't it annoying?
- [31:04]
A
And that's what you wrote in the envelope, that's what has my name on it.
- [31:07]
B
Because I knew. I knew you would want to know.
- [31:10]
A
But let me tell you, I no longer want you to open the envelope. I really want to find it myself. I feel like it's in there or that I can work my way towards the answer. And I need to finish this. And it's not so much that I'm uncomfortable not knowing, it's that I'm anticipating the pleasure of getting it. I was. I got a taste by saying bashful. That made me feel like, ooh, yeah, more of that. All right, so what's this seventh one? Yeah, let me. Sorry. I just want to know. I'll be thinking about this in the background. Are there different degrees to which people are bothered by these information gaps? Like, is it a personality trait to be more upset by them and more fixated on filling them?
- [31:56]
B
Yes. And also, actually, your curiosity does decay as you get older. So it's the dopamine reward system that motivates you to find out more. That actually in some people, it sort of ends up dying away as time goes on. The other thing is, actually, I mean, if you've got this innate drive, and as humans, we have this innate drive, it also means that it could be exploited. And essentially this curiosity drive is the whole reason why doom scrolling works and works so incredibly well. Of course, you can see this, by the way, there's other experiments. So in 2018, OpenAI did this experiment where they. Because there was a big idea for quite a long time about maybe the way to build intelligence. Maybe the fundamental aspect of our intelligence is curiosity. Actually, if you are motivated by wanting to learn information, right, rather than being motivated just by food or, you know, whatever other biological responses there are, if you're motivated by curiosity, maybe that's the way that you get to artificial intelligence. So OpenAI, they built these, these, these. These agents that was rewarded by only curiosity. And they did amazing like they could play Mario from scratch. They, you know, could do all kinds of things. And then somebody added in a TV in the next level, like a TV screen that just showed random static and the agents basically sat down and never moved again. They were just like, oh, transfixed by the sort of maximally unpredictable, like maximally curious sort of forever state. Now, okay, you don't get that in humans because as we know in humans, we need, the gap needs to have a correct size and shape for us to want to fill it, right? But here is the thing with Doom scrolling, that is what it manages to do because there is always the promise that the next thing that you see, it's like, what is this next thing going to be? What is the next video going to show me? And then when you add to that the fact that everybody has worked out that the algorithm just works better, people stay on your videos longer. If you also use these tricks, if you also use clickbait, if you also say you're not going to believe number one is going to be mind blowing. It's something built to exploit your curiosity drive embedded within a bigger system to exploit your curiosity drive that can just end up leaving you just that like getting the dopamine. Dopamine, Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. The sort of satiating, the feeling of having filled the curiosity hole without ever having the kind of joy of actually struggling with that deprivation.
- [34:40]
A
Well, that's why I want to know so much about my algorithm, what, what equations are filling my feed. Because I feel like I would learn so much about myself because I think we all get different things in our feed. There isn't just one way to skin a cat. As we were saying, different people are motivated to keep scrolling because they're getting a particular kind of content. Yeah, I wonder what it is that works on me the best because it works really, really well. And I try to be mindful of what is making me want more of these things that come up. However, yeah, it lacks the, the effort. I'm just getting it for free. And in fact, whenever I'm scrolling reels and one of them is a puzzle and it's something like, can you name the seven dwarves? I might give it a second of thought and then I just say, whatever, I'll revisit this. I might even screenshot it, see if I can do it later, but I'll just keep scrolling.
- [35:41]
B
So I think this is the thing, you know, the three stages of like really getting somebody's curiosity drive up is that you can't Resolve it immediately. You have to sort of leave it. And the problem is when you're watching videos that are one minute, two minutes, whatever, it's just resolved, resolved, resolved, result, it kind of never, it never stays open long enough for your hippocampus to sort of actually retain any of the information of the reels that you're watching.
- [36:04]
A
Right, right.
- [36:06]
B
There's a kicker on this, which isn't very nice either. So. So Lowenstein, again, this is in 2020. The thing is, is that like any appetite, right, this, you know, your dopamine reward system, which is what's, what's going on in your brain, your curiosity needs to feel hungry, essentially. Like you need to kind of have that deprivation. And the problem is, is that if you are. I mean, I'm using an analogy here, but if you're effectively snacking all the time, over and over and over and over again, you never get properly hungry. You never get hungry for real information. And so the real concern here is that actually, I mean, the evidence is mounting in this, in this regard that actually the kind of attention economy isn't just exploiting your curiosity, it's actually dampening it over time. You are less driven, less motivated to find out the sort of deep, more meaningful things that you otherwise would have caught your attention. Because it's just so easy. It's like the, you know, it's junk food, right?
- [37:06]
A
Right. You're not hungry long enough, or if at all, you're. You're just given the snacks. And it does, it does fulfill a little bit of a drive because you don't know what's going to come next. It might be something important, it might be something funny, it might be something you can share with your friend, but it's nowhere near the, the, the kind of hunger you would get without the Internet, without such accessible information, where you're like, how can I solve this problem in my life? Some of them, I bet, are just logistical problems, like, how can I do this, but also pick up my kids and also make sure that I go to the grocery store? Like, those are all things. And once you've got assistance and AI assistants that can do it all, there's. You're not hungry anymore. But what you're saying is that the hunger is important.
- [37:54]
B
Yeah, it really is. It's like you getting stuff wrong is the thing that helps you remember. The hunger is the thing that will drive you on to be more curious. You sort of need it, unfortunately. I mean, look, food tastes better when you're hungry, right? And curiosity feels better. When you, like when you feel. When you fight for it. I want to go back to that question though. That idea of like, you still working on dwarves, by the way.
- [38:21]
A
Actually, I think I figured it out.
- [38:23]
B
Okay.
- [38:24]
A
Yeah. I think. Here's what's funny. It just sort of came to me when I wasn't thinking about the dwarves, which is how this often works because I was pretty sure it was in my brain. Now, I could be wrong, but I think the seventh one is Dopey.
- [38:38]
B
You are correct. It's Bashful and Dopey.
- [38:40]
A
Bashful and Dopey. Now I'm pretty surprised I got that right because I don't think about the seven dwarves very often at all. No, I feel like I had a sense that it was a bit of a silly name, you know, it wasn't a normal, like sleepy Happy. It was something that was a little like, negative. And I was right. Dopey.
- [39:01]
B
Dopey. It wasn't Julie, which I think was one of your earlier guesses.
- [39:06]
A
Cutie Patootie.
- [39:09]
B
That's the ripoff of Snow White and Seven Dwarves. The pirate copy.
- [39:14]
A
Stinky and late.
- [39:17]
B
And late. Yeah. Okay. I want to go back to that idea of like, how on earth could this drive have survived when clearly it is something that would have killed many of our ancestors. And the thing is that while I agree with you about how humans are stand out in our curiosity, I also think that actually you do see this same reward mechanism, this drive, in other creatures too. And what I'm specifically talking about here is about separating out information and reward. Right? Okay, so let me give you an example. There's this experiment where you have a choice between two options. Okay? Like imagine you've got two levers in front of you and both of them give the same chance of food. After five seconds, okay? It's like 50, 50. Whether you get the food, you press a button. 50, 50. Whether you get food. There's no difference essentially between the two buttons, except that one of them will immediately tell you whether food's coming or not. Right. So it immediately tells you whether you've won or not. About you. But I'd be pressing that one every time. I don't want to wait. I don't want to wait to find out if I won. Just tell me, Just tell me, Just tell me.
- [40:31]
A
Yeah, right.
- [40:32]
B
And there's a difference there because it's like it makes no difference to the reward, but the information is a separate signal. And humans, you will not be surprised here, press the information button.
- [40:43]
A
Yeah.
- [40:43]
B
You know, all the time. So do macaques. They, they, they care very deeply. They reliably want the information. Tell me when the food's coming. Birds also. They want that. They, they want the information. Goldfish, they don't care. Goldfish really doesn't make any difference. They're not interested in the extra information. Thank you very much. This doesn't make any difference to them. This is sort of an indication that you are seeing information as its own reward in some animals and not others. Right. It has evolved.
- [41:12]
A
Right. So somewhere between goldfish and macaques, information as a reward emerges.
- [41:19]
B
Yeah, information as a reward. So we know there is this, this evolutionary selection for it or an evolutionary drive, let's say, that has, like, presented it as an advantage. And, and just going back to that idea of like, you know, people surely died when they were crossing the oceans. I mean, I think there are different ways to look at this. There's back to Augustine around 400 AD. This is when he was saying that curiosity was awful. He talks about how there was a mangled corpse by the roadside and people came out to look at it. Right. It's sort of rubbernecking, you know, but, but, yeah, whatever.
- [41:59]
A
Like a morbid curiosity.
- [42:00]
B
Morbid curiosity, exactly. And he writes it was. They, they wanted to see, to be made sad and to turn pale. And this was one of the reasons why he thought it was a sin, because it was like, you know, why would you, why would you be drawn to this? But also, this is like hauling you towards danger, you know, trying to, like, go towards a creature of the same species as you who has died in a bad way. Surely not a very good thing. And yet maybe it actually is. Maybe it actually is. So there's a fish called the guppy who has a behavior that's really similar to this. What it does when a predator turns up to go and eat the guppy, certain, certain guppies will leave the safety of their shoal and swim over to inspect the predator. Crazy. What are they doing? Like, this seems wild.
- [42:56]
A
Well, it seems like a bad idea for them, but is it a good idea for the larger school of guppies?
- [43:03]
B
Wow. The thing is, is that, I mean, they do the sort of the, the, the kind of tail end rather than the business end. They're not sort of like, they're not kind of crazy. They're not suicidal.
- [43:13]
A
Okay, okay.
- [43:15]
B
But the thing is, is that actually the guppies that went and inspected were actually not just sort of helping the wider school. They were less likely to be eaten than the ones that hung back. Because the thing is, is that they know where the predator is. Right. The predator's lost the element of surprise.
- [43:36]
A
Right.
- [43:37]
B
And actually what ends up happening is the predator itself ends up just leaving the hunt, just being like, okay, well, I've been spotted. Not gonna bother with those ones then.
- [43:44]
A
Oh, wow.
- [43:45]
B
To actually reduce the chance of being eaten for them and everyone else.
- [43:50]
A
Right. So there's. It's like there's many advantages here. Cause I would say those. Those morbid curiosities. We feel you can kind of justify it as saying, well, we wanna learn about how that accident happened and what happened to that missing person. Because it in some way is like a vaccinated danger for us. We can explore it, but it's safe. It's just a podcast. And yet it allows us to experience things and almost feel more prepared for them.
- [44:21]
B
And, you know, there's actually evidence for exactly that. So during the early weeks of 2020, the pandemic, it turned out, but people who scored highly in morbid curiosity. So we're talking about horror fans, we're talking about people who love watching true crime, people who sort of, you know, all kinds of like, morbid curiosity, looking at pictures of dead people, all of that kind of thing, they ended up scoring higher on psychological resilience. They were less distressed than everybody else. And like, it's almost as though maybe there is something about. We're kind of rehearsing. It's exactly as you described. Right. Like, okay, well, let's see what's going on there. So we make sure that the same thing doesn't happen to us.
- [45:07]
A
So the benefits outweighed the costs.
- [45:09]
B
Exactly, exactly right. Exactly right. And I think this is it, actually. Just Going back to the point that you made right at the top about how humans have this drive, this curiosity to explore elsewhere. We are still doing it, you know, in 2009, NASA ran this competition for people to name it's Mars rover. And it ended up being this sixth grader from Kansas, in fact. Oh. Called Clara Ma Lenaxa. In Kansas. Do you know where that is?
- [45:43]
A
Yeah, Lenexa. Yeah, of course, I didn't live very
- [45:46]
B
far from there, if I've pronounced that incorrectly. Imagine all the other words that you went there.
- [45:51]
A
I'm a Stillwell Overland part kid. So. Lenexa, they were the, you know, they were the big city folk to me.
- [45:57]
B
Okay, okay. The sophisticated ones, but still, we're, you
- [46:02]
A
know, we're brothers and sisters, you know, I love them, of course.
- [46:04]
B
Of course. I think this is such a lovely story.
- [46:07]
A
Right.
- [46:07]
B
That like they allowed the public to name it. I think Boaty McBoatface has ruined that forevermore for everyone.
- [46:13]
A
Yeah, it's hard to beat that one.
- [46:15]
B
It's hard to beat that one. Anyway, she suggested the word curiosity and she wrote this really gorgeous essay. 250 words. And she said that curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everybody's mind. The thing that drives us through ordinary days. How gorgeous is that? That's what it is. She got to sign her name on the rover as well.
- [46:36]
A
I didn't know that Curiosity was named by a Kansan who said such beautiful things about Curiosity. That's great.
- [46:43]
B
Isn't that lovely? I mean, maybe she saw one of the signs. It's school, right? Right.
- [46:48]
A
It's all been worth it.
- [46:50]
B
It's all been worth it. And I think that's it. You know, this thing has this most, the most incredible arc, you know, something that has been called disease. The thing that like was the, the, you know, that myths were written about as like the moral of the story was to avoid being curious. You know, it's the thing that will make you electrocute yourself, drive you to electrocute yourself, even if it hurts. And I think actually it's just really lovely that this is the thing that's now on Mars kind of wandering around. It's sort of strapped it to nuclear battery and let a 12 year old name in and off we go. How fitting.
- [47:25]
A
That's a wonderful story, by the way. I love hearing a story about any Kansan child who, you know, did something amazing. But I've been doing a lot of research on the history of what it means to be cool, specifically the word coolness, and why people a hundred, a thousand years ago certainly had status and all of that, but the word cool never existed. And I'm starting to think, and this is. I'll tease this for a future episode because we should do one on coolness. I wonder if the concept of being cool might have also emerged for the same social and cultural reasons that curiosity became so important that even children are being taught it and are sharing its importance.
- [48:09]
B
Are you suggesting that I go down to the school tomorrow with a sign that just says coolness on it? I think I will actually.
- [48:18]
A
I am suggesting that. I think that at schools, you know, we have the signs that say respect, compassion, curiosity. There should be one that says cool because we live in a society where it's not just where do you fall in the aristocracy hierarchy, but it's like, what do you have as an innovative thought or idea like we contribute in different ways than we used to. And so being curious and being cool, being autonomous in ways that bring new things, new information, not just existing status but new information. We live in this, like, time now where information is the currency. Like, of course we're going to find that curious people and cool people take up a lot of our time.
- [49:07]
B
Well, you watching this podcast, listening to this podcast, you are both cool and curious. That's right. You are forever part of our club. So thank you so much for listening. Tell you what, we're gonna have to come up with one hell of a clickbait title for this one, aren't we? Imagine that talking about the theory of clickbait and then not doing a clickbait title.
- [49:24]
A
Whoo.
- [49:25]
B
It's going to be punchy. But anyway, you can email us. As ever, the rest is science at gohanger.
- [49:31]
A
Com and we will see you next time.
- [49:33]
B
Bye.