How to Become More Curious

Learning is a lot easier when it’s interesting. And it’s interesting, to a large extent, because you’re curious about the subject. Yes, the carrot of career opportunity and stick of exam failures can motivate. But if you really want to learn something, nothing beats curiosity.

Yet it’s boredom, not curiosity, that dominates student life. Research shows that students report feeling bored much of the time in class. This makes it harder to pay attention and more painful to learn.

How can you boost your curiosity for a new subject?

The Science of Curiosity

Curiosity remains an under-studied phenomenon. Early research focused on now mostly discredited drive-reduction accounts. Curiosity, like hunger, was envisioned as an aversive state that we were driven to reduce. But, if this were true, why would anyone read a murder mystery novel?

In 1994, George Loewenstein offered a more modern take in his information-gap theory. This theory argued that curiosity was driven from the gap between what you know and what you’d like to know. While this definition may seem almost tautologically true, there were a few key predictions:

• Curiosity is susceptible to framing effects. Like a figure-ground illusion, if the situation emphasizes a single missing piece, you’re much curious than if you think you haven’t assembled most of the puzzle.
• Insight-based problems evoke more curiosity than accumulative ones. If you need a…