Too little
Dismissing the interruption
“Just a seed.”
A familiar category closes the question before the particular object has been examined.
Curiosity
Give an unexpected observation a question worth pursuing.
A settled desire to understand rather than remain content with unexamined assumptions.
Curiosity turns a noticed detail into an invitation to understand. Scientific curiosity enjoys the surprise, then gives it a workable direction: what is happening, what might explain it, and what could we look at next?
Curiosity gives a reason to look again
The field map sends you toward the far hedge. A winged seed has other plans: it catches on your sleeve. You stop to look at its shape, then wonder how it arrived there. The interruption becomes a small investigation. Your expedition has acquired a passenger with an excellent opening question.
Finding the balance in Curiosity
An unfamiliar seed catches on your clothing while you are following a planned observation route.
A fitting response
Following a promising question
“What about its shape or surroundings might explain how it reached me?”
You give the surprise a bounded investigation and preserve the main task.
Pursued too far
Chasing every novelty
“Let’s abandon the route for each new thing we see.”
The wish to discover everything scatters attention before any question develops.
A question becomes more interesting when you give it enough shape to pursue—and enough space to surprise you.
What Curiosity makes possible
Curiosity makes ordinary places richer. A sleeve, a shadow or an irregular sound can offer something that a prepared list did not anticipate. Keeping a small question alive also teaches you how to seek an answer: describe, compare, consult a reliable account and return to the observation with better eyes.
Curiosity in ordinary life
An unexpected column
A public dataset contains a variable you do not recognize. Read its description before using or ignoring it.
A repeated sound
You hear a pattern in an ordinary recording of your own work. Ask what distinguishes the repeated part rather than immediately naming a cause.
A shared question
At a team meeting, explain why an unexpected detail deserves investigation and what comparison could begin to answer it. Give colleagues enough substance to assess its promise.
Nearby virtues, different work
Attentiveness
Attentiveness notices the seed; Curiosity begins to ask about it.
Diligence
Diligence sustains the work after the first interesting surprise has become a set of checks.
Curiosity and its counterfeits
Counterfeit Curiosity: following the fashionable question
Adopting an impressive new topic without asking what could answer it mistakes attention for inquiry. A curious investigator wants an intelligible question whose answer matters.
How to cultivate Curiosity
Describe one detail before attaching an explanation.
Turn a broad wonder into a question you can investigate.
Keep a place for later questions so novelty need not derail the present task.
Try it today
Choose an ordinary object already available to you. Write one specific question about it, then consult an appropriate source or make a harmless closer observation.
Questions worth returning to
- Which detail did my first label conceal?
- What would make this a better question?
Keep the practice proportionate
Observe living things without disturbing them; use descriptions or photographs when handling would be inappropriate.
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
I was taught Euclid by a private tutor, and I distinctly remember the intense satisfaction which the clear geometrical proofs gave me.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · School years
The pleasure is in seeing why a result follows. Darwin’s recollection gives curiosity an attraction beyond collecting names or impressive conclusions.
He thus learns that things which, at first sight, seem to stand isolated and without apparent brotherhood in Nature are organically united, and finds the detection of such analogies a source of perpetual delight.
John Tyndall · Fragments of Science · Vol. I, XI. On The Study Of Physics.
The example leading to this sentence is a dew-drop, explained through cooling and condensation. Tyndall finds pleasure in following an ordinary observation into a larger question.
Has the discarded hypothesis, then, been barren? Far from that, it may be said it has rendered more service than a true hypothesis.
Poincaré argues that a rejected hypothesis can disclose an unexpected problem. Curiosity gives the disappointment a further question instead of simply filing it as failure.
I also watched the crabs, live shells, jelly-fish, and various marine animals, all of which were objects of curiosity and amusement to me in my lonely life.
Mary Somerville · Personal Recollections · Chapter II
Somerville recalls the shore as a place of absorbing observation. The interest comes from encounters with particular living things before it becomes a formal scientific project.
However, as you have an instrument, I think you are entitled to information of a telescopic comet which I happened to discover on the 1st of August, and which I found, by the observations of the 2nd, to have moved nearly three-quarters of a degree.
Herschel sends her brother Dietrich a discovery he can try to observe. Curiosity becomes an invitation with enough information for another person to join the inquiry.
But time failed me; I was alone, deserted, struggling against misfortune. Before philosophizing, one had to live.
Jean-Henri Fabre · The Wonders of Instinct · Chapter 1 · trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Fabre explains why an absorbing inquiry was interrupted. A living interest can survive a period when earning a living leaves little time to pursue it.
I claim the privilege of speaking to juveniles as a juvenile myself.
Michael Faraday · The Chemical History of a Candle · Lecture I.
Faraday begins by joining his young audience in the inquiry. Expertise can preserve the pleasure of asking rather than treating wonder as something to outgrow.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.