Curiosity is the Receptor, Understanding is the Stimuli
By Daniel Miessler on September 27th, 2007: Tagged as Culture | Education
The more questions one has floating around in their mind at any given time, the more knowledge can be harvested from day to day experiences. Knowledge and understanding are being presented in every experience, but unless you have the appropriate curiosity associated with that presentation of information, nothing will be gained.
People who lose their curiosity early in life are like nerve damage victims who can no longer feel heat on their fingers. Once you lack the receptor it doesn’t matter what you’re exposed to.
So basically, you need two things to be able to expand your mind. You need to have questions and/or curiosity, and you need to have experiences that are charged with learning potential. As one or both go down, you become limited in terms of intellectual growth.This is why fostering interest and curiosity in young people should be a primary goal of our education system. We can always expose people to more things later in life, but if they lack the ability to benefit from those experiences due to curiosity receptor damage done as a child, then we’ve already failed them.:
“The more questions one has floating around in their mind at any given time, the more knowledge can be harvested from day to day experiences.”
I have to disagree with this. The more questions floating around in ones head the more likely they are to not generate questions based on their immediate observations. Effectively, too many questions results in too much noise and not enough room for signal. As a result, very little ends up being harvested. Instead the most likely result is “knowledge” produced inside their mind rather than by exposure to day to day experiences. Self made knowledge is often inaccurate without the test of reality. If you have a million questions already in your head, and they fill your thoughts, you’ll completely miss the opportunities to harvest knowledge from your day to day.
I argue that in order to most benefit from day to day exposure to data one must be able to generate questions quickly on the spot and at the time of exposure. Going around with a head full of questions is likely to be a major distraction as it’s inherently related to things not in front of you.
It’s good to keep the “pump primed” so to speak, but I think the definition of curiosity is to generate questions quickly based on observation, not to have them pre-fetched.
Comment by Dave — 9/27/2007 @ 1:57 pm
Hey Daniel,
Sorry, now that I’ve had the chance to reread this post, I mis-spoke when saying we were in disagreement. And the notion of having all of the questions already formed up in your head was clearly a figment of that prior misreading. Not sure wth I was doing at the time, or if I was interrupted between reading and replying, but clearly I ended up on some alternate conversation.
Comment by Dave — 9/28/2007 @ 12:07 am
I agree with the question part. In fact this post stimulated a train of thought. Apart from curiosity I think the ability to dream wild (improbable) dreams and set visions is one of the most effective ways of creating something original. I think many people, myself included, tend to censor ideas and visions that seem impossible. Something impossible is usually something you don’t know how to solve, or something you don’t have an answer to, not something that’s truly impossible (what is truly impossible?). This way you’re limiting yourself to your comfort zone and don’t stretch yourself enough.
Comment by Mike — 10/2/2007 @ 4:09 am