Perry Zurn & Dani Bassett || How Curiosity Connects Us

Professor of Philosophy at American University. He is the author or co author of more than seventy five publications in philosophy, political theory, trans studies, and network science, and has given hundreds of talks at local, national, and international venues. His work has been generously funded by organizations like the American Philosophical Association, the Center for Curiosity, and the Least Summer's

Fund and more. Doctor Danny S. Bassett is the J. Peter Skrikin It Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the departments of Bioengineering, electrical Systems, Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, neurology, and psychiatry. Together, they authored more than three hundred and ninety peer reviewed publications which I've garnered over thirty eight thousand citations. They authored more than three hundred and ninety peer reviewed publications, which I've garnered over

thirty eight thousand citations. Doctor Bassett has received multiple prestigious awards from the American Psychological Association, Swollen Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation, among others. Perry and Danny often collaborate on research about neuroscience, curiosity, and the humanities. Recently, they co wrote the book Curious Minds The Power of Connection. In this episode, I talked

to Perry's Earn and Danny Bassett about curiosity. For them, curiosity is not just about gaining knowledge, It's about connecting to the world and to each other. Each individual has their own style of connecting. They can be busybodies, hunters, or dancers at any given time. Perry and Danny also weigh in on how social media affects curiosity and how their network model of curiosity can improve education. This was a really fun and great chat. Doctor Danny Bassett and

I go way back to my pen days. We used to get coffee together and that was a lot of fun and inte actually stimulating, and all three of us had really great energy together and we really nerded out a lot about the science of curiosity and what it means for your own life. So, without further ado, I bring you doctor Perry z Arn and doctor Danny Bassett. Danny and Perry, it is so great to have you on the Psychology Podcast. How the heck are you doing? Whird?

It's thrilled to be here. Thanks for having us. I hope you're both doing well. And I was very excited to see that you have a new book out. It's called Curious Minds The Power of Connection. I know you've both been super interested in this topic for a long time, and I know because Danny we had many conversations at Penn about curiosity and the amazing and amazing work you've done. I remember our coffee chats. Do you remember our coffee chats?

You to remember our coffee chats? They were great. You know, if you could kind of tell our listeners a little about the background, you know, I know it personally, but you know, if you could just give some more context to our listeners about how you got interest in studying this topic and how long have you been studying and these sorts of things just give a little more context,

that'd be great. Sure. I got into curiosity in grad school primarily because I was researching the history of philosophy and the history of Western thought, and curiosity gets kind of a bad rap in that history, and I just thought, there's got to be more. That's sort of that that's strict, right, because today curiosity is just great, everyone's sort of on board. Great, yeh's let's all be more curious. And then in medieval period, age period, both were like curiosity gets you in trouble.

I got into it in grad school to try to table it from a philosophy perspective, and then we started talking about it. See really, when when you were a

post doc right then? Yeah, I mean at that point I was really interested in cognitive flexibility and also in brain flexibility and how is it that the brain can move between different cognitive states and how can we detect that using an MRI or MAGNE at a presidence imaging machine, And so Perry and I started talking a lot about green flexibility and how that might then help us to better understand the cognitive movements that are that are needed

or that are evinced by curious thought. Okay, so stepping back for a second. So Danny you're a you're a neuroscientist, yes, And Perry you're a philosopher. Am I am? I getting this right? So this is a really incredible pairing. You often don't see such a pairing, right, and trying to really contemplate such deep issues. So, first of all, I'd love to be a fly on the wall and a lot of your conversations that you all have when trying to trying to figure out humans. But also something that

people might not know is that you're identical twins. Is this true? It's true? You know that. I didn't know that. No, I did not know that. Can't tell It just never dawned on me, you know, like we funality. It's not like you explicitly told me, Oh, we're difficult, you know? So that is that is so cool? So is this something that growing up did you two talk about a lot?

Were you were? You both really curious kids. We're really encouraged to be very curious by our especially by our mother for well through K through twelve we were homeschooled in a very respirited sort of way. So I think she was always telling us, figure out what you want to know and then figure out how you're going to know it. It was very empowerment centric. So I think I think we're both naturally curious, but I think our

uh environment in that respect was really enhanced. I agree that that's something that we certainly had at the beginning of our our lives, but I think that we didn't really start talking about focusing on curiosity as a place to intersect our scholarly work until much much later. That was really, you know, and when we were post docs, because I guess you know, what happened growing up is that we tried to sort of separate a little bit and define what it was that we were each interested in.

And that's when Perry went off to do a degree in philosophy and I went off to do a degree in physics, and then physics and then the're a science And then it wasn't until after that that we realized, actually, we still maintain some really key shared interests, and now we can communicate about them from these very distinct disciplines. And that's where this book came about. I love that the subtitle of your book is so intriguing, and I imagine you wrote it in to intrigue people, and it's

the power of connection. There's many ways you can kind of interpret that, and a lot of people don't necessarily connect the idea of connection to curiosity. So can you talk about in what sense you're referring to connection. Sure, I'll set it up a little bit before we turn to sort of network science. But historically, again primarily in Western intellectual history, which I know the list about curiosity

has been thought about as an acquisitional approach. From an acquisitional approach, So, curiosity drives us to want to know something, and typically we grab it, grasp it, we talk about getting it, knowing it, taking it home with us in some sends. And this kind of curiosity is this drive to know, this desire to know, this desire to understand,

et cetera, et cetera. And while that's I think illuminating in many ways, this acquisitional approach seems not to be true our experience of curiosity or of the science behind curiosity. And so we went back to the drawing board and I revisited all the old texts and Danny revisited all the new science, and we keep up with the what we call our connectional model. Of curiosity, which is the curiosity isn't wanting to know or to get, but rather wanting to connect, connect the things we do know to

the things we're about to know. Also to connect ourselves to our world, and ourselves to each other and communities to each other. And some curiosity is this drive to connect and to build some kind of web of knowledge. I have you there with what you just said, really, Baumeister, I've always found it really interesting his research connecting the idea of meaning making to human connection. He says, there would be no meaning making if we're not in the

context of human connection. That's that's what meaning is, is the interweaving of lots of different things that you start to connect the dots and when we feel like we have meaning in our lives. I wanted I was wondering how you how you react to that prairie, that idea, and how that connects to the work you've done, the work you're doing at all, you know, and how's curiosity connected to meaning? You know? Curiously You've seeny connections there.

It's a really powerful quotation and reference there, and it resonates with me a lot. I would say, yes, and doesn't that change then what it means to learn or what it means to work in institute of learning. So many times I think all of us fall into a pattern of thinking we want to pass on knowledge or we want students to gear knowledge, not so much to

make meaning or to build connection. I think, especially to our work one of the things that we really want to focus on from it with a connectional model of curiosities to say, hey, we're here because we want to build things together. We want to craft and create meaning and societies, right, cultures and values together, not to be these individual nodes who are simply gathering other individual nodes of knowledge. And it stopped pounding disembodied ideas and things.

But yeah, Danny, I'd love to hear some of the thoughts you had there. Yeah, I mean, the disembodied ideas is a really great phrase. And I think where I was going to pick up maybe is if you think about curiosity as simply acquisitional where we gather a piece of information and we kind of stick it in our pockets, almost like coens that you would then put in a a purse of some sort. Right, So if that's what happens,

then what can you then do with those pieces of information. Well, the only thing you can do is kind of take one out at a time and look at it and then put it back, and take one out and look at it and put it back right, or use single pieces of information for something very specific. But what the connectional account offers is a different affordance, which is that once you understand the relationships between ideas, then you're able

to reason right. You can say, oh, because this is connected to this in this way, therefore this is likely to be true. And you can reason about things that are conceptual, You can reason about things that are emotional, you can reason about things that are personal and social and everything else. And so it's that connective nature that actually allows you to think, to make meaning, and then to share the meaning with one another. We don't share

meaning with one another as independent units. We speak in these sentences that connect ideas to one another broader structures. So the connective model provides these additional affordances, but it also raises some challenges, particularly how do we understand the kinds of connective architectures that we make? Do we each make different connective architectures, So maybe the connective architecture that I am making in one area of work is different

than the connective architecture of somebody else. When we're teaching in a classroom, do each of the students build different

connective architectures. I think about there's a very common craft that young kids do in elementary school where you have a bunch of toothpicks and then lots of the mini marshmallows, and you build something out of mini marshmallows and toothpicks, and it's this connective structure that sometimes it's very ordered, sometimes it's very tall, sometimes it's very disordered, and every child makes something wildly different. I think that's sort of also true in the way that their minds work and

the way that our minds work, even as adults. And so the connective model allows us to address that the challenge, or poses the challenge of understanding those patterns of connectivity. I think addressing that challenge is where network science comes in. So network science is a relatively new and emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry which asks the question of how do

we understand patterns of connection. Typically those patterns are in social networks, So the pattern of social connection among friends on Facebook, on Twitter, in real life, maybe even and it allows us to quantitatively characterize those patterns and say how they're similar versus different. And so that's where some of the work that I've been doing in network science comes into play in an important way, is understanding those

connectivity patterns. What's the learning curve for network science? How long did it take you to get up to speed on how to use those methodologies? Like could other academics who are from other fields, and let's say they're like super inspired by this podcast they want to get up to speed on and incorporating their work. You know, conceptually,

it's not particularly complicated. And then I actually want to turn this over to Perry to talk about the connective nature of certain styles of curiosity in a second, but maybe before we get there, I think that there is also a lot under the hood in terms of mathematics that if you wanted to understand, you could, but you don't need to in order to understand the concepts that network science is trying to tackle and the typical methods that somebody might use if they wanted to bring that

perspective to bear on their work. I would just add that there's network science is really built on the back of network theory. Which was developed in sociology in the seventies. So certainly for everyone who's listening to the Psychology podcast and who was interested in the psychology sociology way of approaching things, there's lots you could read of network theory.

If in a field that is far closer to what you do, then neuroscience also, So maybe I can learn a little more because I actually have published papers using network science applied to the default mode brain network. Is

this the same network science you're talking about? We talked about the same field where we've been able to We've been able to show how brain efficiency of the different regions of the default mode network, the extent to which the different errors communicate with each other, actually predicts your openness to experience personality scores. So we publish that paper. Is that using similar methodologies as what you're talking about?

It is absolutely Yes, it's the exact same methodologies. Yes, yeah, great connection. We just made a connection. We made a connection. We did. I think that the way in which it's used in terms of curiosity is both how we understand connectivity patterns in the brain, but also how we understand connectivity patterns between the bits of infrat that we're acquiring

when we're learning something right. But that work was motivated actually by early work from Perry where he dug into the last two millennia of the Western intellectual tradition to sort of un well excavate I guess I would say particular styles of curiosity that are prevalent in that literature and philosophy as well. So Perry means you can take

it from there. Sure. Yeah. One of the things that I found we were three different archetypes of curiosity, ways in which curiosity gets practiced, and specifically ways of building those connections. So yes, we all build our connections relatively differently, but there are styles, there are recognizable archetypes of how it is that we build our knowledge and our connections together through curiosity. I'll just to sort of outline the three.

The first is the busy body, somebody who loves to kind of listen to anything and everything and just get into whatever topics has struck their fancy in that moment, and they have wide interests. Is that the butterfly, Yes, yeah, we use a butterfly as a symbol on the cover

of the book. And then there's the hunter, which is someone who's far more focused and really wants to know a lot about a little and that person was more likely not likely to have vast knowledge network, but rather to have dense knowledge net, lots of information, lots of little tiny connections, all the information that they've gathered about this particular thing. That's a different style, right, if you were to look at the knowledge that's built, it's a

different shape than the busybodies or the voterfly. But then the third archetype is what we call the dancer, and the dancer is someone who typically takes leaps of creative imagination.

So you're sort of learning something here, and it's not just that you let the world sort of tell you something new to be curious about, like the busybody, And it's not that you decide, oh, there's a tiny little thing I don't understand here, something deeper hunter, but instead something strike you about something quite different from what you've been thinking about, and you say, wow, what if I

brought these two together? What would happen? And so that person is typically really creative, really artistic, kind of as an aesthetic appreciation for what they're building and risks takes a lot more risk in what it is that they want to know and end up knowing. So their knowledge network we call loopy because there are these big, big gestures throughout it. So those are the three archetypes, and

we're not committed to them being the only archetypes forever. Right, we have a whole appendix about creatures animals specifically and how they might give us a whole new slew of styles of curiosity. But these are three that we've actually been in experimentally affirm with Wikipedia users. Exactly. Yes, So you might think, and we wondered whether the archetypes of curiosity that have been present, you know, two thousand years ago, would they be the same as the ones that are

present in now. Has humanity changed? But also how has technology impacted the way that we engage with information? And is it possible that technology and specifically the Internet and online encyclopedias are changing the way that we think and therefore we wouldn't see the same styles of curiosity, right, So there are some arguments to suggest that might be the case. So we went into this investigation wondering would we see the same things would we see something different?

And this was work that was done in collaboration with David Lydon Staley who's at the Annenberg School of Communication at Penn, And what he did is that he had participants engage browse Wikipedia for fifteen minutes a day for twenty one days. And what we were able to do with that data is that we could say how nearby are people stepping? So if they go from this web page to that web page, how far away are those concepts?

So maybe the first start with a rhododendron bush the Wikipedia entry on the rhododendron bush, right, and then the next page that they go to is one on oak leaf hydraanngas, which is another related both bushy plants that you might stick in front of your house. So that would be a relatively short connection, a relatively short step

that individuals are making. Alternatively, you might have somebody who starts with a rhododendron and goes to the Queen of England and then the third page they go to is on game shows. These are huge steps, right, and so that distance in the step size is something that tells you about the space that they're walking through. So if you follow each of these steps and see sometimes they go back to earlier pages, sometimes they move forward. Sometimes

they trace, trace back, retrace their steps. Then you can see this kind of structure or scaffold that they are building by walking, by clicking through Wikipedia, and those structures then very significantly along this dimension of being more busy bodylike with very distant steps and being more hunter like so having closer nearby steps. That data suggests that there's

a lot of individual variability. We may each really be different from one another, but they span the same sorts of archetypes that we can see from the historical philosophical account. That is so interesting, and so my question is how do we link up this framework with some modern day psychology of curiosity research? And I'm going to put forth to frameworks and let's see how you integrate into your work. I'm so curious. One is some psychologists distinguished between deprivation

curiosity and interest based curiosity. They found that these are two different kinds of epistemic curiosity. That we can be motivated and driven to need to know things, you know, any kind of like in a deprivation sort of way, versus just being interested in whatever kind of comes around. And the interest one is more correlated with positive well being. Deprivation curiosity has been correlated with lore wellbeing, And in fact, I found in my research that psychopaths tend to score

high in deprivation curiosity, so they're still curious. Psychopaths are still curious, but they're curious and like, I need to know where I'll kill you sort of way. I know it's dark, it's dark, but our research I've shown that. And then the other framework I just want to just bring up for conversation is Todd Cashtion's five dimensions joyous exploration and deprivation sensitivity. I think probably map onto the two we talked about, but he also talks about stress tolerance,

social curiosity, and thrill seeking as different dimensions of curiosity. Anyway, I'm just wondering, how have you thought about how all these kind of psychological frameworks fit in within your model. Yeah, we have, and in fact, in some of our work we've shown we've shown that the deprivation sensitivity is one that is correlated with the structure of the networks that

people are building. So the more hunter like individuals are those who have higher deprivation sensitivity, whereas those who have lower deprivation sensitivity are the busy bodies or the butterflies, the ones or that are sort of just flitting around and don't need to fill in any particular gaps and information. You know, they're just expansive, jumping from here to there. So there's actually a really nice mapping from the deprivation

accounts certainly onto these results. There are there's less strong connections with some of the other dimensions that you're that

you mentioned. But I'm particularly interested in the social curiosity part actually, and I wonder if we had, if we were to do the study again and ask people to focus to only go to Wikipedia pages that are of people, whether we would be able to see a really interesting again range of individual differences in the way that they are building these these networks among those pages specifically, and whether that would correlate with the more social dimension of curiosity.

I'm so curious about that too. I would also add, there's, you know, with these with cashtids five dimensions. One of the spirit of it is something that we share, which is that there are more types of curiosity and orbations of curiosity, styles of curios let me appreciate, and if we get better at appreciating those different styles or archetypes, then I think we'll notice we'll be able to notice and encourage and facilitate curiosity in ourselves and in others

a lot more effectively. So the spirit is something that we absolutely share. I think, with respect to the social curiosity, one of the things I've always wondered though, It seems to me that there some folks have a joyous curiosity in social settings, or a kind of a thrill seeking curiosity and social settings, or we could go back to my kind of pattern or archetypes. I think there are

social busy bodies. There are also social hunters. I'm going to get to know you because you're in the area that I need to know about, right or the dancer I don't know. I just happened upon you, and let's collaborate. I think I think that social curiosity isn't just its own dimension. I think it has all the dimensions in it too. Well, you said it's so interesting, so I agree. But I want to understand more what a thrill what's a thrill seeking form of social curiosity? What do you

mean by that? Can you unpack that? I think some people strike up new relationships or conversations with strangers really easily, and they're just what will happen what's going to happen? What's this person going to say? I have no idea. They get asked to a dinner afterward, Great, let's go, I see. And then a more so a more joyous what's joyous form of just you really get deep satisfaction from more about a person and who they are. Yeah,

you just love people. You just love all sorts of people. Oh, and you just live that sort of love of joy out for whoever happens upon you. But it's not, But I think it's I've known worth thriller style folks, social folks. Then then then then your joy I don't know, or then simplicity. I also know people who just love people.

It's more like the joy. There seems to be a deprivation form of curiosity as well, social curiosity maybe where you're using people as a way of getting your own needs met and you don't really you're not really curious about them, but you're curious about them to the extent to which your deprivations get satisfied. So interesting to map all this stuff in a network story in the sort of way, how do we map all these different frameworks onto each other? But it's interesting, I mean speaking about

social curiosity and social thrillers. I was just listening to a lecture from Telly Wheatley recently, who said that, you know, why don't we start all conversations with something like, you know, something very deep that's not about the weather, but about what is a very crazy action that you might be willing to perform something like that, and the idea being that you would get a lot more information a lot more quickly in that way than in and you might

actually get a lot of social connection that way than you would by talking about the weather. But I also think that it's interesting to ask, then, where the boundary is and are there boundaries for curiosity? Right? What you Scott have been sort of raising is that maybe maybe there are ways of engaging with another person that pass by their sort of overstep their boundaries, or where you

don't maintain enough boundaries. Or again, when somebody is like using another person for gathering information or for satisfaction, feels like that feels like an issue of bound bise. So I'm curious about the thresholds on which curiosity might work and how to be aware of them as we engage in these practices. And that's very relevant for social and political change, which is much more in Peri's domain than mine.

My earlier book on curiosity, which is called Curiosity and Power, really digs into what are the sort of power structures that inform ways of practicing curiosity that are more using other people for what you can gain from them or

to put to make it really approachable. The early early years of anthropology, for example, involved a scholar somebody from a more typically a more developed area to come in and simply sort of watch and assess and decide what's happening in this culture that's not like mine, and then go back and sort of write papers about it and get published and get promoted. And that's style of sort of I can go anywhere, and I can take knowledge from any context and go use it for my own

conversations and advancement. That's a style of curiosity that is really colial in some sense. And so we want to want to think deeply about well, okay, that's not how one wants to that's not a kind of curiosity that builds personal connections and these connections across cultures that I want to support. Oh, I really want to read your book. That sounds so interesting now it is possible to be more than one of these types of curiosity within a

single body. Right, And we switch back and forth throughout the course of our lives and throughout the course of our days. Right. So can you talk a little about how the butterfly, the hunter, and the dancer in different contexts, for different purposes and even at different times of the day,

can interact or can change in prominence. Yeah, I mean something Germane to our own life as teachers and as academics is simply that we start as these busy bodies, are these butterflies, because we have to learn large swath of things. We need to get familiar with the discipline or with a conversation that's already existed so that we can actually start participating. So let's get to know a lot of information. Let's understand this large landscape of knowledge.

But then we need to focus it and we need to say, okay, well, what is the question I really want to ask? What is the area I really really want to contribute to? Where what do I want to write a paper about or have a conversation about. And

then as we focus, the more we focus. If we've had that larger context, there was often a moment in which we can make it take a creative step or a creative leap, and we can kind of add our own experiences, perspectives, do some experiments, craft for me, craft kind of literatures or arguments that haven't been crafted before, and make that danswer step at the very end, after being the busybody in the center, and then the dancer kind of leaps back out and says, Wow, what if

we could rethink this entire idea or this field from the beginning? Yeah, and just maybe to echo those same ideas, but particularly from scientific scholarship, which I guess for your audience you're probably you have some of both in humanities

and in science, but certainly in science. I think I will often go to, you know, different conferences and listen to talks in areas that are wildly different from my own, and or read kind of eclectically, and it's in that more busy body like way that I come up with a new idea. I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. I

didn't know that. That feels like it might relate to what I'm doing in this way, and then I go down the hunter path to sort of figure out what actually is there is that does the argument have legs? How would we create an experiment? Et cetera? And then fast forward to writing a paper on it, a research article, and then writing the discussion section of the research article.

You often want to frame like what that work, what those results could mean or could how they could stitch together so many different other fields, right, what is the impact of that argument on everything else? And you want to connect it out. And so the discussion section of a paper, in a scientific scholarly paper is one that does more of this dancer like style. So within a single scientific project, I think we walk through those three.

I also, though, wanted to come back to your question of timing like throughout the day, because I think Perry calls these styles almost as if they're like clothing that you can, you know, take on and off and change the style of your clothing, you know, from the morning to the afternoon, and then you're going out later at night,

you're gonna wear something else. I think for me, I find that early morning hours are ones where I am very I can be very hunter like late evening hours I really can't, and late evening being like after eight pm, so that's not really late evening, whereas I think that I am much more likely to want to have either the busy body or the dancer like style in the evenings, and that's different for every person. I can imagine that others. Scott, I'm so curious about what you would say is your

time of day type of curiosity. Yeah, I'm really thinking this. I was actually just thinking, like, did you create a test, like an online test that people can go and like? Because I kind of want to take a test and really get a better sense of what my kind of dominant one is. You should do that, great idea. Maybe that's a collaboration in order here. Yes, because I'm really trying to wrap my head around all three of these mean I think that probably I am not the dancer

after four pm. I think that's the most assured thing I can say, is that like after for like, yeah, I don't feel like I have the dancer spirit as much as I do between the hours of eleven am and three pm. I think the hunter is like in the morning. Yeah, because you said that as well, right, Yeah, I think that's that suits so there must that suits me as well. That I resonated with that as well. I wonder like business is common, like you look at

the averages. Maybe most people maybe like there of course their individual differences, but maye if you look at the graph of what most people how they have been flow throughout the day, maybe there is like a trend for humanity.

That's another research study I'm thinking. In terms of research studies here, we do in the Wikipedia study, we do show that there's a variation on the timescale of weeks that somebody may like tend to be a busy body, but you know, two weeks later they may be slightly more hunterish than they were, you know, two weeks ago, So that varies a little bit. But we didn't study sort of within a day what those cycles might look like. Yeah. I also do think our listeners would love a scale,

like a little quick quiz what's your city type their style? Yeah, and we should bring in some of the other animals from the from the b serie appendix at the end actually too, that could be super interesting. I wanted to talk a little bit about social media because that's a hot topic right now. Are they making us more curious? Are they are there ways in which all this flooding of information without any connection of the dots, without any you know, it's all this a lot of disembodied crap.

I'm gonna call it, not just ideas. How does that affect how's that affecting our curiosity? You know, between iPhone, Google, social media, all this information overload. I'm very curious to hear what Perry has to say about this. But I do think that going back to the distinction between the acquisitional account and the connective account, I think that you can acquire information or stuff you know, and you can

try to stuff it into your brain. But I think that if the focus is on building connection, connection takes time, and it also takes some amount of quiet and room for your brain to actually stitch together and notice, oh this is like that other thing that I heard earlier today. Well, in order to make those connections, in order to sort of build these kinds of inferences and these and certainly relationships with people, it takes time, and it takes a

little bit of stepping back and waiting and noticing. And so I do feel like social media may be providing us with avenues for acquiring information, but in order to do a lot of the connection that we need to do, I also think we need to take a step back and be unplugged in some senses. Perry, I'm curious what

you think. Yeah, I would say that social media in general is yet another, yet another form of media, and this sort of fear that we are going to lose ourselves and unable to stay in contact with our souls and with one another. It has sort of been a fear that has arisen around every advance in media, from newspapers, the printing press, you know, and at advertisements and on.

So our worry about what we're facing right now as a technological shift and an exponential shift in media is unique to us, but it also has a historical a lot of historical precedent, and I think the fears early on fears were not well founded, and we are able to negotiate different forms of media in a way that is meaningful and have been able to do that for centuries. So I do think that we can do that today.

What is troubling for me, following Danny here is not what not the social media itself, but that we don't leave it, or that it doesn't leave us, that we tend not to sort of put it away, But rather it's because if we have a phone that has all of those things on it. It travels with us everywhere and every minute, where there's a down moment where I have to wait for something or someone or use the rushroom whatever it is, or my kiddo is fine and

I pick up my phone and check something. If it's filling all the empty moments in my day, I'm much less able to learn effectively or create powerful things. So I think I think it's that. I think it's the stuff in quality right right in the same So maybe a moral here, a moral of the story is to be less mindless in your life and to have more times in your life where you have consciously decided you're going to practice curiosity in a in a productive fashion.

So what does that even mean? What I just said is that possible? Can we consciously practice curiosity? Does that? Does that phrase even make sense? Yeah? I think again. I think the war that we are conscious of styles of curiosity, ways of practicing curiosity, then we can consciously choose to practice I do think that's true. I also think that we would do well to notice our unconscious practices of curiosity. They can teach us a lot of things.

I think we're we're Yeah, we're exploring all the time, so kind of sitting back and watching that happen, you can tell us a lot about curiosity that would be not yet appreciated. I've been thinking a little bit more about practicing curiosity and specifically noticing the practices of others

and noticing which might be unconscious to them too. Right what I find really interesting is to think about people who have been mentors in my life and who whether they were, you know, actually older than me or not older than me, that they showed different practices of curiosity to me without even realizing it, and certainly without using

those words at all. One of the things I find it very exciting about life right now is just noticing the different kinds of curiosity that people show, the practices that they show without ever having, you know, the linguistic articulation to say, how can we apply some of these ideas to the education system? And this is a topic very near and dear to your heart. What would you say to educators listening to this, you want to apply some of those principles to have their students practice curiosity.

I love that idea. By the way, having students practice curiosity for us, the connectional approach is helpful and sort of thinking about these architecture archetypes of curiosity how it

is that we build our knowledge networks. That's helpful because the minute you step into the classroom, if you only think that, you typically think that curiosity shows up as someone raises their hand a lot and asks a lot of questions, interacts with the assigned material specifically, and a lot if you pick ask what curiosity is, you might miss a lot curiosity that is happening in your classroom moments but just doesn't show up in those recognizable forms.

So again, it may not be physically demonstrated with raising hand, it may not be verbally represented by asking questions, It may not be focused on the assigned text itself. It might have already leaked off the page. And so if you don't, if you're not sensitive and aware of those different expressions of curiosity, not only will you kind of experience a down or day because you just think the students aren't interested, right, but the students won't get the

encouragement and facilitation that they deserve. So that's that's that's the impact. That that's the front page impact for us of thinking about styles of curiosity as connecting information in different ways, Dan, do you want Do you have anything you want to add there? Within an education context. I remember at one point we had this discussion where you're thinking about like connecting everyone's to egenmishes and measure how curious they are in the classroom. Did you ever do

that study? No, I haven't done that study, but I have We have done some studies where we ask people to draw network like maps of the concepts in a class as the class is unfolding. So throughout the course of a semester, we'll say, you know, here are the fifty concepts that are key to this class. Draw from me the lines of how these are related to one another.

Let's do that in week one when you have no idea about the class content at all yet, right, or maybe this is an evaluation of what you came into the class with. And then let's do it two weeks later, and two weeks later, and two weeks later, and we can see these networks growing and changing and reconfiguring. What we actually find is that the connections between different sub

domains of the network become a lot clearer. So early in the class, people seem to be understanding kind of local information and how local information is connected up and then later in the class they can really see these longer distance, longer timescale relationships, and so that is I think really interesting and exciting. But going back to sort of pedagogically what Perry was saying about noticing the different ways in which people are curious and displaying their curiosity.

I really love and encourage it when people in my class will submit work that is quite different than what you would envision a traditional submission to look like. So, for example, in my class last semester, I asked all of the students to write essays about the topic weekly, and then the mid term and final were also essays. One person submitted their mid term as modeled after Alice in Wonderland. So it had Alice, it had the Cheshire Cat, it had the mad hat Jabberwakie was in there somewhere.

It had poetry, it had dialogue, and it illustrated the key ideas of this engineering class in terms of Alice in Wonderland. It was wonderful. It was absolutely fantastic submission and is not what you would have anticipated or asked, but it showed the expansiveness of this student's appreciation for the ideas and and creativity and linking them in this very different way. So I love making space for students or school and have you have you gone into schools

and worked directly with teachers applying some of this. I feel a little bit of this with K through really six or eight middle school especially, and students are very excited about the three different styles, and there they immediately associate, you know, oh, my parents are bus this one or this one, or my brother my sister. So the styles are really intriguing and the students like to think of themselves as, oh, this is the kind of curiosity I have where I am, and it's okay if it's not

the same as or the same as my teachers. So in the in that really early stage, it does seem already to be empowering in some sense. And you know, I'm also interested in what these mean for a classroom in which we have a lot of different learning styles, in which we might have a number of different disabilities, in which or students who are neuroiotypical in a variety

of ways, which really characterizes all of our classrooms. Well, then how does this help open us up as teachers and empower the students to start thinking you know, it might not be these three archetypes. It might be something different.

And if a student had this, if this kind of sunk into the culture in some way, and a student said, you know what, Professor Zarn, I don't have any of those curiosities, but this is the kind that I have, and starts describing it, and this is how it works, this is what I need, you know, like, okay, great, now, let's let's go for it. You know, I just think one of the sections in the in the very last chapter,

I talk about Theoki Uh. He got Shida who Uh as a writer with autism, and and he describes his curiosity as reaching four kind of stars in the sky that he can't always sort of grasp. Sometimes, you know, he could see them, but they're not always it's not always that I can get them and pull them down and express them to you. He also talks about them as fish in a in a river, again, where you can sort of see them, and then sometimes you can't.

Sometimes you can touch them, sometimes you can. So if if curiosity feels like that, is experienced like that, how do how should I be teaching? How should I be entering the room here? And what does it mean for me to validate and facilitate the way your mind works, each of your mind's work. That's I think that's the call now now that we have more awareness of the real device. Yeah, I agree, and that's a very much

a mutual area of interest of ours is neurodiversity. I really look forward to seeing where this work goes for the time being. You're doing great work and I really appreciate you coming on my podcast and talking about it. It's a real honor for me today. Thank you, Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you, thanks for listening

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