Understanding Curiosity and Taking Back Control
A first-principles look at curiosity, attention and using social media algorithms to learn
Curiosity has its roots in the word care. In its essence, curiosity is caring deeply enough about something to want to know all you can about it. But with technology interrupting us every six minutes on average 1 , we seem to be headed in the opposite direction. It would seem as a society, we are caring less.
Trending this way is not the same as ending up this way, however. Curiosity is an evolutionary superpower, responsible for the survival of our species2 and extremely resilient. It can be suppressed, but it is very hard to extinguish. We are capable of feeling awe, beauty and curiosity amidst the most arduous of circumstances 3.
Knowing the nature of curiosity4 can give you the tools you need to counter the shallowing effect of social media on your mind5 and instead, turn the power of algorithms around to serve you.
Regulating Attention
Curiosity has two faces - shallow and deep. Shallow curiosity is evoked from the outside. Clickbait headlines, billboards and ads that pursue me take advantage of this fact. Deep curiosity on the other hand, arises when instead I pursue something I am interested in. Intrinsically, one is not better than the other and they differ only in the amount of attention I am able to pool to the task at hand ( unless explicitly stated, curiosity here refers to deep curiosity ).
Attention is the master regulator for curiosity. How fragile or robust it is determines how shallow or deep my curiosity will be. Imagine for a moment, that my attention is a dam, collecting and protecting behind it a powerful natural resource — my natural curiosity. The stronger the dam, the deeper and more powerfully curious I can be. Find someone who is deeply curious and you will find someone who is masterful at managing their attention.
If I am barraged with demands for my attention, fault lines develop, the dam breaks, and my curiosity shallows out. If I regulate my attention however, miraculously, the cracks repair and curiosity deepens once more. This is more so if what I am paying attention to is aligned with my imprint.6 With sturdy attention, curiosity predictably deepens.
The paradox here is that attention is indestructible yet fragile. It fragments easily but comes together just as easily, as anyone with a regular mediation practice will attest. The key is to eliminate needless stimulus.
Curiosity Needs Calm
If attention is a wall containing curiosity, being present is the floor. Curiosity is only possible from an unhurried, present state of mind. I find I cannot become curious if I have an agenda. Agenda creates ambition and ambition pulls my mind away from the present, draining out my curiosity like water from a bathtub. I can have an agenda to get to my seat, but when on the seat I am simply following my interest in the present moment. For this to happen, I must have interesting things to do and some pre-work here pays rich dividends. More on this a little later.
On a typical day however, my mind is filled with agendas from morning to night, becoming increasingly operational and task focussed through the day. This leaves just two windows to pursue my curiosity: mornings before work and evenings after work.
In my experience my mind is at its sharpest in mornings, best for pursing intellectual curiosities. Evenings are best for getting back into the body and pursuing hands-on curiosity. At the time of writing, I practice math or design in the mornings and drums or sketching in the evenings. I also cook several times a week which serves as a break from work.
Curiosity Can Be Scheduled
Finding a window is not the same as pursuing it. The science of habit formation is important here. Finding stable cues in my morning or evening like, immediately after breakfast or after dinner or before going to bed are essential to build momentum and move towards deep curiosity. Because following ones curiosity is intrinsically rewarding — it literally engages the reward pathways of your nervous system — curiosity is naturally habit-forming. It feels good to do it and it feels good to come back to it. Making sure there is a predictable time every day to come back to my curiosity is essential to build momentum. In the everydayness of following my curiosity, it takes root and grows rapidly.
Curiosity Works In Short Bursts
Pursing my curiosity feels like tuning into my cognitive-muscular-neural engine. In my experience this happens quickly. Within twenty minutes of physical practice or thirty min of intellectual engagement I find I come into alignment with myself. This is also the best place to stop. Extending the session lets fatigue sets in and I find myself efforting. The joy of pursing my curiosity quickly turns to work.
In pursuing my curiosity, leaving on a high with enough gas in the tank is crucial so I want to return the next day. This grooves my nervous system with positive experiences, creates craving, and makes it easier to slip into an agenda-free state the next time. If I skip a few days of math or drumming, I find I miss it and find my way back to it. On the other hand if I’ve had a poor experience in one session, I find it takes weeks before memories of the old experience have faded and my natural curiosity returns.
The Digging and the Doing
Pursuing ones curiosity, especially one that requires acquiring procedural memory like cooking, learning an instrument or mastering a complex tool has two parts: digging ahead of time to curate a playlist of things to do and doing it at a scheduled time. Separating the deciding from the doing is essential to creating a good learning experience and developing momentum. When sitting down to do, I want ninety percent of my time to be spent on doing. Deciding what I want to do ahead of time makes sure I can jump into doing in the first minute or two of my practice session.
As an example, I’ve cooked two to three times a week since last year. Each weekend, I curate four to five recipes that seem doable and delicious, write them on index cards and shop for the ingredients. For the rest of the week, whenever I enter to the kitchen, I know what I want to cook, I have everything I need to cook a delicious meal and get to cooking right away. The weeks I don’t curate my recipes, I am undecided on what to make and slip back into ordering out instead.
The same is true of learning online. To keep in touch with design, I curate exercises I want to recreate from YouTube into a custom playlist using PocketTube. Every item on this playlist is something I want to make and it is sorted by complexity from the simplest to the most difficult. I find and add to this list through the week. When I sit down to practice, I play back from my current video and am immediately in the mode of doing, rather than deciding.
Preventing Backsliding
When doing, what I want to feel consistently is that I’m making progress. But the reality is there are days where it feels like I’m crawling or simply daunted by what I see. 7 This is especially true of learning something from scratch where in the beginning, everything feels clunky.
Digging ahead of time helps with this but there are days where I simply don’t have the energy to do. On these days I will use the time to research and decide on new things to do, and put them on my playlist. This puts me in first gear, but still heading in the right direction.
Take Back Control
Creating a playlist takes a little work, but the payoff is high. It is also where you can turn the power of algorithms around to serve you. Whether you’re pursuing becoming a better cook, musician or designer, social media is an an excellent tool to help you put together your playlist. The algorithms powering social media are designed to give you more of what you want 8.
Using social media this way reverses the attention dynamic. Approaching the platform as a learning resource looking for specific things to do changes my relationship with it, making it a resource worth mining rather than being a resource mined by it. What makes social media different from conventional television or fashion magazines, is that they calibrate for what I want.
Without an agenda, social media platforms behave like a crazy salesperson showing me everything in its bag hoping something will stick if it just follows me around. But once I tell it what I want, it transforms into my personal librarian, tirelessly and endlessly serve up more things I might like to learn and getting better at it all the time.
The ogre, it turns out was simply my sheep dog looking for something to do, nipping at my heels the whole time. Now that you know how to keep it busy, isn’t it time you do things you love?
From Larry Rosen’s work with 260 middle schoolers. More here
The Science of Curiosity link
Man In Search of Meaning, Victor Frankl. Amazon link here
At a neural level it activates reward pathways and works the same way hunger does
First proposed by Nicolas Carr and proven at the University of Winnipeg
This is how I made my way back from burnout - doing only things I loved
James Clear’s Goldilocks Principle is useful here. In my practice I notice it is my interest level that automatically calibrates and picks the next challenge for me,but I can sometimes become ambitious, overshoot and then crash. For drumming my instructor picks the gradient for me
That is over-simplifying but generally speaking, true.