OPINION • Nov 03, 2021
Are we losing curiosity with time?
The answer is an absolute yes…
For the last couple of days, I have been reading this insane book called “What if”, by Randall Munroe. The book deals with serious answers for questions like “How many arrows need to be shot to blot the sun as it happens in the 300 movie?”, or “How fast you have to stir your tea to increase its temperature?”, or “If everybody on earth gathered on one side and jumped at the same time, can we move earth from its orbit?”.
When I thought about it, there was definitely a time when I was putting forth those questions, or at least seriously thinking about this. But somewhere along the line, it stopped and I do not know where, how, or why.
Worse than that, my cousin has already started asking me questions that are making me mildly nervous.
Curiosity is one of those evolutionary traits that every person is born with it and most animals. There is a strong Darwinian reason for this. Imagine an ecosystem where every rabbit is born with a genetic predisposition to be non-curious (slow learning curve). Then out of chance mutation, one rabbit was gifted with curiosity (desire to learn) – seriously, this is how seems to evolution works. If that trait happens to be dominant, this one rabbit will have a better chance of survival. Within a few generations, the rabbits from the original curious rabbit's bloodline will replace the entire rabbit population. So curiosity will be an evolutionary compulsive trait; you are born with a dopamine reward system for learning new things – and this can be in some sense be the definition of curiosity.
But everyone has seen this or at least grown through this. You can give a happy surprise to a one-year-old with almost anything, and every surprise is learning. You cannot surprise a two-year-old the same way. This pattern continues more or less up to a certain age. The more you get used to something, the less curious you get. Later, some get piqued by the scientific and mathematical ways of understanding the world, some get piqued by other subjects, which sometimes extend the period for which one is curious. Some simply lose it early.
But at some point, almost invariably dogma kicks in. And that kills curiosity. At least, this is what most people say. But I have some skepticism. The case for dogma in education can be attributed to the generational educational gap – the proportion of well-educated people in the prior generation relative to the current generation. If a larger chunk of the population is well-educated, more smart people will be well educated, which should, in theory, lead to a better education system that emphasizes rationality.
But does a better education system lead to a society where people are curious? It seems to not. While it is true that several people have vested interest in keeping you dogmatic – including your not-so-knowledgeable teacher -, education is hardly the key to curiosity.
If you look at developed countries and even highly educated societies in India, you can observe the reductionist and deterministic ideology pervasive with them all. Try asking well-educated people some trick questions like what fire is made of or why all animals look different.
Simpler people are ready to plead ignorance, even call it divine – at least a statement of wonder. But the more educated ones are the people who try to explain everything with their reductionist, narrow, and perverted sense of science. Trust me, I know... Rationality is as dogmatic as any system we call as such.
The most revelatory thought about this came to me reading John Von Neumann's quote in the book Chaos - “Science does not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, and they mainly make models” (mathematical constructs). Think quite deeply about this. I
This definition of science makes all the difference to our understanding of knowledge. The inner working of nature will always be a mystery and the best we can do is create correlative mathematical models. So nothing is, and will ever be pedestrian.
This wrong understanding and ultimately a superficial sense of knowledge kills curiosity. This is also probably why the greatest science people manage to stay curious despite their wealth of knowledge.
There is this famous Einstein quote, and this one is truly profound. “There are just two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other as though everything is a miracle”. Looks like it is true. Superficial Knowledge is inversely proportional to the level of curiosity. And since we all learn a lot through life, we will get less curious. Either be curious or not. It is a conscious decision and it is binary. No middle grounds.
And surely, pleading ignorance is a better way to live…