Curious:  The Desire To Know And Why Your Future Depends On It, by Ian Leslie

Curiosity is, as one might expect, a rather curious quality.  Many small children are curious, full of questions about the world around them.  Yet many older people are famously incurious, and whether or not we retain our curiosity depends in large part on the way that curiosity is rewarding or not to us.  This book is a fantastic one about dealing with an exciting subject that is also rewarding for those of us who are thinking about questions of creativity.  Curiosity is not intelligence, but as it inspires us to investigate and learn about different areas, it is something that certainly can lead to a great deal of insight and understanding that one would not gain otherwise.  If creativity is about solving problems, then curiosity is about investigating problems and seeing opportunities where others are just going about their existence blithe and unaware.  Those readers who enjoy this book, it may be imagined, are far more likely to be the sort of curious people themselves that would have a lot to enjoy in a book like this.  I know at least I found a lot to enjoy here.

This short book of a bit less than 200 pages is divided into three parts and eight chapters.  The author begins with a discussion of how curiosity works (I), with chapters on three different journeys that look at the matter of the existence of creativity (1), the way that curiosity begins (2) in the lives of children, and then the difference between puzzles that are no longer interesting once solved and mysteries that retain a set of complex interest (3).  After that comes a discussion on the curiosity divide (II), with chapters on the three ages of curiosity (4), the dividend that curiosity provides to those who have it (5), the power that questions have in encouraging us to seek answers (6), and the importance of knowing (7).  Finally, the third part of the book discusses seven ways that people can stay curious (III, 8), namely staying foolish, building one’s database, being both a fox and a hedgehog, asking the big why, being a thinker and a tinkerer simultaneously, questioning one’s teaspoons, and turning puzzles into mysteries.  After that the book closes with an acknowledgements section, notes, bibliography, and an index, having given the reader a lot to think about when it comes to appreciating and cultivating curiosity.

Of course, curiosity is not the be all and end all when it comes to intellect.  The author is quick to note that one must have a great deal of base knowledge to go along with curiosity.  Curiosity encourages people to feed themselves with knowledge and insight and experience, and over time this leads to a great deal of expertise.  Clearly the author views curiosity as a good thing, and this leads the author to note that animals appear to lack curiosity because they do not wonder why and how, which is something that even small children are known to do.  Notably, though, the author follows many others in using the study of creativity and related matters as a way of clubbing mainstream Christianity, pointing out that it was not Galileo’s curiosity in seeking to understand the heavens that was problematic for the Roman Catholic Church, but rather the fact that he made his research available to the common people.  And that is something that strikes me as a very relevant problem.  Creativity is subversive because it tends to threaten those who profit from the status quo or those who profit off of the lack of knowledge that others have.  And when you have a burning desire to know and to share that knowledge, others are going to be affected by it.