🧠Weekly Mind Sweep #111 | Manage Your Mind | Curiosity
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Understanding Curiosity's neuroscience can be a strategic way to leverage its use in your life and business. I’m here to make it more fun.
Would you like to discover your Curiosity Type?
I've found a quiz for you, but I've also learned about something called the Knowledge Gap [1], so you'll have to keep reading to find it!
Surprisingly, science isn't 100% sure about where Curiosity comes from. For the past few decades, they've spent their time attempting to decipher a single widely accepted definition over studying its biology. [2]
We do know that Curiosity is:
A wanting and state of craving. Curiosity supports the wanting and seeking of information. Curiosity causes a release of Dopamine (a pleasure chemical). Remember, Dopamine is all about the anticipation of reward, not the reward itself.
Deep in the brain. The Mid-brain and the Hippocampus, to be exact. The Mid-brain is where the wanting system lives, and it warms up the hippocampus, which helps us retain information. The two of them are in cahoots.
A fundamental element of our cognition [2a]. The mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
"Curiosity behaves in the brain like a hunger, recruiting the same brain areas whose function is to maintain motivation and drive towards a reward — in this case, a cognitive reward" [3]
What types of information do you feel driven to learn about?
Cognitive scientists have identified several types of Curiosity. I'm going to share four that I think are important to understand as entrepreneurs:
Diversive Curiosity - the Curiosity of children to the attraction of everything! It’s also the type of curiosity that sends us on the doom scroll of social media. Excitement in the novel with nothing to learn.
Perceptual Curiosity - Surprise: Expectation vs Reality. The itch to find out information to relieve the Curiosity.
Epistemic Curiosity or Confounded Evidence - A craving to understand what you do not. The pleasurable state is associated with the anticipation of reward.
Empathic Curiosity - the interest in the thoughts and feelings of others.
Where do you spend time looking for information?
Understanding what is biologically happening in your brain can support your Curiosity of why you may be passionate about an idea (Dopamine), where the appetite for Curiosity comes from (the itch to know and understand), and begin to gain awareness of where Curiosity can be a phenomenal tool in your toolbox as well as discern where it may get in the way of your productivity. More on that next week.
As we discussed last week, as entrepreneurs, we tend to have an insatiable curiosity that provides us tremendous opportunities.
Where do you find yourself spending the most time?
I've witnessed entrepreneurs in all four of these categories.
I've found business owners who can look at something from a new perspective or get lost in the novelty of social media. Some who sincerely desire to understand the difference between reality and what they had expected. There have also been quite a few that feed from the desire to know why something is the way it is. And lastly, we can all benefit from empathic Curiosity, which leads to kindness and compassion for others.
Now that we understand that Dopamine stimulates the hippocampus, which helps us learn and retain information, we can use this to our advantage.
When you communicate with your audience, tap into their Curiosity to gain their attention and ignite their hippocampus to retain the information and learn from you!
To invite Curiosity into your everyday life, here are four things for you to try this week:
Embrace the unknown. Your comfort zone makes you feel safe but might have you playing smaller than your potential.
Ask thought-provoking questions. When someone shares an idea with you, dig deeper than their words.
Surround yourself with diverse perspectives. Keep coming to Curated Conversations!
Keep embracing failure as a learning opportunity. It's a practice.
Which type of curiosity resonates with you the most, and how do you plan to leverage it in your personal and professional life?
Oh, wait!!
Remember that quiz I mentioned at the beginning of this Weekly MindSweep? Your brain has been curious to find it while you've been reading.
Click here to scratch that itch.
Email me and tell me your results!
[2] The psychology and neuroscience of Curiosity When we are surprised, we have an expectation that is foiled by something else happening. Curiosity surges to comprehend and fill the void between the expected and unexpected: Surprise is a temporary cognitive void. Anything that breaks the expectation or pattern. Confounded evidence' occurs where there are a multitude of possible answers to a problem or multiple possible futures to a situation. The instigation of uncertainty arouses Curiosity, and, as research psychologist Susan Engel writes, curiosity "is the human need to resolve uncertainty."
[2a] Cognition definition
The answers you need for your business are already within you.
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