The Hole In Your Brain That Makes You Doomscroll

Why can't you leave a sealed envelope unopened? Professor Hannah Fry begins by refusing to allow Michael Stevens to open a mystery envelope addressed to him. A small act of torture that turns out to be the perfect way in to today's subject: curiosity. What is it, why does it feel almost physical, and how far will people actually go just to resolve a nagging uncertainty? From there Hannah and Michael trace curiosity's surprising reputation through history; how for well over a thousand years it was branded a vice, even a sin, before a couple of inventions flipped it into a virtue almost overnight. Along the way they delve into the psychology and neuroscience of this itch. Why your brain can't stop worrying at a missing answer, why getting something wrong could be the key to remembering it, and which animals share the drive (and one surprising creature that doesn't). Plus curiosity's darker side, the way the modern world has learned to hijack the very same circuitry, and a rather lovely story about how a Mars rover got its name. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I am Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I am Hannah Frye, and I have here an envelope for you, Michael. It says "For Michael" on it.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, it does.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Do you want to see what's inside?

• 0:15Speaker 00

  I want, yeah, please.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Are you interested?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  I'm, yeah.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Are you intrigued?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  I don't know, maybe I'm not. No, do it. Open it.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I'll tell you a bit more about it. Inside is a piece of card, and you're very much gonna want, you're very, as the episode progresses, you're gonna, you're gonna want this card more and more, okay?

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, so you're not gonna open it?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm not gonna open it. Do you think I'm a fool? I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give in to you straight away, Michael.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Right, but I really wanna know what's in there.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  This is, this is what you call a hook and tease, okay? And that is, that's what this episode is about.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  I'm hooked.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  And, and teased.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  I'm hooked. I'm being teased.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  And that here is, is what this information is about. What is it about sealed envelopes, locked boxes, clickbait, all of the things that make us desperately want to know the answer? This, Michael, is an episode about curiosity.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Ooh, curious.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Our bodies are incredible machines, worrying away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells, and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  To the moon and back? That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London Underground into a suitcase.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  By the age of 50, you have copied almost 6 trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes, and over time, those mistakes can accumulate, and that collection of errors can lead to cancer.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors, and by finding them, they've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years, and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Observe the North American dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  All right, let me start off, let me start by telling you about this amazing psychology experiment. My favorite psychology experiments are the ones which involve electrocuting people, particularly when people essentially volunteer to get electrocuted themselves. So this is 2016, it's 54 students, and, I mean, look, they've, they've signed up for a psychology experiment, so let's not pretend they didn't see something coming. But they are led into a room, and there is a bowl of joke pens on the desk, and they're told, "Look, some of these will shock you and some of them won't." If you tell people exactly which pens will shock you and which, which ones are safe, they don't touch them. They don't go anywhere near them. They're like, "That's fine. I can accept.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna touch any of the, the black pens or whatever it might be."

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  However, if you just tell them that, "Look, some of these pens will shock you and some of them won't,

• 4:26Speaker 01

  no further instructions," then they get involved. They, they wanna find out. They're sort of curious to find out the answer. Five times as often, by the way, if you don't give them that information, if you leave an information gap, then five times as often, they will go in there and they will fiddle with these pens and get electrocuted.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Right. Well, I was gonna say, we know that people will shock themselves knowingly if they're bored enough. It's just something to do. But you say that they're five times more likely to get shocked if you leave it mysterious what will shock them.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  At just a little information gap that they want to close in. They're not bored, by the way. They, they can, they can do plenty of other, they're just, "I just wanna know, just wanna know which ones, which ones are gonna electrocute me. I wanna know how sharp the electrical shock is gonna be." And there is something weird about this, right? Because there's no prize here, you know, there's no dare, there's no, like, expectation. They're just electrocuting themselves purely to discover whether they'd be electrocuted.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's, it's not a game. They can't win. It's not about finding the electric ones. They just do it for themselves.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Right. So the research has called this, this particular phenomenon, they call it the Pandora effect. You know, the idea that, like, okay, you're, you're given an instruction, don't over the box, and it's sort of a, a similar draw to touch these pens. But here's the thing that I think is a real puzzle in all of this, because our curiosity is quite often this, this force that is strong enough to beat self-preservation. The drive to not wanna be shocked or not wanna be hurt pales in comparison to our drive to want to find out, to want to, our curiosity to find out an answer. And I think that's kind of interesting, right? Because I was at my daughter's sports day today, and they have all of these signs up right around the school. One of these giant sign that just says "curiosity."

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And I think there's something interesting in that, right? Like, this is something that we prize in our children, that you kind of like, you give it to toddlers as like a, a banner, a badge of honor, right? Be as curious as possible. I mean, you and I talk about it all the time. It's like a really positive thing. And yet, maybe it isn't, you know? Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's the thing that will end up getting you shocked. That's, that's where I'm going with this.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  So, yeah, we've, we've talked about curiosity a lot. We often talk about it as a species-defining trait, though it's a bit paradoxical, because it can lead to some bad outcomes. Why would evolution prefer it?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And also, I should add, right, like, this, this idea, the way you and I talk about it, the way they put banners up about it in school, as though it's this incredibly positive trait, that absolutely was not always the case. For a very, very long time, curiosity was considered really a horrendous sin.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Oh, when are, when are we talking? Because curiosity is something humans have had forever, and yet, our social and cultural attitude towards it has changed, you say?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so for about 1,500 years, it was considered a vice. Not, not a virtue at all, and, and a proper-named one, by the way. So St. Augustine, who was writing about 400 AD, side note, basically personally road-tested every sin, just to decide which ones were really bad, and he said that curiosity was lust, lust of the eyes, right? One of the three lusts at the root of all sin. That's what he wrote. It was like, it's not good. He called it a disease, Michael. I mean, people really were not happy about this. Aquinas, he was the same. He called it "curiositas" and said that it was a vice,

• 8:09Speaker 01

  as opposed to "studiositas," which is studying, but only the kind that, that God signs off on. So like, asking questions about the world around you is not considered a good thing. I mean, look, if you look at ancient literature, you can see that over and over again, the moral of the story is that curiosity is bad, right? So Pandora's box, you know? She really wanted to know what was in the box. It didn't turn out that well for her. Eve's apple, she really wanted to know what the apple tasted like. There's also Lot, Lot's wife, who turned around for a quick look of sodum, and then was instantly turned into a pillar of salt. I mean, over and over again, in these stories, the sort of the fable, I mean, partly the accused is a woman. It's almost always, "Oh, you silly, curious woman."

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Always those women, yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Always the women. But definitely, the sense of these stories is like, "Do not be curious," you know? Like, it'll never lead anywhere good.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, don't ask questions. I think it very, it seems very connected to the notion of the sacred. Some things just are the way they are. Don't try the apple. Just, just accept it.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Just accept it. And I think that there was elements of sort of population control that were going on around that, you know, especially with Christianity, with the kind of rise of the Christian church. This idea that you can sort of, the scripture, the Bible is the ultimate truth, and don't ask questions about it too much, because actually, that's just not, not gonna lead anywhere good. So in the 1500s, you started getting these little, little academies popping up, where scholars really wanted to ask these kind of questions. There's one called the Academy of Secrets, and then the, the Inquisition just shut it down, because they were like, "No. If you know too much, then you get to decide what is known, and that's, that's not a good thing."

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And the turn to curiosity possibly being a good thing actually only happens in about the 15, 1600s, when it just flips from, from being a vice to a virtue. And actually, the turn happens with the, the advent of the telescope and the microscope.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm taking notes on this. Like, I am just, I'm learning so much and this is so interesting to me. So, yeah, the telescope and the microscope, they show us that there, there, there is not just hidden knowledge, but hidden stuff that can be learned about. There's more to see. Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  There's more to see. And suddenly, everybody is like, oh, okay, and what about this? And what about this? And what about this? I mean, then you get the era of enlightenment. Then you get the scientific revolution. Then you get, you know, this massive explosion in, in, in discovery and curiosity and all of that goes on to give us. Um, the, uh, the proof, by the way, that curiosity wasn't valued before is the word itself. So, uh, basically it barely existed before about sixteen forty, right? Almost, almost didn't exist at all. Um, and it comes from the Latin curiositas, from cura, which means care. Which is the same, same root as cure,

• 11:17Speaker 01

  curator and manicure. So, okay, when you are being curious and getting your nails done, it's basically the same urge, right? Same, same literature.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  You're caring for something.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  You're caring for something. But you literally, I mean, you almost don't see this word at all before that point. And then it appears hundreds of times a decade. But, you know, by seventeen hundred, it's, it's used really commonly. And that's it. You know, before that moment in time, we just didn't permit curiosity. In fact, you know, the, um, I told my daughter, my nine-year-old daughter, I was gonna do an episode on curiosity. And she said, oh, curiosity killed the cat. No, actually. The original line from fifteen ninety-eight was care killed the cat.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Are you serious?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Fifteen ninety-eight, care killed the cat?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. The only switch in about nineteen hundred.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  What does that mean, though? Care killed the cat? What's the lesson that they're trying to convey?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Killing it with kindness.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  That sometimes kindness can lead you astray into danger?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  So it was about excessive anxiety. Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looks like, uh, you can also find the line in Much Ado About Nothing. What courage, man? What thou care killed a cat? Thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care. So.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  So here's the thing, right? This is this word that we, we said was a sin for fifteen hundred years. And then in the end, we, we'd sort of naming a Mars rover over it. And that's like, what's going on with those two things?

• 12:43Speaker 00

  What's happened? Yeah. Now, we're, we're putting up big banners that, that extol curiosity in schools. We want kids to be curious.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  I thought it was a really positive thing.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Wow. So it wasn't even really a concept that was discussed. It wasn't a virtue. The closest thing was care, by which we meant excessive worry and anxiety over someone or something, which could kill a cat.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Which I would say is not a positive thing.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Even, even in nineteen ninety-eight, Ebenezer Brewer included a definition that said, care killed the cat. It is said that a cat has nine lives, yet care would wear them all out.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Uh, I wanna show you that. I wanna show you just how powerful, right, this like curiosity can be. Because at some point in the next, let's say twenty minutes or so, I'm gonna open up a little hole in your memory, um, that, that you're gonna be physically unable to leave alone. Okay?

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Okay, good, good.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  You're gonna know the moment, when it, when it arrives. In terms of what is going on when we feel curious, when we have that drive to push the button to, you know, turn over the pen, whatever it might be, sail across the ocean, there are all of these different theories about it. And I think the cleanest theory, you know, the first time people really sort of got hands on this, is it was George Lowenstein in the nineties, right? This is kind of how late we were like, what is this? Because before then, it was all like, oh, it's the pleasure of learning. It's, it's, you know, you're just enjoying learning and that's, that's all there is to it. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. There is this drive that you have that is more than just sitting down and reading a textbook.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  It's where you really want to know the answer. And he says that it is an information gap, essentially. It's the distance between what you know and what you've just realized that you don't know. And that just realized bit is really key. But the way to think about it is, uh, to think about a missing tooth, right? So you know precisely where it should be. So this isn't just like some vague information all over the place. You know, I don't know very much about sixteenth-century French poetry, but I don't really, I'm not sort of driven to find out more. Um, it's like, the missing tooth is a really good analogy because you know exactly where this information slots in. And your, your tongue will not, under any circumstances,

• 14:59Speaker 01

  leave it alone, right? Sort of you're poking at it because you feel the gap, right? You sort of have a deprivation. And that's the thing that about curiosity is that it's not a wish. It's not like, oh, that would be nice. It's more like a deprivation. It's more like your brain is missing something and it needs to know.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  That's a really good way to put it. Because, yeah, I also don't want to or desire to learn about sixteenth-century French poetry, but I could be made to. Where suddenly, if I feel that it's, it's a deprivation, I feel like it's a missing hole in my teeth, then I will look it out because I need it for some new reason.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Exactly right. I'm gonna show you a couple of examples of that in a second, of how, of how this works. But the thing is, if you put people in brain scanners and then you make them curious, you, you put them in this state of deprivation, essentially, where they really wanna know, then the, uh, the, the same part of your reward circuit inside your brain lights up that you would see if they were at a fruit machine, right? Or if you said, would you like a bacon sandwich? Um, or if you get a text back from somebody that you, you're really, you know, flirtatiously pursuing, right? It's like, is your, is your dopamine essentially, um, centers that? And what that does is it means that curiosity is a very specific form of motivation.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  The prize is dopamine in the end. But, uh, but, but you shouldn't mistake the dopamine for pleasure. There's like, this, the, the difference between wanting and liking, right? And those, those run on separate systems in your, in your brain. Um, and we know this, actually, there's St. Parkinson's patients who were put on, uh, drugs that would boost their dopamine. Um, so that they had like kind of endless motivation, but no sort of satisfaction, as it were. And what they became, they, they would sometimes slide into, you know, compulsive gambling or shopping or eating or whatever it was. But they weren't enjoying any of it. They were just driven to just do more and more and more and more and more of it. And that's the bit that your curiosity is doing. It's driven to find it.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Right. And then you can sate your curiosity. But these people taking these drugs couldn't sate it. They just kept.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  I think that explains a lot of the behavior we're seeing in old folks' homes nowadays, where they're just throwing caution to the wind, gambling, a lot of STDs are spreading like never before. Have you heard about all of this?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  They might be on medications that are helping their Parkinson's and yet are making them wild, uninhibited teenagers who need to pursue these things, these, these delicious lifestyle treats. But they can't, they can't be satisfied.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  I mean, they can't be satisfied, but it's not so good. But aside from that, knock yourselves out, guys. I think that's great.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Keep it up.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  That's great. Maybe it's protection. But nonetheless, so, you know, I think it's great. I think it's great. Right. So here's the other thing about this. When you have created this gap in somebody's mind, when you've created that, that sort of deprivation, you put them in this curious state. Actually, what ends up happening is that you remember the thing that you learn better. So your hippocampus is essentially primed. It's like, okay, I really wanna know this and I'm really gonna, I'm gonna hang on to the answer that comes in. Curiosity is like this real attention spotlight that you're like, I'm really focused. I'm, I care a lot about what the, what the answer is gonna be. But there is this shape, you know, kind of as we said with sixteenth-century poetry, that, that if you know nothing about a subject at all, you're not gonna have an itch. If you know everything about a subject, you're not gonna have an itch at all.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  This is the Lowenstein work. You get this, this peak right in the middle where you know just enough to know exactly where the information is missing, which is not coincidentally where the whole like, oh, you're never gonna believe what happened next. Ten weird things that psychologists want you to know, right?

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  It's like, there's just enough in that that you're like, okay, fill the holes for me.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  I gotta fill it. Right. That's why it's such great clickbait. Yeah, you open up that hole and then it's curiosity that is, causes us need to fill it. I need to click, I need to figure this out. Oh, they say number one is really mind-blowing. What is number one? I can't, you can't just leave me hanging with this like unfinished promise.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Right. And that phrasing just there is different to, um, there's something interesting in this film. Because it's not specific enough. You'll enjoy this. It's nowhere near specific enough. Whereas number one is mind-blowing, is quite literally a sort of what's in the box, right? What's in the envelope? It's like, it's one of those. It's like, I want to know what is inside that particular thing. Okay. So, so here, if you want to make somebody maximally curious, right? Here's, here's your, here's your, your three steps and, and retain the information afterwards. Okay. So the first is that you, you need to open up a gap where they nearly know the answer, but they don't know. Um, so for you, um, I would like you to name all seven dwarfs, right?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  I'll start you off. You've got Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy. What are the other two?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Say those first five again.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Bashful and Cutie Patootie.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  No, what's, I know, I know Bashful's one of them.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  You're not allowed to look it up.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  I'm not looking it up. Um.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Give me some, give me some wrong guesses. Cutie Patootie.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Okay, say the five again.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Oh, I was gonna say Sneezy, but you've already listed that one. So it's Bashful and.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Tell you what, we'll stick back to this later. Sticky. No, no, not, not sticky, not cutie patootie.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Isn't, isn't it like a, it's like not even an adjective. It's like, well, Doc is one.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  You know what? I think, I think we should come back to this later. Because I've got the answers written in the envelope.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Ah, I see. Yeah, you've made this difficult. You've made me want, you've made me driven to get the answer.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  I have tried to. I have tried to.

• 21:22Speaker 00

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• 21:24Speaker 01

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• 22:24Speaker 03

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• 23:28Speaker 01

  So here are the three steps, right? You've got to open the gap where they nearly know but not quite. You've got to refuse to close it so that it's not just instant gratification. I'm not going to instantly tell you what the answer is. And then the third thing, wrong guesses actually end up making people remember the information when you finally get it way more than if you just, if you just don't know. And, and I think this is it, you know, we sort of gave these examples earlier of like how this is used in clickbait, but actually you can use this to this incredible effect in teaching too. Let me give you an example. Okay, so, so this is an example I really love, right? I can tell you, your stomach lining regenerates in three days. Like, how boring is that? Who cares?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  But I can tell you, hey, you know, your stomach acid is strong enough to literally melt metal. How, how does it not destroy your insides? How come you're not melting from the inside out?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  And then get people to give me guesses and then get all the wrong answers. And then when you finally do the reveal, when you fill in that missing gap and you say, ah, it's because your stomach lining regenerates every three days quicker than it can be melted. It's basically building itself again faster than the acid can work. All of a sudden, actually, it's like it's got in there. And it's because what you've done is you have literally ripped open a hole in your brain, primed your hippocampus, motivated you to care about the answer, and then the information will end up being retained.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  And the wrong answers help.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Can you tell me more about why they help?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  I think that, so, so this is, this is Lowenstein again, by the way. He did this in 1992. And he asked people which US state reaches further east, or furthest east, sorry. Do you want to make a guess?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's Maine.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Incorrect.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Oh, really? Maine is the closest to Africa.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  But the furthest, reaching the furthest east?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Uh, it's curious. I mean, I really want to look at a map. I really need to get this information. Because if it's, if it's not Maine, what could it be? Because I've always heard and seen, if you look at a globe, Maine is definitely closer to Africa because of the way we're actually a bit, you know, tilted.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Agree.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  But

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Agree, that is true.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Is there some weird thing where it's actually Alaska because it crosses the Dateline? Yeah, okay.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. It stretches so far west that it kind of essentially wraps around. I mean, Sarah Palin, who said, I can see Russia from my window.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  It's because it goes so far west that it ends up crossing the Dateline and ending up.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Right, right. So part, there's part of Alaska that's actually just extremely east, according to our system of, of longitude.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. So Lowenstein, he asked people this question, and he found that people who were told that their guess was wrong, ended up both being far more curious, but also remembered the answer for longer than people who just guessed and then left it.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Well, you know what? I mean, that's a case in point right there. Like, if I had just thought to myself, oh, the answer is Maine, I know this, then I wouldn't have thought about it again. But because you told me I was wrong, I, I became much more aware of a hole in my knowledge. And it's there, and I, I even have a good sense of the shape of that hole now. And I go, wait a second. And I didn't let us move on until I got it right.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Right, totally. So, but this is the thing. I think that when you are, when you are learning, it feels like wrong answers are just, you know, delaying your progress. But actually, wrong answers are making you feel the shape of the gap and driving you to want to find the right answer, as long as it is done in a way that is not too hard, not too easy. The right, if you get it exactly the right level, it's like where you get the best possible learning. Like, you need to struggle a little bit because that is where your brain is kind of forcing open these gaps.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  This reminds me of, I think Derek Muller's doctoral thesis was on this method of teaching. And he incorporated it into his YouTube videos, where he was like, people have more fun when things are pretty, like, easy. They say they enjoy a video. But they learn more if you present wrong answers as wrong answers. And that's why he did so many of these interviews on the street where he was like, hey, if the earth was a, was a basketball and the moon was a tennis ball, how far apart would they be? And he showed people getting it wrong. And it made you go, oh, my gosh, just tell me the answer. And people would say they were frustrated by the video. But when you tested them later,

• 28:27Speaker 00

  they remembered the correct answer better if you had shown them all the wrong guesses.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  I bet they watched longer as well. I bet.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  And they probably watched longer because they, they need to wait around for this answer. They can't just think, oh, I'm sure I know this. It's probably, I don't know, about that far next.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, right? So, so, I mean, despite the fact that this was very unfashionable for a very long time, you know, the idea of curiosity, it is in all of us. It arrives incredibly early, this like insatiable need to fill in the gaps of information. This really gorgeous study using, using babies who are 11 months old. And what they do is they get, they get a ball and they basically show the babies a magic trick. So they have like a, a kind of a hidden lever which makes it look like this ball passes through a wall. Okay. And then they give the baby an opportunity to play with this ball and other balls. The baby always chooses the magic ball. You know what? I said always as though nothing is ever 100%. The baby.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. We gotta, we gotta make room for the babies that are like, nah, magic ball, big deal. Give me the block.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Okay. So, but what they do with the ball is they take the magic ball and they start hitting it against tables, against walls, against chairs, whatever it might be. And if you change, if you change the magic trick that you show the babies and you show them where a ball floats in the air, okay, then the babies go to, gravitate towards the ball, gravitate. And then they pick it up and they drop it. So it's like they're testing their models of physics, essentially. I mean, certainly, you know, you wouldn't read like that inside of a baby brain.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  But that's what they're doing, yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  That's what they're doing. They're like, here is this gap in what I thought I knew about how balls worked. And my drive is to try and fill in that gap by running experiments, essentially by, they're sort of motivated to learn. And I think this is it, right? It's again, this, this Goldilocks effect. Because if the scene is too chaotic, if the magic trick is too elaborate, they don't care. If it's too simple, if it's too easy, they don't care. But this sweet spot in the middle of where they can feel what the gap is, and they believe that they can fill it, it's like they know the exact shape of this gap, then off they go. They're, they're just like extremely excited by it.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Wow. I'm sorry. I was literally trying to think of dwarves' names.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Because I can't stop.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  It's annoying, isn't it?

• 30:59Speaker 00

  I feel like I should know.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Isn't it annoying?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  And that's what you wrote in the envelope.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  That's what I wrote.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  That has my name on it.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Cause I knew, I knew you would wanna know.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Well, let me tell you, I no longer want you to open the envelope. I really want to find it myself. I feel like it's in there or that I can work my way towards the answer and I need to finish this. And it's not so much that I'm uncomfortable not knowing. It's that I'm anticipating the pleasure of getting it. I got a taste by saying bashful. That made me feel like, oh yeah, more of that. All right, so what's the seventh one?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Let me, sorry, I just wanna know, I'll be thinking about this in the background. Are there different degrees to which people are bothered by these information gaps? Like, is it a personality trait to be more upset by them and more fixated on filling them?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yes, and also actually your curiosity does decay as you get older. So it's the dopamine reward system that motivates you to find out more. But actually, in some people, it's sort of, it ends up dying away as time goes on. The other thing is actually, I mean, if you've got this innate drive, as humans, we have this innate drive. It also means that it can be exploited. And essentially, this curiosity drive is the whole reason why doom scrolling works and works so incredibly well.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. You can see this, by the way, there's other experiments. So in 2018, OpenAI did this experiment where they, cause there was a big idea for quite a long time about maybe the way to build intelligence. Maybe the fundamental aspect of our intelligence is curiosity. Actually, if you are motivated by wanting to learn information, right? Rather than being motivated but just by food or, you know, whatever other biological responses there are. If you're motivated by curiosity, maybe that's the way that you get to artificial intelligence. So OpenAI, they built these agents that was rewarded by only curiosity. And they did amazing, like they could play Mario from scratch. They, you know, could do all kinds of things.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  And then somebody added in a TV in the next level, like a TV screen that just showed random static. And the agents basically sat down and never moved again. They were just like, oh, transfixed by the sort of maximally unpredictable. It's like maximally curious sort of forever state. Now, okay, you don't get that in humans because as we know, in humans, we need, the gap needs to have a correct size and shape for us to want to fill it.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  But here is the thing with doom scrolling, that is what it manages to do. Because there is always the promise that the next thing that you see, it's like, what is this next thing gonna be? What is the next video gonna show me? And then when you add to that, the fact that everybody has worked out that the algorithm just works better. People stay on your videos longer if you also use these tricks. If you also use clickbait, if you also say, you're not gonna believe, number one is gonna be mind blowing. It's something built to exploit your curiosity drive, embedded within a bigger system to exploit your curiosity drive that can just end up leaving you just there, like getting the dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  The sort of satiating, the feeling of having filled the curiosity hole without ever having the kind of joy of actually struggling with that deprivation.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Well, that's why I wanna know so much about my algorithm. What equations are filling my feed? Because I feel like I would learn so much about myself. Cause I think we all get different things in our feed. There isn't just one way to skin a cat, as we were saying. Different people are motivated to keep scrolling because they're getting a particular kind of content. Yeah, I wonder what it is that works on me the best because it works really, really well. And I try to be mindful of what is making me want more of these things that come up. However, yeah, it lacks the effort. I'm just getting it for free.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  And in fact, whenever I'm scrolling reels and one of them is a puzzle and it's something like, can you name the seven dwarves? I might give it a second of thought and then I just say, ah, whatever, I'll revisit this. I might even screenshot it, see if I can do it later, but I'll just keep scrolling.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  But I think this is the thing, you know, the three stages of like really getting somebody's curiosity drive up is that you can't resolve it immediately. You have to sort of leave it. And the problem is when you're watching videos that are one minute, two minutes, whatever, it's just resolved, resolved, resolved, resolved. It kind of never, it never stays open long enough for your hippocampus to sort of actually retain any of the information of the reels that you're watching.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  There's a kicker on this, which isn't very nice either. So Lowenstein again, this is in 2020. The thing is, is that like any appetite, right? This, you know, your dopamine reward system, which is what's going on in your brain. Your curiosity needs to feel hungry essentially. Like you need to kind of have that deprivation. And the problem is, is that if you are, I mean, I'm using an analogy here, but if you're effectively snacking all the time, over and over and over and over again, you never get properly hungry. You never get hungry for real information. And so the real concern here is that actually, I mean, the evidence is mounting in this regard,

• 36:45Speaker 01

  that actually the kind of attention economy isn't just exploiting your curiosity, it's actually dampening it over time. That you are, you are less driven, less motivated to find out the sort of deep, more meaningful things that otherwise would have caught your attention because it's just so easy. It's like the, you know, it's junk food, right?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Right, you're not hungry long enough. Or if at all, you're just given the snacks. And it does, it does fulfill a little bit of a drive because you don't know what's gonna come next. It might be something important, it might be something funny, it might be something you can share with your friend. But it's nowhere near the kind of hunger you would get without the internet, without such accessible information where you're like, how can I solve this problem in my life? Some of them I bet are just logistical problems, like how can I do this? But also pick up my kids and also make sure that I go to the grocery store? Like, those are all things. And once you've got assistants and AI assistants that can do it all, there's, you're not hungry anymore.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  But what you're saying is that the hunger is important.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really is. It's like you getting stuff wrong is the thing that helps you remember. The hunger is the thing that will like drive you on to be more curious. You sort of need it, unfortunately. I mean, look, food tastes better when you're hungry, right? And like, curiosity feels better when you like, when you fight for it. I wanna go back to that question though, that idea of like, are you still working on dwarves, by the way?

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Actually, I think I figured it out.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, and here's what's funny, it just sort of came to me when I wasn't thinking about the dwarves, which is how this often works, cause I was pretty sure it was in my brain. Now, I could be wrong, but I think the seventh one is dopey.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  You are correct, it's bashful and dopey.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Bashful and dopey. Now, I'm pretty surprised I got that right because I don't think about the seven dwarves very often at all.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  I feel like I had a sense that it was a bit of a silly name. You know, it wasn't a normal, like sleepy, happy. It was something that was a little like negative and I was right, dopey.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Dopey, wasn't Julie, which I think was one of your earlier guesses.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Cutie patootie.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  It's the ripoff of the seven dwarves, the pirate copy.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  Stinky and late.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  And late, yeah. Okay, I wanna go back to that idea of like, how on earth could this drive have survived? When clearly it is something that would have killed many of our ancestors. And the thing is, is that while I agree with you about how humans are, stand out in our curiosity. I also think that actually you do see this same reward mechanism, this drive in other creatures too. And what I'm specifically talking about here is about separating out information and reward, right? Okay, so let me, let me give you an example. There's this experiment where you have a choice between two options, okay?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Like imagine you've got two levers in front of you and both of them give the same chance of food after five seconds. Okay, it's like 50 50 whether you get the food. You press a button, 50 50 whether you get food. There's no difference essentially between the two buttons, except that one of them will immediately tell you whether food's coming or not.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Right, so it immediately tells you whether you've won or not. I don't know about you, but I'd be pressing that one every time. I don't wanna wait, I don't wanna wait to find out if I won, just tell me, just tell me, just tell me, right? And there's a difference there because it's like, it makes no difference to the reward, but the information is a separate signal. And humans, you will not be surprised here, press the information button, you know, all the time. So do macaques, they care very deeply, they reliably want the information, tell me when the food's coming. Birds also, they want the information. Goldfish, they don't care. Goldfish.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Really?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Doesn't make any difference. They're not interested in the extra information. Thank you very much. Like, this doesn't make any difference to them. This is sort of an indication that you are seeing information as its own reward in some animals and not others, right? It has evolved.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Right, so somewhere between goldfish and macaques. Information as a reward emerges.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, information as a reward. So we know there is this evolutionary

• 41:25Speaker 01

  selection for it, or, or an evolutionary drive, let's say, that has like presented it as an advantage. And, and just going back to that idea of like, you know, people surely died when they were crossing the oceans. I mean, I think there are different ways to look at this. There's back to Augustine, around 400 A.D. This is when he was saying that curiosity was awful. He talks about how there was a mangled corpse by the roadside. And people came out to look at it, right? It's sort of rubbernecking, you know, but, um, but sort of whatever.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Like a morbid curiosity.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Morbid curiosity, exactly. And he writes, it was, they, they wanted to see, to be made sad and to turn pale. And this was one of the reasons why he thought it was a sin, because it was like, you know, why would you, why would you be drawn to this? But also, this is like hauling you towards danger, you know? Trying to like go towards a, a creature of the same species as you who has died in a bad way. Surely not a very good thing. Um, and yet, maybe it actually is. Maybe it actually is. So there's a fish called the guppy who has a behavior that's really similar to this.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  What it does, when a predator turns up to go and eat the guppy, certain, certain guppies will leave the safety of their shoal and swim over to inspect the predator. Crazy. What are they doing? Like, this seems wild.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Well, it seems like a bad idea for them, but is it a good idea for the larger school of guppies?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is, is that, I mean, they do the, the sort of the, the, um, the kind of tail end rather than the business end. They're not sort of like, they're not kind of crazy. They're not suicidal.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  But the thing is, is that actually the guppies that went and inspected were actually not just sort of helping the wider, um, school. They were less likely to be eaten than the ones that hung back. Because the thing is, is that they know where the predator is, right? The predator's lost the element of surprise.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  And actually, what ends up happening is the predator itself ends up just leaving the hunt, just being like, okay, well, I've been spotted. Not, not going to bother with those ones then.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  So they actually reduce the chance of being eaten for, for them and everyone else.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Right. So there's, it's like, there's many advantages here. Cause I would say those, those morbid curiosities we feel, you can kind of justify it as saying, well, we want to learn about how that accident happened and what happened to that missing person, because it in some way is like a, a vaccinated danger for us. We can explore it, but it's safe. It's just a podcast and yet it allows us to experience things and almost feel more prepared for them.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Right. And you know, there's actually evidence for exactly that. So during the early weeks of 2020, the pandemic, it turned out, but people who scored highly in morbid curiosity. So we're talking about horror fans. We're talking about people who, uh, love watching true crime. People who sort of, you know, all kinds of like morbid curiosity, looking at pictures of dead people, all of that kind of thing. They ended up scoring higher on psychological resilience. They were less distressed than everybody else. And like, it's almost as though maybe there is something about, we're kind of rehearsing.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  It's exactly as you described, right? Like, okay, well, let's see what's going on there. So we make sure that the same thing doesn't happen to us.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  That, so, so the benefits outweighed the costs.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly right. Exactly right. And I think this is it, actually. Just going back to the point that you made right at the top about how humans have this drive, this curiosity to explore elsewhere. We are still doing it. You know, in 2009, NASA ran this competition for people to name its Mars rover. And, um, it ended up being this sixth grader from Kansas, in fact.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Called Clara Ma, uh, Lenaxa in Kansas. Do you know where that is?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, Lenexa. Yeah, of course. I didn't live very far from there.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  If I've pronounced that incorrectly, imagine all of the other words that you went there to correct me.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  I'm a Stillwell slash Overland Park kid. So Lenexa, they were the, you know, they were the big city folk to me.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. The sophisticated ones.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  But still, we're, we're, you know, we're brothers and sisters, you know, I love them.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. I think this is such a lovely story, right? That like they allowed the public to name it. I think Boaty McBoatface has ruined that forevermore for everyone.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's hard to beat that one.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  It is hard to beat that one. Um, anyway, she suggested, uh, the word curiosity. And she wrote this really gorgeous essay, 250 words. And she said that curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everybody's mind. The thing that drives us through ordinary days. How gorgeous is that?

• 46:31Speaker 00

  That's what it is.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  She got to, she got to sign her name on the rover as well.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  I didn't know that curiosity was named by a Kansan who said such beautiful things about curiosity. That's great.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Isn't that lovely? I mean, maybe she saw one of the signs at school, right?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Right?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  It's all been worth it.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  It's all been worth it. And I think that's it, you know, this thing has this most, the most incredible arc, you know? Something that was being called disease, the thing that like was the, the, you know, the myths were written about as like the moral of the story was to avoid being curious. You know, it's the thing that will make you electrocute yourself, drive you to electrocute yourself, even if it hurts. And I think actually it's just really lovely that this is the thing that's now on Mars, kind of wandering around. It's sort of strapped it to nuclear battery and let a 12-year-old name in and off we go. How fitting.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  It's a wonderful story, by the way. I love hearing a story about any, any, um, Kansan child who, who, you know, did something amazing. But I, I've been doing a lot of research on the history of what it means to be cool. Specifically the word coolness and why people a hundred, a thousand years ago certainly had status and, and all of that. But the word cool never existed. And I'm starting to think, and this is, I'll tease this for a future episode, because we should do one on coolness. I wonder if the concept of being cool might have also emerged for the same social and cultural reasons that curiosity became so important, that even children are being taught it and are sharing its importance.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Are you suggesting that, um, that I go down to the school tomorrow with a sign that just says coolness on it?

• 48:15Speaker 00

  I think.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Cause I will.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Actually, I am suggesting that. I think that at schools, you know, we have the signs that say respect, compassion, curiosity. There should be one that says cool. Because we live in a society where it's not just where do you fall in the aristocracy hierarchy? But it's like, what do you have as an innovative thought or idea? Like, we contribute in different ways than we used to. And so being curious and being cool, being autonomous in ways that bring new things, new information, not just existing status, but new information. We live in this like time now where information is the currency.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Like, of course, we're going to find that curious people and cool people

• 49:04Speaker 00

  take up a lot of our time.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Well, you watching this podcast, listening to this podcast, you are both cool and curious.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  You are forever part of our club. Um, so thank you so much for listening. Tell you what, we're gonna have to come up with one head of a clickbait title for this one, aren't we? Imagine that, talking about the theory of clickbait and then not doing a clickbait title. Whew, it's gonna be punchy. So, but anyway, you can email us as ever, the rest is science at gohangar.com.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  And we will see you next time.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 49:43Speaker 06

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