Curiosity motivates us to learn

Like hunger motivates us to eat, curiosity motivates us to learn.

George Loewenstein

The meaning of the quote

In 2009, George Loewenstein put a group of Carnegie Mellon students into a brain scanner and fired trivia questions at them. The students who already knew the answer barely reacted. Neither did the ones with no shot at guessing it. Curiosity spiked in the middle, in that narrow zone where someone had a rough guess but wasn’t sure.

A full stomach doesn’t crave food, and a stomach that’s gone hungry long enough goes numb too. The sharpest hunger sits in between, right where there’s just enough appetite to notice what’s missing. This quote says your mind runs on the same setting.

Loewenstein called that in-between zone an information gap. Curiosity switches on the moment you notice a hole in what you know, and it stays on until the hole gets filled. That’s why a half-finished sentence pulls at you harder than a blank page, and harder than a paragraph you already understand.

Every headline that promises “what happened next” without saying what happened next is built on this exact gap. It hands you a fact-shaped hole and dares you to click your way to closing it. Teachers use the same trick on purpose: open a lesson with a question nobody in the room can answer yet, and students lean forward in a way they never do for a lesson that opens with the answer.

The kid who won’t stop asking why isn’t being difficult. He’s hungry.

Try this

• Ask before you start. Before opening a new chapter, article or course, write down one question about it you don’t already know the answer to. That’s the gap your brain will work to close.
• Stop one page before you’re satisfied. When you’re deep in something interesting, end the session on a question instead of an answer. Come back the next day and notice how much faster you pick it back up.

About the author

George Loewenstein’s great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud, and his mother spent her own career picking apart Freud’s theories instead of defending them. He grew up to study the mind too, just with brain scanners and lab experiments instead of a couch.

He earned an economics degree from Brandeis University in 1977, then a PhD from Yale in 1985 with a dissertation on how people form expectations about their own future choices.

Today he’s the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where he runs the Center for Behavioral Decision Research. He’s credited as one of the founders of behavioral economics, the field that studies how people actually make decisions instead of how a perfectly rational person would make them.

His other well-known idea, the hot-cold empathy gap, found that we badly misjudge how we’ll act once we’re hungry, angry or aroused, because a calm brain can’t accurately simulate a worked-up one. Hunger keeps showing up in his research, not just his metaphors.

The quote grows out of a 1994 paper he wrote called The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation, where he laid out what’s now called the information gap theory of curiosity. His argument was that curiosity works like any other drive, sitting right alongside hunger, thirst and pain. Notice a gap in what you know and your brain treats it like a debt it wants paid off.

In 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences made him a fellow, putting him in the company of scientists across every field the academy covers.

Resources

• The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation (Paper)
• Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know (Article)
• Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It (Book)
• Out of pure curiosity (Article)
• George Loewenstein (Wikipedia)